Clover Hill Diaries - Join Me and Be the Change - #Strongwomen. "I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful

History is full of people who could not spell their own names.

Christine Yeats Convenor of the Assessment Sub-Committee of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee.

A sold-out audience gathered at Kiama Library today to learn from two of Australia’s most experienced historical researchers.

Kiama Historical Society was honoured to welcome Carol Liston AO, President of the Royal Australian Historical Society, and Christine Yeats, its Senior Vice President.

Carol is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on early colonial New South Wales, particularly the development of the County of Cumberland and the lives of convict women transported from Britain.

Christine is an archivist and historical researcher who spent much of her career with State Records NSW, now part of Museums of History NSW. She is also Convenor of the Assessment Sub-Committee of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee.

Carol and Christine set up for their presentations with Vice President of the Kiama Historical Society Dr Tony Gilmour watching cleary please the AV is working

For local historians, family researchers and writers across the Illawarra and Shoalhaven, having Carol and Christine visit Kiama and share knowledge gathered over a lifetime was a rare opportunity.

It soon became clear that historical research begins with persistence.

Our ancestors could not always spell their own names.

Neither, apparently, could the people recording them.

A surname might begin with Mc, Mac, M’ or a space. Trove may read it differently again. Christine’s advice was simple. Try every variation you can imagine, including a few you cannot imagine, and never assume something is absent because your first search failed.

She also demonstrated how to use quotation marks, AND, NOT and Trove’s persistent links, along with the importance of saving the newspaper title, date and page number. Search results can move as new material is added, meaning the article you found easily today may play hide-and-seek tomorrow.

Newspapers, Christine told us, are wonderful places to begin. They are not necessarily wonderful places to stop.

Historic Waughope House and the farm today is still and operating dairy farm

One article about Kiama’s Waugh family contained a letter and plenty of useful clues. It also elevated the wrong family member, incorrectly explained how Waughope got its name and confidently repeated details that did not survive contact with the original records.

Nobody had necessarily set out to mislead anyone. Someone filled a gap, another person repeated it, and eventually the story acquired the reassuring appearance of fact.

Carol took us further back, into colonial records created because Governor King wanted to prevent “fraud, confusion and perplexity”.

That may be the most honest description ever given to a government recordkeeping project.

The Old Register records what ordinary people were buying, selling, mortgaging, promising and fighting over from the earliest years of the colony. Carol showed us why one document is never enough. Every record reflects the knowledge, purpose and opinion of the person who created it. The researcher’s task is to compare it with maps, correspondence, newspapers, land records and other evidence.

Dr Tony Gimour Vice President Kiama Historical Society, Christine Yeats and Cameron McDonald Mayor and Patron

Then a Kiama silk mystery appeared.

Christine had been investigating Anne Waugh, who sent locally produced silk to the Paris Exhibition of 1855. That search led through parish maps, title records, primary applications and annotations left by long-dead clerks.

It also raised a new local question.

Are some of Kiama’s old mulberry trees survivors of its forgotten silk industry?

Kiama Historical Society has a well-earned reputation for bringing together outstanding speakers, fascinating local stories and food tables that deserve their own place in the archives. The magnificent lunch was prepared by the Children’s Medical Research team.

Nobody walked out with a neat answer to every historical puzzle.

We left knowing where to look next, what to question and why the smallest handwritten number on the corner of a document may change an entire family story.

History, it turns out, is less about finding one perfect record and more about refusing to be defeated by a badly spelled surname, an intimidating website or a very convincing local legend.

Remember the “pinkie” campaign could it fix our e bike problem

Remember this campaign? Will it fix our e-bike problem?

Watch it again and then ask yourself a serious policy question: is this the answer to Kiama’s e-bike problem?

The Pinkie campaign understood something about teenage boys that every threat misses. The whole performance is for an audience,They think they are bulletproof. Fines bounce off them. Warnings bounce off them. The road toll belongs to other people. Could laughter from the girls on the corner be the answer

Kiama has tried the enforcement route before. I mean well before. In the 1880s this town had a big hoon problem. Mobs of forty and fifty boys patrolled the streets from ten o’clock. They damaged everything in sight. Joseph Weston lobbied hard for his solution, “bring back the whip”

Larrikinism, he thundered, was “a social and moral infection which should be stamped out like small-pox”

In November 1883 he got his wish. “LARRIKINS BEWARE! The ‘Cat’ has arrived.” Triangles, a cat-o’-nine-tails and two taws came down from Sydney on Saturday’s steamer, and the magistrate a Mr Connell announced he would happily show the appliance to anyone desirous of seeing it at the court-house. Kiama invented the pop-up exhibition a century early.

