"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse."
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So cries Richard III in the eponymous play about that tragic and devilish English monarch.
So desperate for a horse is he, to keep fighting his losing battle against the Tudors and Henry VII (whose son is the one of many wives fame), that he would give up his kingdom for it.
Such is his despair for, for lack of a better word, infrastructure, that no sacrifice seems too great.
Apologies in advance for starting this week off with some Shakespearean analysis, but that feeling of utter despair and frustration is very much how it feels driving on our rural roads.
I would certainly, had I one to give, forfeit a small kingdom to improve the roads around our region.
As a regular commuter to Canberra and Wagga Wagga, I can see first hand not only the damage done to our roads, but also a seeming inability to fix them quickly, or indeed at all.
Many of our roads, between Boorowa and Cowra, Cowra and Young, Harden and Cootamundra, are all in a state of disrepair and neglect.
Yet it's not as if people aren't working on them.
The road from Junee to Cootamundra was repaved not once, but twice last year, only for it to look just as bad now as it did before work started on it.
The stretch of road from Boorowa to Yass has had roadworks on it for several months, with what I can't exactly call progress taking place.
Our tax dollars are hard at work. Certainly harder than the government.
Even closer to our capital, where politicians pay immensely more attention, our road network is languishing.
The Barton Highway duplication (well, stage 1 of that duplication) took over three years to complete, with no sign on when stages 2 through 5 will be finished.
I made a joke at the start of that project that I wanted to retire before it was done; it seems the government is helping me along with that.
The reason the roads are so important out here is because there is no other way around.
Even if you're in one of the lucky communities with access to the Sydney-Melbourne train line (looking at you Harden), you know how slow and unreliable that service is. It also doesn't get us around between our communities.
Our councils have limited to no funds to improve our road network, we know this. Through no fault of their own they're hampered by financial pressures. The previous state government (it's hard to blame the new mob given they've been in office for 1 year) clearly didn't see it as a priority.
I fear that until it is, we're in for a bumpy ride.
Dhuluyarra - Straight Talk is a weekly contribution to the Boorowa News by James Blackwell.
