A few days prior a mystery woman drops a note in everyone’s mailbox, there’s a departure point and time if people want to meet up to trick and treat together and a little pumpkin to stick on your mailbox if you’re happy for the kids to knock on your door.

I like to get into it. I dressed up, the wise witch of OC - at my place you can’t take any candy (the only night of the year you’re allowed to call lollies that) if you take one of the kids’ books I have out for giving. One cheeky ghost called me the crazy book lady. I like that too. For the record, the books got replenished more times than the candy bowl did.

And for the next few hours plenty of people came and went, some came back, settled on the lawn, I had spirits (get it) out for the parents (well, a couple of beers and some wine) and my neighbourhood mingled.

I met people I didn’t know, some who had just moved in around the corner, found my teenage son a babysitting job, swapped notes about new places to eat, things to do, all of this with a crooked black felt hat on my head and Thriller pumping from the portable speaker I’d hidden in the mailbox.

It was a fun night and we made plans for a Christmas event where we could kick back on the lawn once again.

It seems like my little pocket of the inner north is not the norm.

New research by HSBC Bank revealed that one in four Australians do not speak to their neighbours - with 19 per cent only knowing their neighbours by sight and seven per cent saying they wouldn’t know their neighbours if they fell over them.

How sad. I quite often fall over my neighbours as I’m reaching over to refill my wine, or diving to take a catch in another game of tearaway cul de sac cricket.

I’ve been living in the same street for 15 years now. We moved in when I was pregnant with the man-child. We’ve seen neighbours come and go, made lifelong friends, dealt with deaths and births, seen houses, and homes, been demolished and rebuilt.

When it came to rebuilding my own home, I couldn’t imagine leaving my house, my hood, and while I still wonder whether it was the right financial decision or not I know it was the right decision for my emotional wellbeing.

When life fractures in a way, it’s your community that holds you together.

Whether that’s your neighbourhood, your workplace, your team or bookclub, or your gang of girls, foster these relationships in your time of need, and be that person for someone else if they need you.

I interviewed social researcher Hugh Mackay back in May about his latest book Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society.

For all our problems, personally, nationally, globally, “the better world you dream of starts in your street”, he writes in the new book.

“We are all very accomplished at wringing our hands about ‘the state of the nation’ or, more broadly, ‘the state of the world’.

“It’s not always so easy to acknowledge that the state of the nation actually starts in our street, in the sense that how we choose to live will help to determine the kind of neighbourhood ours will become, and the composite character of all our neighbourhoods determines the kind of society we will become.”

He spoke about how we need to connect more, linking our increasing isolation to an increase in anxiety.

“Thanks to our rate of relationship breakdown, our shrinking households, our busy lives, our increasing income inequality and our ever-increasing reliance on information technology, we are a more fragmented society than ever before,” he writes.

“We're social animals, when we become more socially fragmented, we become anxious.

“When more people in our history than ever before are living alone, when relationships are failing, 35-40 per cent of marriages are ending and we're more mobile than we used to be … all of these things tend to isolate us from each other and we end up paying a very high price for that.”

I know nights like Halloween are good for the soul, perhaps they are good for a lot more things than that.