Yesterday, just before sunset, I was back at the One Mile Jetty in Carnarvon, the town I grew up in.
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Unlike every other time I’ve been there, I was not able to set foot on it. An exhilarating walk out over the Indian Ocean where the giant mulloway (or “kingies” as they’re known locally) still run, was not an option.
The way was blocked by a big NO ENTRY sign. With no money for maintenance it has become too dangerous to use. The town’s iconic attraction is dissolving into the waves.
I watched a couple of forlorn older tourists poking about, possibly looking for other ways out on to the old wooden planks. They gave up and got back in their car.
I’m always struck by how Carnarvon has a knack for carelessly sweeping away mere human projects and aspirations.
The place is regularly whipped by cyclones, drowned in floods.
The jetty managed to hang on for 50 years beyond its working life as a shipping port, but the power of the waves has now proven too much for those giant hardwood pylons.
As I type this at my wonky round table in a holiday cabin, I’m also thinking about Mount Panorama’s iconic status as an international car racing venue.
Things can change dramatically and rapidly, leaving towns without the very things that used to define them.
It would seem incredible – rude even – to question Mt Pan’s future but it is worth thinking about now that the Draft Bathurst 2040 Community Strategic Plan is taking submissions.
By 2040 – just over two decades hence - everything about cars and transport will have changed dramatically. Climate change will be biting.
By 2040 – just over two decades hence - everything about cars and transport will have changed dramatically.
- What's the future of car racing?
The world is likely to have shifted emphatically to renewable energy, or be suffering from its failure to do so. Road vehicles are likely to be going driverless. The context for car racing in 2040 will be very different to the context for car racing now.
Section 1.5 of the Draft CSP - “Support Mount Panorama as a premier motorsport and event precinct” - uses a lot of future-ish language (“innovation”, “research and development”) but an explicit sense of the revolution around the corner, the phasing out of the fossil-fuelled internal combustion engine, is entirely absent.
We should be embracing the challenge explicitly, and the best way to do so would be to support electric car races as a goal, in this part of the CSP.
My dad, in his Carnarvon days, had a noisy yellow racing vehicle that kicked up plumes of red dust on the local speedway.
Today those times seem so close I could touch them. But everything is changes.
