Born Here – Raised Here – Live Here
My greatest thrill is to have the chance to serve the people that are my origins and my roots. Not just in my lifetime, but also in the lifetimes of my parents and my extended family and my friends and their extended families. As much as we are all different, we are still very much all one.
If I were on the other side of the world and bumped into a person from Kurri Kurri or Edgeworth or Greta or West Wallsend or Wollombi or Cessnock, we could easily strike up a conversation and start putting together the connections that we have.
As a community we all have memories of schools that we went to, teachers that we all knew, events that we all attended, special events that came to town, friends that we have in common and the struggles that we all lived through.
When I was a kid, our community was not wealthy – even if you were a coalminer. Wages were low, homes were small and the cupboard of clothes was very small and never described as “full”. Some people had cars. Some had telephones. Some had TVs and some even had colour TVs.
Growing up in our beautiful community, kids walked to school, rode bikes to friends’ houses, spent plenty of time in the backyard or out in the bush, came home when the streetlights came on and used sport as the great chance to have fun with friends.
Having grown up here, I was lucky to get the chance to go to Newcastle University, while still living here, and then find work in the town that I had grown up in.
My wife and I married, built a house locally and settled into our adult lives as part of a community that had given each of us so much. It was our turn to give back.
Raising our kids here, it has been my absolute pleasure to coach teams, help others to coach teams, work in sporting canteens on game day, do charity work and generally make an effort to make sure that our town was as good as it had been when I was growing up, or better.
I have worked in local schools, poured beers in local pubs/clubs, taught swimming to our local kids, driven buses in our vineyards, been on Committees that have helped out our local sporting teams, and worked with local community groups that were making a better tomorrow for all of us.
There are thousands and thousands of people in our community that have done way more than I ever could. They served our community in business, the arts, sport, community services, armed services and hundreds of other ways. They donated land to community. They started the new build of a PCYC or a community centre or a hospital or a town square or a sporting oval or a community festival. More often than not they got no recognition and no fanfare, but that didn’t matter to them because they simply cared about building a better tomorrow for all of us.
Our local workers would take strike action and form unions and Co-Ops that would very much define who we are today. Our local battles on the work front would also shape the State of NSW and the country of Australia in terms of rules and standards for workers. And we mourned far too many workplace deaths.
Our villages would be separated by distance but share a heartbeat. A single death or a single success would be shared by all.
Born here, raised here and living here with my family, I want the very best future for our community. I am so proud to be one of us.
