The corrugations on the old hall at Sutton look tired. The community hall has stood on the outskirts of town since the early 1900s and in that time very little has changed. The first time I visited the hall was as a child for a school dance. I had made the drive from our rural haven to the burgeoning city of Canberra and Mum had reluctantly spent $50 on a pair of shorts for me to wear. Unfortunately the new shorts made me no more enticing to the girls at the dance and the century old wooden floorboards creaked and willed me to sit.

Just under a decade ago I visited the hall again. This time it was to marry my wife. She was willing to look past my horrible dancing and we spent the night dancing, laughing and celebrating with friends; it really was the best night of my life.

The Sutton Village Hall.

The hall has been a special place. It’s been a symbol of the community, a place of coming together, a place of celebration. Recently that has changed. The hall is no longer a place of smiling and laughter and bad dancing. It has become a war room; a meeting place for a divided community fighting against a much larger foe. It's become a familiar kind of fight playing out in community halls all across our region.

My family are sixth generation farmers, and all things going well, my children will be the seventh. I love reading the memoirs of my great grandmother who grew up on the land. She tells tales of riding to Gundaroo for school, the cranky teacher that made life difficult and how at night she would say a prayer that perhaps God could make him fall of his bike so that they could have a new teacher. She tells of going into Canberra in 1913 for the laying of the foundation stone and how in one awful week her husband and husband’s parents all died of pneumonia, leaving her with a two-year-old daughter and a large farm to manage alone, which she did.