In March 1884 the cat made its courtroom debut, produced before three youthful offenders to rattle them. The delinquents smiled. The Bench promised them a taste of it next time. By the close of 1885 the cat was still waiting for its first customer, the most feared instrument in the British penal system reduced to a conversation piece with viewing hours.

This week Council opened a portal where residents can report e-bike incidents. Same recipe, new appliance. Acquire the instrument with fanfare, then wait for the teenagers to reform themselves. The boys on Collins Street will smile at the portal exactly the way the larrikins smiled at the cat, assuming word of it ever reaches them.

Which brings me back to the pinkie. It cost less than a steamer and it frightened more teenagers than the cat ever did. So here is my alternative submission to Council: skip the portal, commission the ad. Or save the money entirely. Collins Street, Saturday night, all of us on the footpath, little fingers raised.

Watch the add again. What do you think?

Here comes Pollyanna

I’ve just had a big birthday. The kind with a zero in it. You move into a new decade whether you’re ready or not.

Walking into the restaurant, half a dozen people I wasn’t dining with wished me happy birthday. That’s a small town for you. I’m noisy in this community. I have opinions, I used to write for the paper, and everybody knows what I think. Every time we have an election, people are convinced I’m standing for council. Apparently I’m just what council needs.

This post challenges that idea. Our community doesn’t need me. One person can’t deliver what this community deserves, and neither can nine. It needs an engaged community working together, not keyboard warriors: informed people with the skills to make sure the bureaucrats are working for us.

Around my own table were Greens, Labor supporters, independents and friends who had stood for council themselves. Between us we had campaigned, letterboxed, handed out how-to-vote cards and argued for change across more elections than any of us cared to count. If anyone in this district believed in democracy, it was us.

For the record, I’ve never voted for a party in my life. I vote for the person. Over the years that has meant I have voted Liberal, National, Labor, Greens and independent.

The talk turned to council. A councillor had resigned, and the by-election to replace him will cost ratepayers about $200,000. Our council is broke. That’s $200,000 it doesn’t have. The question went around the table: what could one councillor achieve when the bureaucrats seem to have the rest under their thumb?

This is how bad it is. I know our councillors. That’s what my year at the paper gave me. They spend a lot of time on social media trying to work out what the community cares about. So they’re hearing the loud voices, and like most communities, we have plenty of loud voices who all want different things.

I said I’d love to see us try what a district in north-east Victoria did. Build the community first. Find out what people want. Learn to solve problems together, and worry about who to elect after that.

One of my oldest friends smiled and said, “Here comes Pollyanna.”

I know her well enough to understand what she meant by that. Her focus was looking after her friend. She knows what twenty years of heart and soul in agriculture, encouraging people to believe we’re all in this together and the win-win is there if we go after it, had cost my mental health. I had witnessed failure first hand, and neither of us wanted a repeat. That’s how much my friends care. So I listen. I came home and had a big think about whether she was right.

This post is the big think. It ends in an electorate nobody at my dinner mentioned.

In December 2012, a small group from north-east Victoria got eleven minutes with their federal member, Sophie Mirabella. The meeting ended when she told them, “The people of Indi aren’t interested in politics.”

Her district knew her by then. She had boycotted the Apology to the Stolen Generations. She had stood beside Tony Abbott in front of the “Ditch the Witch” signs. Neither time did she ask her community what they thought. They had a member who didn’t speak for them.

They went home and proved her wrong.

The push had started with two young people who grew up in the district and moved to Melbourne for work, because they believed there was nothing at home for them. They decided to do something about it. The generation who had stayed backed them: young people with the idea, older people with the networks and the skills. Between them they ran hundreds of kitchen table conversations, asking what people wanted for the region.

And they argued. Some of the group wanted a seat at the table in Canberra. Others wanted the focus on the community itself. It was the same argument we had at my birthday dinner. Then they did what makes this movement so smart. They agreed to disagree and kept working, until they were confident the community was engaged and that a tilt at the seat was what the community wanted.

Before the 2013 election they wrote down what success looked like: engaged community members turning a safe seat into a marginal one. Winning came last on their own list of aims.

They won anyway. They unseated a frontbencher. They kept meeting between elections. When Cathy McGowan retired, the community chose Helen Haines, and the seat has now been theirs across five elections.

