When our family lived in Tennant Creek in the mid 1990s, we had a friend called Day Day. He was a fine craftsman and he made the most elegantly sculpted snappy gum coolamons.

Day Day had mastered the use of almost any type of wood-working tool but his adze would have been one of his favourites. The handle, a piece of one-inch water pipe was almost chrome-smooth from years of holding. It was welded to a section of an old leaf spring, shortened, sharpened and shaped to make a tool as precise as you could get.

The way Day Day would sit in the shade and wield his adze was good for the soul to see and remains an endearing memory of our time in the Northern Territory.

Add 10 to the years, minus 25 to the mercury and here we are in Mongarlowe. For the last three years our trusty wooden bridge has been partially demolished just after Easter for a month or more while it’s had a major structural upgrade.

The council workers helped the locals to build a walkway for school kids and others to get over the river during this time. The rest of us had to drive an extra twenty minutes to go round the long way. One afternoon as I waited for the school bus, I watched one of the workers preparing the new long beams.

What was he using? An adze – and he had the same ease of working as had our friend Day Day from out bush in the Territory. Off chipped the pieces to reveal the new shape, seemingly so effortlessly, as to make you suspect it had been hiding in there all along.

That these skills are alive in the council workforce, along with the other expertise the bridge workers displayed on our bridge, is gratifying to see. If we were a tiny outpost of a mega-shire the whole bridge might well have been torn down and replaced with an off-the-shelf concrete lego span.

It’s comforting to remember that the council is not just a posse of elected citizens but is also these permanent staff who have the skills to keep the shire running smoothly.

I would like to be part of a council that accepts the challenges and grasps the opportunities ahead. Whether it’s the ratebase, rubbish collection, road upgrades or renewable energy, the staff, the elected officers and the community can work together to find solutions that best meet the needs of Palerang.

The future is not pre-determined, it’s just what we make it.