We came out of the cellars after the Revolution was crushed in November 1956. We opened the huge gate of our apartment house in Rákoczi Road, Budapest, and we all cried. Our beloved city was in ruins. This experience, when I was 10, changed my life.
I witnessed a fight of David, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, against Goliath, the Soviet Army. The might of the powerful crushed the virtuous powerless. Is this an irrelevant image to recall as I think of the battle with the government: we, the people, being perhaps the virtuous David, trying to save our beloved Blue Mountains from the onslaught of Goliath, the powerful New South Wales Government?
How about Brutus’ warning?
‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.’
I learned these lines by heart in my Higher School Leaving Certificate Course at the Sydney Technical College, in the first year after my arrival to Australia in 1965. But could I gain my certificate when I could not speak English and I was learning it through Shakespeare’s set text, Julius Caesar?
It was a daunting task and I failed myself in my mind many times before I sat my final exams. But somehow I scraped through. I learned, that with perseverance and help from friends, sometimes it is possible to win against seemingly impossible odds.
Are the odds really impossible in our battle to save our beloved Blue Mountains? Should we just throw up our hands and cry: ‘Why bother, we can’t win anyhow?’ I hear Barack Obama’s slogan: “Yes we can!”
This is a critical junction in the history of the Blue Mountains: will it survive as we have taken it for granted till now or will it be irreparably degraded?
I have lived in the Blue Mountains for 30 years now and I am in love with the place. It’s a love that I have never taken for granted. As I wake up every morning, I thank God for the privilege of living here. So I owe it to my conscience to do everything in my power to join the struggle to save these glorious mountains. I don’t want to be just a helpless victim of history when I know we can shape it.
I don’t want to stand at the traffic lights in a few years time, when God forbid, I witness fleet after fleet of B-doubles of 30 metres’ size, rolling over the once ‘Great’ Western Highway, screeching as they stop and start and spew toxic fumes into my face. I don’t want to stand there and cry: “If only we would have prevented this from happening!”
Of course we can! When there is a will, there is a way! And there is a no loser way:
Double the rail freight, not the Great Western Highway, transfer most freight from road to rail, as in Canada where 70 per cent of intercity freight is carried nationally by private rail costing nothing for the tax payer! Introduce faster trains and with minor upgrades let the Bell’s Line of Road share the remaining traffic more equitably with the Great Western Highway.
This way the congestion is avoided on the Great Western Highway without doubling it and mega-trucks can be continued to be banned from the Blue Mountains. There is safer and faster car travel and upgraded infrastructure via the rail line to comfortably carry increasing loads of mega-freight and passengers on faster trains to and fro the Central West and Sydney without turning the Great Western Highway into something like Sydney’s putrid Parramatta Road.
Living in Hungarian totalitarian communism for 18 years, I got used to hearing many lies from the government. But actually, the NSW Government current misinformation campaign to persuade people not to resist the duplication of the Great Western Highway in the Upper Mountains would have been the envy of past Stalinist regimes and the current Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department.
The government has now issued its fifth glossy misinformation pamphlet, vexing lyrical about the proposed duplication. This pamphlet has now been posted to every address in the Upper Blue Mountains.
The danger is that many people who have not studied the pros and cons of the Great Western Highway duplication might swallow the government’s misinformation, hook, line and sinker and come to believe that it is in their interest to duplicate the highway. But is it?
Take for example, this paragraph from the posted pamphlet, under the heading: ‘Modern Trucks are safer trucks’. I quote:
‘The highway is being designed to carry the safest and most productive vehicles, which means fewer heavy vehicles on the road and safer road environment for local communities and the motorists. This includes B-doubles up to 25 metres and modern, more productive vehicles up to 30 metres’.
This quote, like the rest of the pamphlet, consists of half-truths and omissions which taken together add up to outrageous lies! In fact, there will be many more heavy vehicles and much less safety on the road and mayhem for local communities.
The half-truth above is that yes, some of these mega-trucks are safer than others on the road now, but just because these new trucks come on the road it does not mean that the less safe older trucks now there will disappear; the mega-trucks often will be in addition to them on the road. Secondly, because the population of the Central West and of Sydney is expected to increase substantially, the number of freight-mega-trucks on the road will exponentially increase, causing more traffic congestion, slower transport, more pollution and accidents.
In fact, if the last buffer to allowing mega-trucks onto the highway, the Upper Mountains, is removed by duplicating the highway there, every single village right through the entire Blue Mountains along the Great Western Highway will lose their second lane to fleets of mega-trucks. So the highway duplication not only will fail to provide more lanes for ordinary traffic, it will reduce many villages which now have two lanes each way for general traffic to having only one lane!
We need the mother of all campaigns to get across to the whole Blue Mountains population and to all Blue Mountains lovers in Sydney, NSW, Australia and the whole world that turning the Great Western Highway into a Parramatta Road-like putrid and congested freight road would ruin our world heritage Blue Mountains. We should instead have our win-win rail upgrade plan adopted.