Hardly anyone in New South Wales has heard of Indi, and I’ve come to think that is the strength of it. They did it for the district, not for the fame.

My friend is right. People are hard to organise. Indi is proof that hard and impossible are different words.

It also helped me work out what all the council talk is about. When my neighbours decide I’m standing, it’s the habit we’ve all fallen into: find one noisy person, hand them the problem, and wait. Indi swapped that habit for a better one: believe you can do it yourselves.

We’re already proud of where we live. Imagine being proud of what we build together. Our dry stone walls have stood for a hundred and fifty years. They’re under threat and the reason they’re still standing is our community made it clear it cares about them. What we love survives because we stand up for it. That is true of walls, and it’s true of towns.

The people who wrote Indi’s story down ask a question.

“Have you wondered who is hearing your voice, listening to your community?”

My answer is the power is in your hands, too

So Pollyanna has a question of her own. Why does organising ourselves sound less realistic than spending another $200,000 on another election?

How my valley became Mosman or Toorak with a blowhole, one sale at a time

I have spent a lifetime at farm kitchen tables, and in every conversation the problem is someone else’s to fix. The council’s. Canberra’s. The person who never rang back. So we elect a politician every three years, and we wait.

Look at what that actually asks of them. I hand over my problem. My road, my rates, my paddock. So does my neighbour, and his neighbour, and every voter in the electorate. The politician ends up holding thirty thousand separate problems, most of them pulling against each other, and no honest hope of fixing them all. Politics becomes a queue of grievances, and campaigning becomes promising to move you up the queue. The politician can only promise, disappoint, and be replaced by a rival who promises louder. The loudest dog in the yard wins, every time. We built this machine, and then we blame the politician when it does what it was always going to do.

And while we queue, the big calls get made without us. Here’s how it works in my valley. A dairy farm comes up for sale. A Sydney buyer pays more than any farmer could ever earn back from milk, because he’s not buying a farm, he’s buying a view for six weekends a year. The farm next door is now worth city money too, so when that farmer retires, no young farming family can afford it either. Sale by sale, working farms become holiday homes that stand dark most of the year.

And it doesn’t stop at the farm gate. Every sale drags the price of an ordinary house up with it. Kiama is now the most expensive place to buy a home in regional New South Wales, dearer than Byron Bay. The nurse at the hospital can’t buy here. The teacher can’t. The kids who grew up here can’t. There is no affordable housing here, and no social housing. The school loses children, the shops lose staff, and the town that made the views worth buying slowly stops being a town. It becomes a postcode with scenery. Mosman with a blowhole.

Nobody chose this. There was no meeting about where it was all heading, no vote, no moment anyone could point at and object to. Each sale was legal and each seller had every right. But add it all up and my district has been rezoned by the market, one sale at a time, and nobody ever asked us what the best outcome would be for the farms, the buyers, the nurses the kids or the community. I watch it from my own front gate.

So here is the problem: we hand our say to a politician with thirty thousand problems in the queue, and the calls that change our districts get made elsewhere, by the market, the local council, the state government. What’s left for the rest of us is Facebook, one keyboard at a time. Each of us finds our tribe there, and the tribe does what tribes do: agrees with itself, louder every year. Plenty of conversations. Never one table.

And here is the goal: communities with the knowledge, confidence and skills to find the best outcome for everyone affected.

One rural community in north-east Victoria worked out how to get everyone to the same table, and it’s still going strong five elections later. In my next post I’ll tell you what they did. Then I want to work on the question that follows with you: how do we do it in every district in Australia?

Agriculture talks about the burden of regulation. Fewer talk about the licence it already holds: public trust.

FI have a rule about agricultural stories on LinkedIn. I keep scrolling, unless Karin Stark wrote them.

Last week I broke it.

The post asked why any young person would choose agriculture when farming often feels like a fight with government.

That caught my eye, because the young farmers I know are still choosing it. Succession. Land prices. The money it takes to get started. Those are the barriers in my part of the world. Agriculture here is also attracting young women from urban areas, women who have chosen farming with their eyes open.

Then came the line that sent me in a different direction.

No other industry or profession has to put up with this.

Plenty of industries do. We all live with forms of social control every day. We have licences to drive. Permits to renovate. Working with Children Checks to volunteer at the school canteen. Certificates to serve alcohol. Council approvals for sheds. Dogs are registered and microchipped. A council ranger can fine you for walking one in the wrong place or leaving its mess behind.

Most of us renew permissions all the time.

Farming is different.

