I had reason this week to revisit the big series I wrote about Armidale Secondary College in 2023, after someone contacted me for help navigating issues with the principal who is now at their school.
Two things struck me.
The first was: wow, that was some bad writing.
The stories themselves remain painful and raw, but objectively, it is obvious I was still very much in the radio mindset. I was not accustomed to writing regularly, and certainly not to writing about things that were so difficult.
The second was that so many of the problems I documented in 2023 have not budged an inch in three years.
Change over time is a funny thing. It creeps up on you. I had not consciously noticed what now seems like a dramatic improvement in my writing and development of, for want of a less wanky term, my news voice.
I have noticed that Duval High is still closed. And the intense social issues related to having only one high school has not, and will not, change until that is resolved.
But I had forgotten how traumatising it was to hear the stories and retell the few that I could, and how it affected the team.
I suppose this is why people keep journals: to preserve a record of where they were, what they believed and how they felt. Looking back gives us a way to measure changes that were almost invisible while they were happening.
But I do not particularly want to remember how I felt then.
Those stories were overwhelming. I was watching a catastrophe unfold and felt powerless to prevent the harm happening in front of me. I do not want to feel that way again.
And so I am busily telling myself that is okay.
Whatever trauma you have endured, even the comparatively minor trauma of witnessing suffering and being unable to stop it, it is okay to move forward. To not want to feel like that again.
Moving on does not mean the pain was unimportant. It does not mean you have forgotten, forgiven or decided that what happened was acceptable.
What is not okay is allowing the same harm to keep happening to others. A question for the Department of Education I guess.
Growth cannot simply mean running away from pain. It must also mean learning from it. It means becoming wiser, stronger and more determined to prevent its repetition.
Our region knows too much pain.
Our health care, our schools, our roads. You name it, we are denied, defunded and delayed. When we become angry about it, we are met with excuses, lies, and gaslighting.
It is one of the reasons I strongly support New England separating from New South Wales and becoming a separate state. There is no way we would do this to ourselves.
The state Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong behaves like an abusive partner towards our regions: controlling the money, withholding essential support and insisting that our lived experience is not really happening.
Leaving such a relationship is hard. It is frightening. There are countless unknowns. But there comes a point when remaining in it becomes more dangerous than stepping into an uncertain future.
At that point, you have to summon the courage to move out and file for divorce.
New England must learn from a century of pain, particularly the six decades since the statehood referendum that was supposed to deliver change but instead was just the dawn of things getting so much worse for our region.
Personal growth is rarely comfortable. Neither is the growth of a community.
But growth requires more than surviving what happened to us. It requires refusing to let it keep happening. Refusing to allow our resources to be taken for no investment in return. Refusing to allow numbers to be skewed to justify resources being kept in the city. Refusing to be ripped off any more.
We need to be brave enough to say stop, enough, and never again. And be prepared to say goodbye.
End rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.
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