Hamish Macdonald

Look, I think wherever you come from, wherever you're listening to this, you'll have examples of this in your own community, in your own maybe school or work environment or just the town you live in or the city that you live in.

And we can probably think of examples that are confronting Australia right now.

But I'll tell you a story about where I come from because we have explored this in the series.

I grew up in Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales.

It was a beautiful place to grow up, an amazing environment to be raised in.

I love it.

I'm still very passionate about it.

When I grew up in the Snowys, there were issues that divided people.

There were, you know, frictions and fracture lines.

There were local TV news services that came out of Canberra.

There were local radio stations.

There were a couple of local newspapers.

Those issues that existed then, I think were always present.

I was kind of aware of them, but they weren't so big that it sort of pulled the community apart.

I think the difference that exists today is that those issues, and I'm going to tell you about one key issue in a moment.

There's not these kind of shared spaces where people get their information from, like newspapers, like TV news in the evening.

There's just a community Facebook page, and that's where it all plays out.

The issue in my community is Brumbies, so horses, that are in the national parks, so this pristine environment.

The Brumbies have been there for a very long time after white settlement.

Farmers took them up for grazing in the summer months and this became part of the kind of identity of the place, the heritage of or at least the colonial heritage of the place, the man from Snowy River, you know, you get it.