A person can buy land tomorrow and call themselves a farmer. Farmers work inside rules, inspections and regulations, but the occupation itself has very little formal licensing. No registration board. No annual renewal. No professional body that can take the title away.

As a dairy farmer, I was licensed under food safety laws. That licence covers what I produce rather than me. Farmers who use restricted chemicals need accreditation. Water has rules. Chemicals have rules. Food safety has rules.

Farmers did the training. We learned the rules. Then we went further. We brought in accredited specialists, precision technology and contractors who could put the right product in the right place. This morning, a contractor’s drone was working in the paddocks outside my front window. This is modern farming too. Training. Skill. Technology. Rules taken seriously.

When a clear standard is set, farmers usually meet it. Often they go past it.

The licence still sits mostly on the product, the chemical, the water or the process. The person doing the farming carries something else. Public trust.

The public trusts us to manage land, draw water, run animals and produce food. That trust has no renewal date. It has no form to fill in. It has no annual fee.

It can feel like freedom, until public trust shifts. Anyone who watched the live export debate knows how quickly that can happen.

Before I came back to farming, I was a community pharmacist. Pharmacists renew their registration every year. They have to show they are fit to practise and prove their professional development hours. The annual renewal can be annoying, and it also keeps the profession’s standing current.

Pharmacists also pay a serious annual levy to the Pharmacy Guild. In all my years behind the counter, I rarely heard pharmacists complain about it. They could see what it bought.

The Guild has delivered five-year Community Pharmacy Agreements under governments of both colours. It has kept location rules in place in a way few small business sectors have managed. Its method is simple. A pharmacist in every electorate. A relationship with the local MP. Clear requests. Pressure used carefully.

The noise stays in reserve. That is why the threat of it counts.

A strong lobby lets its members get on with their business while skilled people handle the influencing.

I want that for farmers.

Twenty-five years ago I came back to farming, and land clearing was the argument of the day. Peak bodies answered aerial mapping with press releases. Too often, they still reach for the same tools. Press release. Rebuttal. Rally. Submission.

Those tools have their place. They are not a strategy on their own.

Influence is a skill. It can be learned. And the research is consistent: people trust people. They are wary of institutions. A farmer telling their own story will always be more convincing than a spokesperson reading a statement.

Through Action4Agriculture we spent years training young people in agriculture as their own spokespeople. We brought in experts from around the world to teach it. The skills are available. Agriculture has invested in many things before investing in its people.

Members can see activity more easily than they can see influence. A rally looks like action. Quiet influence is harder to put in a newsletter. The risk is that organisations start proving they are busy, rather than showing what has changed.

The lobbies that win in this country often make less noise. The Pharmacy Guild. The clubs. The mining industry. The property lobby. People may have strong views about whether those groups serve the public interest. They know how influence works. They know who to talk to and when to move. They know when a public campaign helps and when it harms.

Agriculture starts with something many of those industries will never have. People still have genuine affection for farmers.

Farmers are trusted in rural electorates. They have the stories. They understand the land. They can explain what is at stake better than anyone sitting in an office far from the paddock.

The decision-makers are knowable. MPs, advisers, departments, councils, agencies, journalists and community leaders can be reached when the industry is disciplined about who speaks, what is being asked for, and why it matters.

Too often, peak bodies stand between farmers and decision-makers, speaking over both.

Influence is a skill. It can be learned. I spent years running a national program that taught young people in agriculture how influence is built. We brought in experts from around the world to teach it. The skills are available. Agriculture has invested in many things before investing properly in that.

Every farmer I raise this with points to the same problem. Fragmentation. Cotton, dairy, grain, livestock, irrigators, dryland farmers, each with its own body, board, chair and table.

Farmers have seen this before. Dairy deregulation. Processor mergers. Banks leaving town. Bigger and fewer has often meant further away and less accountable. That concern comes from experience.

Perhaps the starting point is making better use of the structures agriculture already has.

The National Farmers’ Federation exists. State farming bodies exist. Commodity bodies exist. The challenge is getting them to speak with one clear voice when it counts.

Three state farming bodies recently found that voice on water. That points to what is possible.

Joining forces one issue at a time can win a round. The harder task is turning that discipline into a habit, so agriculture is heard before the fight begins, rather than once everyone has retreated to their own corner.

I do not have the full answer.

Agriculture has trusted people in every electorate, stories people care about, and a public that still wants to believe farmers are part of the solution. The question is whether our representative bodies are prepared to use all that with more discipline.

Other industries deal with scrutiny, rules, licences, audits and governments that test their patience. So does every individual. We renew proof all the time.

