This was published 2 years ago
Big, bold NSW: The state that's above state rivalries
By Ben Groundwater
The rivalries other states have with New South Wales are one-sided. NSW people don't care.Credit: iStock
My first brush with the great state of NSW came in the form of a beautiful blonde surfer girl called Tamsin.
It's not as romantic as you think. The date is somewhere in the 1990s, and I'm in the early stages of high school with all the awkwardness and deep social anxiety that that entails. The place is Rainbow Beach, up in Queensland, a campsite where we're spending school holidays.
The kids all get to know each other in a place like that, we all run around and go swimming and play cricket and lick ice-creams in the sun. My brother and I make friends with a whole bunch of them, but there's one kid who stands out, who is a few years older and just impossibly beautiful, impossibly cool. Tamsin.
Ken Helm, a CSIRO boffin who decided to make wine just outside Canberra instead.Credit: Destination NSW
She comes from Sydney. Sydney. It doesn't get much cooler than that, much more unknowable. I've never been to Sydney, I don't think I've ever met anyone from Sydney. But I know it's cool.
And the strangest thing happens on that summer holiday: Tamsin talks to me. A girl from Sydney talks to me. I'm just some dorky kid from industrial, shabby Gladstone, a flyover town for Sydneysiders on their way to the Whitsundays. And yet still, Tamsin talks to me. We'd become friends.
Sydney was almost a mythical place back then, so big and important, so full of people who knew about things I didn't, about art and music and fashion and life. Little did I know I would call it home one day, that I would eventually feel at home there, that I would come to understand it.
I didn't understand Sydney, and I didn't understand NSW. I knew the state below us was the enemy, because of something to do with rugby league, but I couldn't tell you much more than that.
Because back then NSW didn't have an assumed identity - and it still doesn't. It doesn't have characteristics everyone else in Australia can pinpoint or send up. Most other states seem to: we were the banana benders up north, the rum-guzzling bogans, different to the latte-sippers of Victoria and the posh-accented South Australians. But NSW was a blank slate.
Even its residents now would seem to agree with that. A study done by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age earlier this year found that NSW had the weakest sense of state identity in Australia. Victoria had the strongest. The people of NSW tend not to think of themselves as the people of NSW. They're Australians. That's it.
I've always found that interesting, particularly over the past 18 months in which my travels have been largely restricted to this once unknowable landmass. What is NSW? Who are the people of NSW? What makes my home tick? What makes us unique?
This is a place filled with character, and characters. It's Dick Wagner, out in the opal-mining town of White Cliffs, who arrived on a holiday to the middle of nowhere and decided yep, this is it. It's George Cruikshank, who planted a flag in the soil outside Cowra and declared it his own micro-nation, Atlantium. It's Ken Helm, a CSIRO boffin who decided to make wine just outside Canberra instead.
This land itself is as wildly varied as the people who have chosen to live here, a place of snowy mountains and endless desert, of Gondwana forest and rolling hinterland. This is a vast and beautiful state, with so much possibility, though something like 80 per cent of us crowd into the small stretch of coast from Newcastle to the 'Gong.
More than anything, however, NSW to me is a gathering of outsiders who have come together to build something great.
I'm not the only one who has arrived here from somewhere else. I'm definitely not the only Queenslander. There are people from all over the country and all over the world here, and you meet them everywhere you go.
The family running the motel in Nyngan. The couple running the cafe in Mudgee. The groups staffing the markets in Cabramatta. Outsiders who have arrived and are helping to shape an identity, whatever that may be.
In fact, if there's one thing I've found that defines the people of NSW, it's not what we have here, but what we're missing: a grudge. Everywhere else I've been in Australia, there's some sort of beef with another state. Queenslanders dislike NSW. Melburnians nurse a deep rivalry with Sydney. West Australians bear a grudge against the eastern seaboard. Tasmania, the whole mainland. But NSW? No chips on shoulders. These rivalries are one-sided. People here don't seem to get involved. And that's admirable.
I'm not so blown away, these days, when people from Sydney talk to me. Though I still like to remember Tamsin and the Sydney she represented, the NSW she came to mean. I get to live here now. I get to explore. I get to call it my own. And that is impossibly cool.
See also: Great state: The ultimate guide to NSW
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