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Friday 30 June 2006: Professional Practice in Regional Australia
We still have page under construction on our page on professional practice in regional Australia. We have a fair bit of material here. The problem is simply finding the time to write it up properly. But we need to do so.
During the week a journalist rang to get information on the sea-change/tree-change phenomenon as it applied to professional practice. This demonstrated the continuing interest. So we will make this a priority over the next week.
Tuesday 27 June 2006: Paddle Steamers
It's sometimes very easy to get side tracked! Looking at the story of wool led us to inland shipping and the paddle steamer along the Murray Darling. The brief historical material that follows is drawn from australia: our national stories, chapter 2, "Ports and Shipping, 1788-1970", http://www.ahc.gov.au/publications/national-stories/transport/chapter2.html.
The first paddle steamers entered the Murray River in 1853. By 1859 the practical limits of trade were established taking vessels up the Murray to Albury, the Murrumbidgee to Gundagai, up to Darling to Walgett, 2,660 km (1,650 miles) from the Murray-Darling junction. Towns like Bourke, Menindee and Wilcania on the Darling, Balranald, Hay, Narranderra and Wagga Wagga on the Murrumbidgee, Wentworth, Mildura, Swan Hill on the Murray all became important ports.
The coming first of the railways and later lorries progressively reduced the trade. However, recent years have seen something of a resurgence based on tourism.
General information about operating vessels along the Murray can be found on http://www.murrayriver.com.au/homepage.htm.
At Echuca the port of Echuca - http://www.portofechuca.org.au/ - operates three vessels including the PS Adelaide (see photograph). Built in 1866, the PS Adelaide is the oldest wooden hulled paddle steamer still operating in the world. Further information about Echuca can be found on http://www.echucamoama.com/
On the Darling, one vessel still operates providing short excursions from Bourke. See http://www.visitbourke.com/.
Tuesday 20 June 2006: On the Wool Track
We have just been posting material on the Australian wool industry. This entry is written as a personal memoir, rather than our usual combined approach.
I (Jim Belshaw) grew up in Armidale in the New England region of NSW. Armidale, a major educational centre in the midst of a fine wool growing district, was then broken into town, gown and country. As the son of the Professor of Economics at the University of New England I was clearly gown. But because I lived in Armidale I was also town. Then my mother's linkages to the rural scene gave me a country connection as well.
Now living in Sydney for family reasons, the smell and feel of that period come back to me.
How do I capture the country shearing sheds that I used to visit? They were generally made of galvanized iron raised from the ground on stumps. This allowed sheep to be brought up ramps for shearing, sent down when sheared. Pens for the sheep that had been sheared, were waiting to be sheared, were linked to the shed.
Smell was the first thing you noticed when you entered the shed, the rich deep smell coming from generations of sheep. In front of you were the shearing machines, individual stands that the shearers stood at, man-handling the sheep from the entry point, through the shearing process and then down the exit ramp. Nearby were the sorting tables, simple wood constructions on which the fleeces were thrown for sorting.
From there the fleeces went to the bailers, wooden and metal rectangles. The bale was inserted, the wool pushed down, the bale sown up using long needles. Hanging from a neaby hook were the metal sheets with the property brand punched out. These were placed against the bale and then painted over, leaving the property brand marked on the bail.
The shearing sheds were more than an industrial establishment. They were also places of entertainment. Wool shed dances and parties were held there. The band went in one corner, leaving the main floor for dancing. Because of New England's altitude, winter could be very cold. So there were fires outside the sheds, often bult into forty-four gallon drums. There the girls in their sometimes flimsy dresses and blokes, sometimes in formal wear, gathered in breaks.
After all these years I can now say that those girls from NEGS or PLC - the two main local private schools - really terrified me. Looking back it sounds silly, but they were so pretty and sophisticated that I felt really very clumsy.
A web site is a cold, one-dimensional space. However, we hope that our section on the wool industry will encourage you to visit, to wear wool, to experience the touch, feel and smell of one of Australia's truly great industries.
Tuesday 13 June 2006: On Schools and Schooling
Geoffrey Blainey, one of Australia's best know historians, wrote a book The Tyranny of Distance (21st century edition, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney 2001). Subtitled "How distance shaped Australia's history", the book explores the ways in which Australia's vast distances have shaped our history and thought.
Distance remains a factor. However, when expressed in terms of travel time, metro and Regional Australia have reversed position.
Today it is not unusual for metro parents to spend three to four hours per day driving their children from one activity to another, battling traffic. Those in rural and remote Australia living long ways from major centries still experience the tyranny of distance. But for most Regional Australians, the amount of time metro Australians spend travelling is simply incomprehensible. One of our colleagues who moved to Sydney for family reasons describes the difference simply as two hours less sleep per night, the amount of extra daily travel required to do the same quantity of things in Sydney.
This issue is presently relevant because we are in the process of updating the schooling sections on the site, adding in web details for all the state and territory education departments.
Take a place like Armidale, for example. In Armidale a parent has a choice between ten primary schools, six secondary schools, all within a ten minute drive. Then there is a university and a TAFE college. (See Armidale case study). Yes, Armidale is a little exceptional because it is a major regional education centre. But it is not unique.
One thing that we have found in updating the schooling sections is that the print directories on schools continue to be deficient so far as the regional option is concerned. One well known directory on NSW schools lists only Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle and Canberra schools. A second has broader coverage, but a lot of entries are limited to a name and address. This adds to the difficulty faced by parents in making choices.
By contrast, our focus is unashamedly on Regional Australia. Yes, the various links we have included do allow parents to access metro information. But our core aim is to redress the current information gap.
Tuesday 6 June 2006: Our regions are their own worst enemies
This site went on-line for the first time on 8 April 06. Since then we have added an initial 58 pages of content. We have also started to attract our first visitors. Excluding search engine robots, over May we had 1124 visits (sessions) from 239 IP addresses. Not a lot, but also not a bad start given our early stage of development.
Creation of a site like this is a journey. We want to make the site valuable to all those who share our interest in Regional Australia. But to do this we have to learn as we go along. For that reason, we have decided to introduce editorials, regular reports on site progress, the things that we have learned.
At this stage in our development it is too early to make any judgements on visitor interests. We do know that our boarding school sections are so far the most visited sections of the site. However, that reflects the fact that our boarding school pages rank high on key search engine lists rather than an overwhelming interest in boarding schools as compared to other elements of life in Regional Australia.
If we cannot comment on visitor interests, we already know enough to comment on the other side of the equation, information sources about Regional Australia. Quite simply, our regions are their own worst enemy because of the way they make it hard for visitors to get the information they want.
Take boarding schools as an example. To generate our tables of schools we had to check every boarding school site. We found that some schools did not say where they were. Yes, they gave their addresses, but no locational information beyond that. So we had to use atlas and web search to locate them. Worse, some schools do not even tell you which boarding years they provide.
We found something similar with local council web sites. They have lots of information relevant to local rate payers, but are often very bad when it comes to providing relevant information to those outside the immediate area.
Thinking about this, the key problem is one of focus. Councils and schools focus on their immediate concerns. In so doing, they lose sight of their broader objectives. To overcome this, both have to stand outside their own areas and concerns, focusing instead on presenting the information the external visitor needs.