Coffs Harbour — Who Will Save Our Towns?

Driving the long road home to Queensland, Margaret is told she has to see Coffs Harbour, so baby van rattles down the misty mountain roads to the mid north coast. It's a homecoming of sorts — forty years ago, as a young woman, she lived here after joining a Christian group, and she still remembers the crystal-clear creeks, the beaches and the easy country vibe. What greets her now stops her cold: traffic on steroids, boarded-up shops, a seedy town centre and homeless tents right down at the jetty. Over a few short days she meets the people working at the coalface — a near-80-year-old volunteer gardener at Pete's Place who treats every client with dignity, a mum named Jenny who bravely shares her story, and a young woman called Rachel who leads her out the back to a ramshackle tent city hidden in the mud during a council clean-up. At the Lifeline soup kitchen she meets Phil, well into retirement and still serving lunch most days, and at Loaves and Fishes she runs into Bruce, a familiar face from four decades ago, and Peter — three weeks out of cardiac surgery and already back at work — who quietly lands the truest words of the whole journey about housing, food and what charity really costs. As she drives home with a Sacred Heart of Jesus print riding shotgun, Margaret is left asking the question at the heart of this episode: who, or what, is going to save our regional towns?