#1537 What Might Have Been

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You see a familiar face on the street. It’s someone you knew a long time ago. You couldn’t place a name, but you remember being very fond of them. You near each other, your eyes meet, you’re about to pass, you open your mouth, and in a second they are gone, moving onwards in the opposite direction.

Neither of you stopped or even smiled. It might have been something – you could have asked then for a drink, placed their name while your fumbled for your phone. But the moment is gone. All you’re left with is what might have been.

This week on All the Best – missed moments, alternate paths, loves lost, whole cities never realised.

North Arm

There’s a place on the north coast of NSW called North Arm Cove. There are 400ish residents, no shop, no town water, but they do have a tennis court they built with money from the government’s GFC stimulus package a few years back.

But North Arm Cove was slated to be something much bigger. For a brief, shining moment, it might have been the capital of Australia, designed by Walter Burley Griffin. That didn’t happen, obviously. But plans were drawn up and roads carved through the bush, and due to a strange confluence of planning laws and economics, a small community lives in a perfectly planned city that’s mostly gravel boulevards and eucalyptus trees.

Produced by Heidi Pett

Brother

One of the biggest, strangest things about ‘what might have beens’ is the ways they could change not only the course of our lives, and what happened, but our identities. Things that happen or don’t happen ripple through us and form the people we become.

Erin’s been wondering for a while what might have been if something in her family had happened very differently

Produced by Erin Rosenberg

Executive Producers: Heidi Pett

State Coordinators: Bethany Atkinson-Quinton and Bec Fary

Presenters: Pip Rasmussen and Michael Brydon

Image Credit: Google Maps