Anyone notice how often rainbows appear in my pics of Braidwood? It really is quite uncanny – they seem to pop up a lot around here. I’m not sure whether it’s just the season for rainbows, or if there’s something about the area itself, but there they are, every few days.

Judeo-Christian lore tells us that God sent a rainbow as a promise to humankind that he wouldn’t send another catastrophic flood to destroy us; the ancient Greeks believed a rainbow was the trail left by the messenger Iris as she carried a communication to the Gods; my Irish forebears believed the Little People kept a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In the beliefs of many Aboriginal Australian tribes, the enormous rainbow snake is the creator of all things and can dispense rain and therefore prosperity — but also has a mean streak, visiting disease on the people it has given life.

Of course, rainbows are fraught with other symbolisms and cultural associations. Just think of Judy Garland’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz: a poignant ballad where the rainbow represents the threshold of “a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby” – an impossible place where dreams actually come true.

In the full flush of hope and celebration following the end of apartheid, South Africa dubbed itself ‘the rainbow nation’ – based I think on the idea that people of all colours would coexist in harmony. It was a heady time: everything seemed possible after years of oppression and violence, and the dream really seemed to be coming true when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup and Nelson Mandela donned the team jersey.

Another sports jersey that actually sports the rainbow colours is of course that of the Cycling World Champion: the winner of this accolade is entitled to wear the rainbow band on their kit for the year they are champ. Intriguingly, this jersey is said to carry a curse, with the winners frequently failing to perform to the same level of success in subsequent years. Just look at Lance Armstrong.       

And you’ll have to have been living under a stone if you’re unaware of the LGBTQ community’s adoption of the rainbow colours, with a similar rationale to that of the Rainbow Nation – people of every sexual stripe united and accepted as equal, free of discrimination.

So when you see a rainbow, it’s got to bring with it a sense of wonder and promise – of dreams that may come true, of mythical pots of gold, of unattainable achievement and freedom from prejudice. It’s not really a harbinger of bad times, no matter what the Rainbow Snake or the cycling World Champ’s jersey may say.

Frankly I’m not sure how much of all this can be applied to the township of Braidwood. It’s a pretty chilled-out place overall and I can’t imagine anyone applying major prejudices to those unlike themselves; I’m not aware of serious floods recently – although Flood Creek could point to a propensity for inundations I suppose; and cycling’s not really huge here.

Given a choice, I’d really go for the Celtic pot-of-gold idea – it is, after all, a gold-rush town. The shiny stuff shipped from Braidwood to the Royal Mint in Sydney between 1858 and 1874 amounted to 19,596 kg (630,088 ounces) – and this is never far from my mind when digging in the garden, let me tell you.

So let’s take these sightings as portents of the fortune to be found here in the Queanbeyan-Palerang region – if not at the end of the rainbow or somewhere over it, then in the opportunity we have during this screwed-up time to make something new for ourselves. Because with COVID-19 we absolutely aren’t in Kansas anymore.