Alison Young

For the June long weekend I’d planned with my Mum to pay a surprise visit to her parents who live in Trundle NSW. Where you ask? Here is Trundle, home to only a couple of hundred people and my grandparents. It took approximately 6 hours to drive there from Sydney even though it’s only around 430km. There is no mobile signal for my Optus phone once and there is no internet at my grandparents place. I volunteered to deprive myself of my technological addictions for the weekend, mostly. I also thought I’d go one step further and not drink coffee until I get back to Sydney.

Just south of Trundle is another town called Bogan Gate. Australian readers may be amused by a town named after a somewhat derogatory named social class. To my great surprise and delight Mum told me there was actually a gate which the town was named after. She elaborated that it was in the middle of a field nowhere significant. None the less I insisted that I had to get a photo on the Bogan Gate else nobody would believe it. So here it is:

Saturday evening, we’d had dinner at 6pm and by 7.15p I was yawning and musing about going to bed. Feeling very isolated I had to repeatedly tell myself that checking my phone was a pointless endeavour and to stop thinking about what conversations may be happening on Twitter, Plurk, IRC and IM. It was odd once everybody had gone to bed and I was sitting up alone at 10pm drinking tea and reading a book I’d been meaning to start for a number of weeks.

It’s very dark and quiet out there. A stark contrast to the ‘not quite night’ darkness and noise that is part of living in Newtown. The air is cold outside but the house was centrally heated, so despite bemused friends commenting about how I’d freeze on my trip west, it wasn’t the case at all.

On a Sunday daytrip I did have signal for a couple of hours and checked my email, Twitter replies and managed to catch up with a few people who were around at the time. It amazed me quite a bit how much I depend on the feeling of connectedness with people who are located both locally and all over the world. I don’t need to be talking to these people all the time, but I do feel most at ease knowing that I can. Instead I found other ways of passing the time, listening to my Mum talk to her Mum about the people who grew up and currently reside around the area. It seems that people out here are getting married and having children but doing little else. Perhaps its the rural setting, with little else to do. But it isn’t a technological black hole. The exchange in Trundle ADSL2 capable, people out there probably have a better internet connection than I do. There is no reason why somebody out there couldn’t be as active online as anybody in a capital city.

Admittedly there isn’t the same opportunity to network face to face but that shouldn’t stop you. My friend Fiona is based in Cairns and is a very active member of a number of online communities. She’s travelled to cities and met with several other people. While I’ve never actually met Fi face to face, we regularly communicate through social networks, have text conversations, call each other on mobile or Skype and send each other sms’. In other words, we’re not different to any other people who are friends and living 1600km apart.

I’ve taken some photos around Trundle, I think fondly of this place after spending a great deal of my childhood visiting here. There are a couple of heritage listed locations and Trundle also boasts the widest street in the west. The reason its so wide is that ‘back in the old days’ there needed to be sufficient room to turn the bullock-drawn wool wagons. It’s a saying here that you can tell the difference between locals and visitors by who walks and who drives from one side of the street to the other. You can see some of the larger photos from around here on my Flickr account starting from here.

Something that has been discussed in various circles lately is age. While out with some colleagues on Friday night the topic arose and not for the first time has somebody been surprised that I’m 25. This person was actually agape, later explaining that they’d thought me to be closer to 21 and that I didn’t look 25 at all. On my birthday last year in a different workplace I had colleagues asking me if I’d finished high school the previous year. When I look in the mirror I don’t see an 18 or even a 21 year old. In conversation when the topic of age comes up, majority of people will guess I’m 23.

The point to the post is that I continually observe how age seems to be less important than your achievements, passions and outlooks. At a different event I was among a group where the exclamation of ‘I can’t believe you’re only 23′ was the response to a story about somebody and what they had done during recent years. Majority of my social and professional interactions involve people across a very diverse age group. My friends group age range exceeds 25 years between youngest and oldest. In recent years age seems to matter less when it comes to determining who you talk to and befriend, especially among technology people. What keeps us all so young? Our areas of passion are young and vibrant to many; do we tend to adopt those characteristics and to non-tech people appear much younger than our years?

What I’d like to find out is whether the age barrier breakdown is occuring amongst non-technology people. What about groups in other countries or even different parts of Australia? I think it’s great that I know and have built friendships with people of varying ages. Experience comes with age and develops into widsom. Sharing of wisdom is something that people can always benefit from.