Council commission accomplished local author Carrolline Rhoades to write the history in the style of a narrative non-fiction. The result is the book, Evolution of Community.

The work will be officially launched at the theatre at 4pm on Friday, December 4.

Author Carrolline Rhodes explains the process:

The Evolution of Community is my sixth commissioned history and as it awaits its launch, it is a good time for me to reflect on the first one. Back then I decided that my voice would be so neutral, no one would be able to determine whether I was male or female, or anything else about me at all.

I remember getting to page 14 and scrapping the whole thing. At that point, I realised my voice had to be authoritative, that I should not only present facts, but interpret them. I also came to understand that nothing happens in isolation: events that unfold nationally and internationally, impact locally.

From that point onwards the task of writing became much more interesting, and because I was not hiding behind words, the narrative acquired a vivacity it lacked on pages one to 14, first draft.

A couple of years after that history was published, I received a letter from a newcomer to the area I had written about. He said he was grateful that he had stumbled upon my book because he now understood the place in which his new life was beginning. I am no longer a stranger in a strange land, he wrote. This correspondent has been beside me from first word to last in the histories that have followed. He is the puzzled man who doesn’t know why dairy farms that once numbered in their hundreds have now contracted to a handful, or the answers to many other questions that should be simple, but somehow aren’t.

Research reveals the answers. Putting them together in a narrative that illuminates times past, rather than simply reporting who did what, why, when and how, creates the sense of community my correspondent needed in order to find belonging. 

In the Evolution of Community you will meet heroes and larrikins, ordinary people who became councillors in order to serve, and councillors who had barrows to push. You will lament the impact of settlement on indigenous people. You will meet ratepayers who never speak the word ‘council’ without using ‘bloody’ as a prefix.

The ‘Great Gravel Controversy’ spreads over two chapters, the ‘Skate Park Saga’ covers several pages, and narrative strands include the entrenched animosity between Bowraville, Macksville and Nambucca Heads, and the plan to evacuate the entire area during WWII.

As I awaited the proofs, excitement played hide and seek with apprehension. I know when it is published there will be those who say I got some things wrong: it is the risk history authors accept as an occupational hazard. Countless hours of checking and rechecking are never enough, but in the end I know that I have fulfilled the brief: We want an interesting read.

It is.