Last week, said a Wyalongite, shaking a threatening finger and quivering with indignation, “We’ve got the mineowners, and the mineowners won’t exactly say that they won’t employ any man that lives in West Wyalong, but they presently will only employ the men that live in Wyalong. That’ll stiffen ‘em.” And the West retorts with adjectives, red as the churned-up dust of its main street. In fact, this feud and the utter vileness of the road to either Wyalong probably account for the extremely high colour of the vernacular. If one accepted the West estimate of the East it would be that they are a dour and stiffnecked generation, while the East regards the West as the “slimmest” of the “slim” in the Boer sense of the term. They are such whole-hearted fellows in the two towns, so full of the virtues of a mining population—of hospitality, energy, and heartiness, of dogged pluck and determination, all expressed of course in language like unto that of the returned troopers from South Africa—that it is a pity some modus vivendi cannot be quickly arrived at. If development goes on as it is doing the trouble will be got over by the runs of the two towns overlapping, and when the electric trams are running down the main street the sectional differences will simply have resolved themselves into penny sections. Already the telephone is coming, and that will check things a bit, for the regulations will not permit the free interchange of the “language,” and in which East describes West and West, East.

The Sydney Mail, Saturday 13 October 1900