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Instead, Berzinski puts his trust in the Townsville Thuringowa Adult Tutor Group, a free service run by volunteers and a few paid staffers out of a cramped building in the suburb of Aitkenvale. There people with literacy or numeracy problems learn to write, read maps and complete official forms. "I've never been a good speller or reader, and you need those kinds of things now to get a job," says Berzinski. "When I was young, you didn't-you could walk out of a job and into another one the next day."
For many, Townsville is still a place of opportunity. But it also has its share of unemployment, drug abuse, divorce and violence. When Tony McDermott moved to Townsville to become director of Centacare, he inherited five staffers and an annual budget of $A300,000. Eight years on he manages 70 workers and spending has grown to $A3 million-and people still have to be turned away. "Life is getting a heck of a lot more complicated for many people," McDermott says, "because of things that never troubled my parents' or my generation." Townsville's Family Emergency Accommodation service last year could help only 150 of the 600 families who sought assistance. "People at the bottom feel that there are fewer services which are very stretched; that the gap between them and everyone else is getting bigger," says coordinator Ruth Meikle. "They get quite angry at times, feeling they haven't been given a fair go."
A nation, like a community, can be judged on how it cares for its most vulnerable people-and in the way its citizens live together. Crime rates in Townsville are on a par with those nationwide, but, says community policing coordinator Snr. Sgt. Paul Caswell, "it's a big country town-more than half the break-and-enters come from unlocked doors and windows." The city has also had success with the trial of a community policing program that makes one officer responsible for a given neighborhood. Yet here, as elsewhere, there is a perception that the days of tight-knit neighborhoods are ending. "There's not a lot of social cohesion," says McDermott. "People come and go so much." Frank Hornby, director of community and cultural services at Townsville City Council, says neighborhood support is damaged by the transience of the population: "Once you would have had mother, father, grandchildren and grandparents all living here. Now you don't. We're affected by mobility, but that's not all bad-it opens us up."
Henry Parkes' "crimson thread of kinship" still runs through many suburban streets. The local basketball and rugby league teams bring people together, as have cyclones and other natural disasters. A quieter camaraderie also survives. Vi Felmingham, 76, has lived in the same house in Garbutt, with a giant mango tree in the back yard, for 41 years. Her neighbors on both sides have been there almost as long, though there are more and more unfamiliar faces further down the street. The Townsville of Vi's youth-where swagmen would wait outside the unlocked family home until her mother came home and gave them food in return for wood chopping-is gone. But she'll never move, she says: "It's still a good place. We have no trouble."
The bonds of neighborhood are not just for long-time residents. Sharyn Heslop and her family moved into a new home in the rapidly expanding suburb of Annandale a year ago and are still watching new homes going up around them. A neighbor had a barbecue to welcome them; the Heslops did the same for their new neighbors. Their children play and fish together. "We look out for each other," says Sharyn. "We don't intrude on each other's privacy, but we're there for each other if need be." Many feel the warmth of the place. Chip Henriss-Anderssen, a former U.S. marine and now an Australian Army major, moved to Townsville in 1995. "My wife didn't know how we were going to spend two years here," he says. "But now we're not leaving. When I leave the army, I'm going to keep working here. We love it."
A sense of local identity stretches beyond the cul-de-sacs. This is a town that prefers to think of itself as the capital of North Queensland rather than the nation's 14th largest urban center. People from south of Brisbane, a two-hour flight away, are commonly labeled "Mexicans." Residents speak proudly of their do-it-yourself attitude. "We fought for a long time to get services here," says Hornby, a 20-year veteran of the local council. "There's a resilience here that comes from being able to get things done."
There are many echoes here of the mood of 1901. Like their forebears, people in Townsville still like to see themselves as capable and fair, tough and adventurous. They still hope their children will grow up in an egalitarian nation. They still love their country-fourth-generation sheep farmers and recent migrants alike. The tests of modernity have left them less exuberant than those who cheered Federation day a century ago. But they are still pioneers, not of a new nation but of that nation's new place in a changing world.
p>-With reporting by Leora Moldofsky and Michael Ware -Townsville /p>