Agriculture has been given something rarer. A licence built on public trust.

That is the one we renew in how we farm, how we speak, and how well we use the trust we still have.

Did you expect more courage from Labor?

I did not vote Labor, but I had hopes for them.

Clear-eyed hopes. By their second term, Labor knew exactly what government demands. They knew the difference between a promise made in opposition and a decision made with power in their hands.

I still hoped they might mean it when they talked about ending the culture of secrecy and doing politics differently.

The Coalition earned the loss in 2022. Labor had since earned a second term. That gave them more than a mandate. It gave them a test of character.

Like every voter who is not rusted on, I was waiting for Labor to show me they had the courage to do the right thing when it cost them something.

Last week, the gambling advertising bill went into parliament.

And there was the answer.

The reforms offer a partial ban. Three ads an hour on daytime and evening television. A block during live sport between 6 am and 8.30 pm. Some limits on radio during the school run. Racing carved out. A start date of 1 January 2027, more than a thousand days after the government received the report that told it what needed to happen.

A report Labor commissioned.

You win some, you lose more, chaired by the late Peta Murphy, one of their own, made 31 recommendations and called clearly for a total ban, phased in over three years.

The government’s own advice says partial bans fail. They had the evidence in their hands. They had the case for full reform written for them. They had the moral argument laid out in plain sight.

And they chose the smaller path.

Anthony Albanese then defended the bill by saying it exceeds the Murphy recommendations.

It does nothing of the sort.

A government proud of its decision does not need a cover story.

The cover story is the admission.

Labor knows exactly how this looks. They know the gap between the evidence and the bill. They know the gap between the promise and the decision. They know the gap between what children and families need, and what the gambling industry can live with.

And they went ahead.

This is calculation dressed up as principle.

It would almost be easier if this were a simple grubby deal, a cheque here and a favour there. This is deeper than that. The dependency is built into the system.

The football codes run on gambling money. Commercial television runs on gambling advertising. A real ban would tear a hole in professional sport and free-to-air media at the same time.

Those are two rooms a government wants on side before an election.

That is the power this bill exposes. The easy reform, the popular reform, the evidence-backed reform, is the reform they stepped around because too many powerful interests had arranged themselves around the harm.

My disappointment sends me nowhere near One Nation. Anger that only wants to break things has no appeal to me. I have no interest in the politics of the wrecking ball.

But it will make me think very carefully about who gets my vote at the federal election.

The disappointment is larger than one bill.

Labor promised to be something different. They promised to be the party that had learned from the secrecy, arrogance and cynicism of the last government. They promised a different standard.

What this bill says to me is that the different standard applies when the cost is low.

Almost nothing worth doing comes without cost.

That is why this is more than a policy failure. It is a character question.

Character is revealed when the evidence is clear, when the harm is obvious, when the powerful rooms push back, and when a government has to decide whether it means what it said.

On gambling advertising, Labor has answered.

And yes other countries have had the courage

Italy banned gambling advertising outright in 2019. Belgium followed in 2023. Lithuania has gone further again. They have shown us what Labor could have/should have done.

The three ads an hour Labor is presenting as reform is the same number Lithuania allows only as a temporary step on the way to a full ban.

Lithuania also set aside four million euros to help broadcasters absorb the lost revenue.

None of those countries faced a softer lobby than ours. The sport and media money in Europe is bigger, not smaller.

They legislated anyway. Other countries had already shown the way. The evidence was there. The reform was available.

What was missing here was the will to act.

How often do your forget to ask the right question?

All my communications training says the same thing. Have three key points. Include a call to action. Reinforce the points. Then reinforce them again.

For the last twelve months I have been presenting to local service groups and doing my very best to stick to the rules. And I have learned something important. No matter how impressive the talk is, nobody takes up the call to action. My presentation is usually followed by lunch and I invite people to come and talk to me about it over lunch. What I get instead is “wow, your presentation was great.”

After each talk I kept asking myself the same question. What is wrong with me? Why is nobody sitting down to talk about the call to action?

Then I finally woke up. It’s the audience, Lynne. They want to be entertained.

How old do I have to be before I start asking the right question first? Who is my audience? What do they want from this presentation? The reason I keep getting invited to present is that people talk about how entertaining the talks are. Facepalm.

It took me a while longer to see what the answer meant, and it started with admitting what I am actually there for.

I am not in that hall to win commissions. I talk about life story writing because I want people to create living memories, the kind that last well beyond the last person who remembers them. The lunch invitation was never the real call to action.

