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Key themes: 2002

	We are a family
	My name made my life
	Raising children
	Important family occasions
	Families in adversity
	Staying single and escaping family life
	The roles of father and mother
	I couldn't have done it without my family....
	Old age
	Family break-up and death

Key themes: 2001

	Making a new start
	Neighbours and the place where I live
	Being a parent
	Work
	Coming out the other side
	Racism and prejudice
	Dreams and obsessions
	Loss
	I was there

All about the 2001 series

True Lives Homepage

All about: Neighbours

Our neighbourhood consisted of two apartment blocks, nestled among the quiet streets of a small country town in New South Wales. It was quite common for one to encounter a sheep or a horse when collecting the morning paper.

The residents of these flats were mostly students at the local university, and had come from all over the country and the world.

One particular resident, the catalyst of this story, worked with a local Internet Service Provider and, as a consequence of his job, possessed a permanent connection to the Internet.

We did not know it when we moved in, but this self-confessed computer geek had a master plan.

He began knocking on the doors of the apartments asking, 'Do you own a PC?' Being students, most of us did own a computer of some description, if only for typing up assignments.

'Well,' he continued, 'would you like to link up to my computer? It's got a permanent link to the Internet.' Free internet? Why not? At the time, and in our circumstances, free Internet was like free money.

The only catch was that we would have to share everything we downloaded, bear the costs of any necessary hardware and generally exercise a degree of trust for other members of the network. Would it work? We wondered.

A few spare cables, a couple of trenches and a lot of drill holes later, we had linked each apartment via a network cable. It was an instant success - we were surfing the net, sharing links, messaging one another and also sharing music, articles, pictures and programs.
To say that a computer cable had created the relationships within our neighbourhood would have been incorrect. Rather, the network was the means by which we began exchanging ideas, publishing our research and experiencing the richness of the Internet together.

Due to this open policy of sharing, our music tastes widened, we suddenly knew more about the people living around us, their interests and their cultures. Information passed under and over the walls that previously had made us total strangers: e-mails soon lead to social dinners and acquaintances quickly led to friendships.

For a rural town in 1998, where social interaction was determined and
maintained in the pubs, this residential application of technology was
virtually unheard of or thought to be only available in the big cities.

Our network community became the envy of everyone who came to visit and we were always happy to share our knowledge with anyone who wanted to learn. Because the exciting thing for us was the fact that we were a living model, albeit on small proportions, of how we thought communities may exist in the future.

Thanks for reading,

Ramon, Australia