Is there a prosperous future for the Australian bush?

Poor transport is as great an economic and social killer as a lack of water.

Flynn drove over non-existent roads in an old Dodge, and often watched people die as he tried to get them to hospital at a maximum speed of about 10 miles an hour. He saw how the cost of getting rural produce to a port was greater than the cost of getting it on to Europe and America. Still is.

Relative to the general reduction of world transport costs, Australia is now falling further behind.

We need heavy-duty freight railways where trains can run at the same speed as trucks: Not even on the radar - never has been.

Instead of investing in the bush to make it competitive, governments have allowed people to drift from the Inland to overcrowded cities, leaving 80 per cent of the continent almost without population: Shocking planning - no sense of balanced development.

Flynn understood the ingrained negativity of metropolitan voters who never drove beyond the outer suburbs, and so he stayed away from his base office in Sydney as often as he could. He reckoned that capital cities were not part of the real Australia.

I can affirm that he was right, having been born and bred in the bush where I attended a school that had only 11 pupils. They were the happiest days of my life.

Then there is mining. Except for a few places like Mount Isa, Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie, the development of mines has not caused growth in rural communities.

The minerals are extracted by people who come in and out every few days and, when the resource is exhausted, they leave nothing but empty landscape and a lot of big holes: No nation building whatsoever.

It is not difficult to understand why people prefer to live on the coast and commute, but little effort has been made to develop liveable mining communities, thus the families left behind at the coast become dysfunctional with one parent always missing.

There has to be a better way to do it. As John Flynn often said: "People have to experience a real sense of community if they want to have a good life."

Often forgotten is Indigenous Australia. Flynn reckoned that Aboriginal Stockmen were the best in the world, and he was right. Their wives also were important members of the household staff of cattle stations, and Flynn had a great relationship with Aboriginal communities everywhere.