Even though I live in a small town in a national park, no day is free from artificially produced sound. Sirens on the highway, lawn mowers, whipper snippers and leaf blowers, cars with dodgy exhausts, hammering, a medley of power tools, chain saws and mulchers, school bells and PA systems, car horns and pulsing stereos, to name but a few, are daily present in varying forms, duration and volume.

And it is really getting worse. When I first moved here 30 years ago, you might have lain across the road for twenty minutes before a car dawdled along. It was eerily quiet then compared to where I had come from in Sydney.

'Progress,' I hear you say.

I don't think it's that.