www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/a-nation-in-need-of-catharsis-20110107-19ir9.html
" …. your neighbourhood is undergoing a revival. Book clubs, men's sheds, choirs, community gardens, coffee-shop encounters, adult education groups, local library-based activities, increased participation in the creative and performing arts, picnics and street parties … These are heartening signs that, deep down, we know our leaders cannot shape the kind of society we want. We have to do that ourselves."
Well-Being Australia chairman Mark Tronson, a retired Baptist minister says that he remembers such events as the fifties and sixties 'Marching Girls' with their very colourful outfits who were getting on with life in this Hugh Mackay spirit.
He remembers the excitement of the 1954 Royal visit as a child, along with the Melbourne Olympic Games, when again Herb Elliot won his 1960 Gold Medal in Rome.
These were conservative years followed by the radical 1960's and 70's and he see's today that Australia and elsewhere are showing signs of a growing move to conservative values, a back to the values of the fifties.
He cites a recent Oprah television show (Friday 7 January) where several groups of American young women were moving into Catholic Religious Life (becoming Nuns). In every interview, each young woman spoke of it as a calling, they experienced a peace within their hearts, and almost all of them had relationships with boy friends at one time. This was a calling beyond all that glittered.
Young people today it seems are on a spiritual search and the Church Life Surveys are also indicating this. Many lively Pentecostal and Baptist churches around Australia who are reaching the youth of the nation, are finding this same phenomenon.
Therefore, he asks, would such events as the Marching Girls of the fifties be acceptable to many today, in the light of so many who are against anything that might reflect provocatively?
To help answer this question he conducted his own straw survey in Tweed Heads where he lives, 200 metres from the southern Gold Coast's Coolangatta's tourist beaches.
He first spoke to a number of his fellow Tweed Heads Chamber of Commerce members who are retailers. Then he spoke to numbers of the friends of his fourth (their third daughter) some of whom are now in their third year of university or have been working for over two years.
Mark Tronson considered this would provide a good cross section of the community. Hard nosed business people who are out there in the reality of higher interest rates trying to make a business grow and develop, and then at the same time, a group of young people (twenty year olds) who are beginning to get a sense of responsibility for their own futures.
His conclusion was that this conservative mood of the nation is certainly a realistic and ongoing experience in Tweed Heads. The Marching Girls outfits of the fifties and sixties today might well have been toned down a little.
For the Churches on the move, this is a clear signal of an open door into the community.
