Bowen

Bowen View

Returning to the Bowen specific content of the site, the way you do when the contents need to be rearranged, it dawned on me that this bit needed a slight rejigging. Not a major revision, but a slight modification of the content, so here we are with Bowen on the Ground: The view from Ground Level, the section of the site where those Bowen specific issues can be wrestled with and gnawed away at like a dog worrying a bone.

Bowenwood, I realised, as an account of what was going on at the time Baz Luhrmann came to town with a film crew, Nicole and Hugh was more or less set in stone. That's the way it was. Nothing's going to change it.

Bowen, Twenty-five Years On, on the other hand, looked like it needed a substantial rejigging, and substantial rejiggings are something I'm keen to avoid. An hour spent on that sort of exercise is an hour that isn't spent generating new content or working on projects in progress.

Rather than tackling the way things have changed since around 2009 a new slice of crystal ball gazing seemed like the way to go, and the result is, unsurprisingly, Bowen, Thirty Years On, which presents a far less sanguine view of the way things look on the ground in a town that's doing it tough.

Back in 2009 there were confident forecasts that the population would increase, the town would boom, and things would be all hunky dory. Five years later, things are looking increasingly desperate. Whether there are further five-yearly updates is something we'll have to wait and see as things unfold.

 © Ian Hughes 2014