MAYBE it's just my country roots or possibly I've failed to recognise the changes happening around me, but this week I had an epiphany.Our nation is changing.Fewer people are converging on the local drinking hole for the regular Friday night ritual catch-up. Instead of picking up the phone for a chat, we send a text or email. Gone are the days when your next door neighbour was your best mate.Yes, I know it's gloomy — but such was my astonishment at the events in big city Sydney this week that I was forced to reconsider where we as a nation have come from and where we are headed. Natalie Jean Wood was found dead in the upstairs bedroom of her Surry Hills home in inner-Sydney, on Tuesday afternoon.Ms Wood, who would have been 87, had apparently died eight years ago. Remember 2003 — when the war in Iraq started, when Mark Latham rose to the Labor leadership, when Makybe Diva won the Melbourne Cup — for the first time? It's a long, long time ago.Her body lay in the room, decaying as Centrelink cheques continued to flow, as next door neighbours slept literally on the other side of a brick wall, as busy city workers parked out the front of the house on a daily basis.Yet no one knew, or worse still, cared. While there has been the understandable witchhunt this week to find the persons or authorities "responsible" for failing to discover Ms Wood, this should not be our primary concern. Of greater worry is how as our nation develops, as people work longer and harder, as the population moves and as we become more and more reliant on electronic communication that we are losing the sense of everything that our nation is built on. You know, those uniquely Australian elements that a John Williamson or a Paul Kelly write songs about.It's not being ocker or bashful: it's about balancing our need to be more sophisticated, more open-minded and more capable of generating prosperity for everyone in our society without forgetting what makes our society function so well in the first place.Amid the traffic and the masses of people in our big cities, looking out for your friends, family and neighbours is central to the theme.There have been signs that we are not immune to facing such problems. Earlier this year in Wendouree, we reported the case of an elderly woman who was found in her Wattle St home days after her death. Nearby residents described her as a very quiet person who kept to herself. They said the blinds were always drawn, her grass was left long in the backyard and neighbours never saw any visitors.New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell this week described Ms Wood's death as an "extremely sad event"."The terribly tragic situation's a reminder why we all ought to take more interest in our neighbours and demonstrate that friendliness has always been a part of Australian society."It's a message which should be heeded across the nation.