“With a little help from my friends”
Judy Lambert vividly recalls the wonderful feast at her mother’s funeral that was provided by dozens of volunteers from the Country Women’s Association. “It was an extraordinary spread they pulled together to feed mourners from all over Australia, and it was all catered by women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They knew how to rise to the occasion. All their lives, that was what they did,” says Judy, a well-known environmentalist, casting her mind back to an era in which community was everything.
You don’t have to consume a daily ration of calamitous global news to be amazed by how resilient human beings are – we’re hard-wired to overcome extraordinary challenges just to get through each day. But as anyone who’s tried to give themselves a hug or a stirring pep talk will agree, survival techniques are not always something you can serve up to yourself. “Togetherness simply produces better outcomes for survival,” says Harvard professor and author Robert Putnam. “Evolution fashioned us not only to feel good when connected but to feel secure.”
When the going gets tough, we need community, we need friends. Only a hundred years ago it was practically a death sentence to go it alone. Plagues, famines and natural disasters were so common everyone understood that sticking together was the
