happiness is the consolation for life's necessity

i often find when i am in old gold mining town and i see the incredible architechture i am thankfull to the people who lived there and invested into the town they were a part of, the sense of community, though long gone but impermeable and outstanding in the relics that remain.  I think of this only in comparison to todays mining boom where the places where this is happening still remain extremely bleak outposts with little more than corrugated iron and a few truck stops.  I took two years travelling australia and seeing all this as well as growing up in a mining boom town, Mackay no less.  And the companies that run the mines don't seem to be interested in investing in this kind of thing and the government has little plans besides some kind of block art sculptures that keep popping up around the place.  I see there was a time in australia's past when there was some pride of home and town, i can only assume this in my interpretation of the art and architechture but the feeling grows nevertheless that the Australian majority culture has lost a sense of overall community.  I don't know, i am no sociologist just a layman but it is only in rare circumstances that i have felt a strong community around.

Is it because a big portion of the mines are owned by offshore investors, so the money is filtered into the government and then rushed overseas.  All i notice of the boom is the exhorbitant price of land, unruly development, over development of agricultural areas by sprawling urbanisation, extreme rent prices. 

I can't complain, i feel responsible and part of an apathetic generation.  I sometimes dream of owning a v8 7 litre just to get rid of the fuel quicker so we can settle down again.  Burn up all the coal so we can go back to having more simply and less disposable lives, disposable like our phones, our plastic bags our cheap thin plaster houses, with weak walls and poisonous materials.   It is a inevitablility that this will happen but i feel particularly impatient, because i work in the building industry, and i drive around the city  for my work and i have to see the mess that is spreading like a rash across this southern land.  And also because i recently saw a photo of an aboriginal camp amongst the trees on the yarra huge gums and ferns and healthy people, happier than us, living within nature instead of "above".

I long for the country and it's complex simplicity, but then i would miss the complex naivety of the human animal and their maruading ignorance.  I chose art as a agent of change and only time will well if it is a plausible vision, this one of mine.