Lauren Jackson may well be the world’s best woman basketball but our commentators delight in telling us she was born in Albury, NSW. Just like they tell us that George Barton the shooter is from Tamworth, and Kate Smyth the marathon runner is from Cowra, Melanie Wells, the Hockeyroo is from Wagga Wagga, Jade North the Olyroo is from Taree, and so on.

The commentators feed us like chooks and we love it. We like to think that our country cousins get a fair go at Big Things. And we like to think that, somehow, there’s a bit of bushie in us all.

Unfortunately, it could be that our links to country life, to the bush, have long since evaporated.

No longer do we see grain and wool and livestock shipped from our ports. Sydney’s abattoirs and tanneries are gone. (Search for ‘leather and Sydney’ on the web and you get a page of gay men’s clubs.) The scouring plants and textiles mills are gone. The flour mills are gone. A few milk processing plants and a chicken meat processing plant are all that I can track down as surviving in our midst.

Work we’ve done at the Urban Research Centre shows Sydney’s main freight links are with Brisbane and Melbourne rather than with country NSW.

The city’s major imports are consumer products from overseas. Last year Sydney’s ports unloaded 812,000 containers (TEU equivalent) of stuff. Fully 60% of the containers came from Asia. Of the 799,000 containers that Sydney’s ports despatched, 447,000 – or 56% – were empty.

Sydneysiders’ holidays are ‘short break packages’ to the vineyards, the ski fields or the Blue Mountains. Come summertime we cling to an increasingly suburbanised coastline or head overseas. We might feel nostalgia for our declining country towns, but we never visit them. Homebush at Easter is enough.

The evidence tells us, then, that Sydney has severed most of its commodity links with the NSW countryside. Sydney now processes only a very small proportion of its material needs. Increasingly, Sydney is a city of services workers and of consumption.

Our links to the bush are thin, which probably explains our gushy claims on talented country kids who succeed on the world stage.

*Phillip O'Neill is Professor and Director of the Urban Research Centre for the University of Western Sydney. He regularly comments on matters affecting Sydney.