I was crossing the Princes Highway the other day on my mobility scooter, opposite the south exit to Quaama, my village. The speed limit on the highway there is 100kph. But I have a big, all-terrain scooter which can do 15kph on the flat, and the highway is only two lanes, and there’s good visibility…
Author: Jen
I get a lot of compliments
I get a lot of compliments. It all started when I got a walking stick. “What a lovely cardigan!” “Oh, thanks!” Nice, I thought. What a nice person. I should be like that, handing out compliments like flowers to strangers. But then they started coming thick and fast, and it hit me: it’s the stick!…
Cobargo Folk Festival 2015 Highlights
Friday Afternoon I might have gushed a little last year about Canadian guitarist-singer-songwriter Scott Cook, so when I heard he was back I went along to make sure. In 2014 he was a last-minute entry and they stuffed him into the tiny Narira shed up the back, where a heads-upped crowd sweltered through a heart-on-sleeve…
On walking
I used to be a fast walker. The men I walked with had to ask me to slow down. I left everyone in my wake. One day in 2001 as I crossed Church St in Bega, striding out across the old cobblestone gutter and onto the blacktop in my jeans and shirt and RM Williams…
Richard Denniss: Whatever happened to just in case?
The world’s sluggish response to climate change is a mystery to many. After all, overwhelming evidence of a problem usually results in mitigation of the problem. Witness the global response when scientists suggested in the 1990s that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) might be busting a hole in the ozone layer, leading to high rates of skin…
Finnegan’s Release
The rusty flatbed lumbered along the track, the wire cage on the tray rattling and lurching with every rut. The old man heard the bird squawking. This was the place. He pulled off where the track ran down and across the creek, where the water ran shallow, clear and cold over glistening stones, under a…
Ten years lost: Ken Henry on the economics of climate change
It was an unseasonably balmy night at the Bermagui Hotel. The speaker was Ken Henry and the subject “The Economics of Climate Change”. We’d all been congratulating the Bermagui Institute’s Jack Miller on his orchestration of the China-US emissions reduction deal just in time to create a dramatic backdrop for the talk, when Henry told…
Dennis Blanchfield 1949 – 2014
It was a cool, drizzly day on 13 October for the funeral of Dennis Blanchfield at Quaama Cemetery. He must have been well-remembered and liked, judging from the crowd. Dennis’s brothers Jim, Danny and Brian all still live here in Quaama. I didn’t know Dennis; he left Quaama well before my time. But I heard…
Tony Windsor: The man with no secrets
It seems these days of political spin that you only find out what’s really going on from those outside the fray. Be they an ex-security advisor, or an ex-department head, or an ex-parliamentarian, at last they don’t owe any favours to anyone and can speak their mind.
Busted: The Baseload Myth
The restaurant in the Bermagui Hotel is buzzing as I enter at 6pm on Thursday 3 April for the Bermagui Institute Public Dinner. Such is the interest in tonight’s speaker, the Institute has raised its booking limit, and still I meet a couple of ticketless friends hanging hopefully by the door. Dr Mark Diesendorf is…