Of unsacred cows and hollowed ground

There was an ineffable inhospitality to this part of town.

Although the decomposing bitumen track bordered the back end of the bushland "common" area open to the public, it was a deserted place, its air vaguely astringent, untrustworthy.

Prickly pear was beginning to take hold in paddocks already plentiful with eastern browns and death adders, so it never felt safe to leave my oxygen-depleted ditches and venture into the long grass; a maddening bind when I'd hear the unmistakable zing of zebra finches from over in no-man's land. Even more alluring than amphibians, the birds, like little vibrating Sirens, would buzz and hop about their smooth branches; daring me to wade out towards them so I could secure proof of life with the cheap Hanimex I kept in my saddle bag.

Of course, being a 10-year-old, I'd accept their challenge, braving the many perils lurking at Dunlop Volley-level, so I could click away under those trees, never failing to position my subjects so the blinding white sun blazed behind them.

A week after submitting my Kodak cartridge to the chemist, I'd take delivery of the photos; all 24 blurry, lens-flared, yet irrefutable evidence colonies of indefinable black lumps did indeed thrive in these parts.

As well as the unease generated by cacti and snakes, the geography itself had a perfidious quality.

Across the road, mounds of dirt hinted at the parcel's previous life as a military shooting range. Once, my best mate and I spent an afternoon scratching hundreds of brown bullets from the hard-baked clay. When we returned to his house and showed his mother our haul of lead, she nearly fainted because, evidently, we'd been skipping about land pocked with sinkholes.

That was the other thing about this precinct a few hills away from the tip; it's where they used to dig for coal.

It wasn't until years later I learnt what was at the end of that road, because cement tank traps and barbed wire impeded entry to the closed mine site - marking the end of the line for me, but just the beginning for an ambitious industry leaping from the relative inefficiencies of subterranean toil (all those tunnels terminating just a couple of blocks from my ignorant bedroom) into full-blown open-cut production.

A few months ago, I was back in my home town for a funeral. At the wake, some old friends gathered on the balcony of the RSL club towering over the main street's recalibration to highway. The thoroughfare is now straddled by fast-food joints and the busy Centrelink building, but it still holds up a Vinnies shopfront and the shady pub from which we once obtained an underage, back-door carton of beer on Good Friday (both fine Catholic enterprises).

As if in longing, familial response to the heat and humidity, the skin under our shirts signalled for pores to spring open and we were flooded with the sweat of our youth. Sopping away together, we sipped our schooners and looked north up the street, all of us recalling the day we'd returned from a bike ride on that bottleneck to stumble upon the horrifying result of a drag race between two men who'd never escape their 20s. With no way to avoid the crash, we'd all alighted and walked furtively and single-file past the carnage. Blankets, police lights, mangled sedans, a truck.

From that balcony, we also took in the view to the west, once a clear vista of farm land flowing from the banks of the river for which the region is named.

All you can see now are mountains of displaced, dead earth.

Like prickly pear, the coal game which had taken root in that gnarly corner of my neighbourhood had escaped to terraform the entire region. Some embraced it (four-wheel-drives, speed boats), others railed against it, others ignored it.

Industries rise and fall and debate about how communities must transition from one epoch to the next invariably intensifies as entropy sets in. This is especially true of my home town, which, thanks to deconstructed mountains of fine particulates in the air, can lay claim to some of the most spectacular sunsets in the country, not to mention a legacy of respiratory illness.

MORE B.R. DOHERTY:

My sweaty childhood of sinkholes and tadpoles came back to me with this week when I read how CSIRO fermentation technology was being used in the development of non-animal dairy products destined for our breakfast tables. The resulting, protein-rich substance - lactose-free, cholesterol-free, allergens-free - would be indistinguishable from cow's milk, just no actual involvement from the bovine.

The news gives me the same sense of inevitability as when I read how lab-grown "chicken" has made its way into some supermarket freezers (conjuring images of Margaret Atwood's "ChickieNobs").

Neither the dairy nor poultry trades are without skeletons in their closets and given what agriculture, mining and everything else is doing to our planet, we're going to need alternative methods to feed ourselves well before we can all launch, Bezos-style, away from our abused rock in priapic projectiles.

Regardless, there's a sadness in witnessing the beginning of the end.

It's akin to the sadness I feel when I see those mining slopes occupying the same pastures once punctuated by the chocolate-chip hides of unhurried Holstein Friesians.

Not that our own anthropocene has a mortgage on such melancholy.

Thomas Hardy seemed a bit glum about inexorable progress when, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, he introduced Flintcomb-Ash farmhands to a malevolent new contraption.

"Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve - a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining - the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves."

Hardy pretty much had a word for everything, yet it wouldn't be for another 114 years someone else (Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht) would coin the term applicable for "emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change".

Albrecht's neologism described the psychological pandemic spreading among those subjected to ongoing drought and, coincidentally, open-cut coal mining in the region of my childhood.

It's called "solastalgia".

Still no vaccine.