For millennia, it was known as Wahluu and now it is most commonly known as Mount Panorama.

It's home to wine growers, orchardists, kangaroos and magpies. Every year in spring it buzzes with the sounds of the V8 races but also more quietly with the sounds of native bees and other tiny creatures.

I write this in the midst of a continuing controversy over how we name this mountain. Officially it now has a dual name - in English and Wiradyuri - but how do we think about it, really?

Is it merely a venue for a car race or is it a fully-functioning mountain doing a range of mountain things: producing food and providing habitat as well as big-ticket entertainment events?

Recently, a journalism student at Charles Sturt University made a short video about the changing climate on the mountain.

Grapes need to be harvested earlier in the year as climate change sets in. Our local mountain is changing, and how we relate to it symbolises how we relate to some of the great challenges of the 20th century.

The other story playing out on the mountain is that of the mob of kangaroos that has been living there since the closure of the Sir Joseph Banks Nature Reserve.

Every dawn and dusk, Bathurst Kangaroo Project members Ray Mjadwesch and Helen Bergen visit the kangaroos now being kept in a large fenced area, awaiting removal for somewhere safer to live. As we know, they don't mix well with V8s flying around at speed.

While this is a prudent and realistic solution (and an incredibly taxing and laborious project for kangaroo project members), it would be a mistake to allow habitat, biodiversity and food production to collapse as the big-ticket entertainment enterprises expand.

Truly sustainable development that pays particular attention to the management and stories of this place built up over millennia by the local Wiradyuri people is clearly a hard call.

There are competing stakeholders, competing meanings, competing senses of history and the future. And yet if we can move in that direction, our local mountain can be a vibrant symbol of how one community is caring for past, present and future.