The real call to action happens later, at somebody’s kitchen table, without me. An entertained audience goes home and tells someone about the talk. And somewhere in that retelling, a son or a daughter decides to capture a parent’s story before it is too late.

If that happens at one kitchen table, the talk has done its job. Nobody needs to ring me. The memory does not need me to survive. It needs a family who decides it is worth keeping.

So the training was half right. Three points, yes. Reinforce them, yes. But the call to action belongs to the audience, and this audience’s job is to enjoy the hour and carry the idea home. If I do my job well, they do theirs, and I will never see it happen.

The number one question for anybody doing anything is this. Who is the audience, and what do they want from me? Not what do I want to tell them. What do they want from me. I have spent a working life in communications and I still needed twelve months of puzzled lunches to learn it.

This is the point where I would normally give you a call to action. I know better now.

One Saturday, two events, and the story of three orphans who built this district

Every object on this table holds a story. Yours do too, and most of those stories are one generation from being lost. Saturday 18 July, Kiama Library, the Royal Australian Historical Society is teaching us how to capture them before they go.

Three orphan girls built lives we still drive past every day

I write stories so the people we love are remembered. Memory has a shelf life of about two generations. Your grandchildren will know your name. Their children probably won’t, unless someone writes it down. Every family has people worth remembering, and most families never get around to it.

So when I heard what the Kiama Historical Society has organised for Saturday 18 July, I paid attention.

In 1821 three young sisters, Cecelia, Caroline and Catherine Rutter, were sent to the Female Orphan School at Parramatta. The Orphan School was where the colony put children it had no other place for. It was not a beginning anyone would choose.

Fifty years on, their names were attached to some of the finest homes in this district. Cecelia married Michael Hindmarsh of Alnebank at Gerringong. Caroline married Thomas Surfleet Kendall of Barroul House. Catherine’s second marriage, to Thomas Chapman, made her home at Hartwell House.

For me, one of those names is personal. In 1880 my grandfather’s family, the Chitticks, arrived in Sydney aboard the Samuel Plimsoll, a wool clipper 74 days out of Plymouth. The shipping list records six brothers, aged 15 to 27, every one of them an agricultural labourer, with their mother and sisters listed as domestics. In time the Chitticks bought half of the Alnebank farm. The orphan girl’s ground became my family’s ground. My grandmother’s people had already been in this district since 1831, and my father’s side arrived in 1841. These stories don’t just overlap with ours. They share fences.

I know all of that because somebody kept the records, and somebody else taught me how to read them. A shipping list, a family tree in a booklet, dates and ages in a column. That’s how a name becomes a person whose story you can share.

Carol Liston, president of the Royal Australian Historical Society, tells the Rutter sisters’ story at Kiama Library Auditorium on Saturday 18 July at 1.45 pm. It costs $3 for Historical Society members, $5 for guests, afternoon tea included, and you can just turn up.

The morning session is the one I’d urge you to book

Before the talk, Carol and the Society’s senior vice president Christine Yeats are running a research workshop, 10 am to 1 pm at the same venue. This is a rare thing. The two most senior figures of the Royal Australian Historical Society, in Kiama, teaching the practical craft: how to search Trove so it gives you answers instead of noise, how to use the Historical Land Records Viewer to trace a property and the people who held it, how to read colonial records for the personal detail that turns a name into a person.

Almost every family around here has the shoebox. The photographs with no names on the back. The family tree that stops dead somewhere in the 1880s. The house with a name nobody can explain. This workshop is for that shoebox. BOOK YOUR SPACE HERE

It’s $25 for historical society members, $30 for everyone else, and that includes morning tea, cakes and lunch. Bookings are essential, so don’t leave it until the week of.

I’ll be there with my own list of dead ends. Whether Trove can crack them is another question. That’s rather the point of going.

Two workshops in one week, and what they showed me about memory

Last week I went to two workshops.

On paper they had little in common. One was about making cabbage tree hats. The other was about recording oral history.

By the end of the week, I was thinking about both of them through the same lens. They were both about the past, and about what happens when people decide it still deserves a place in daily life.

The first was Sue Brian’s cabbage tree hat workshop at Jamberoo Youth Hall. I went to watch, not to make a hat, which was probably wise. The people at the tables were learning how to boil, shred and plait the palm fronds. I was listening for the story behind the craft.

There was a lot to hear.

In the mid nineteenth century, cabbage tree palms were cut in huge numbers. The trunks were used and the unopened leaf spears were taken for hat making. Sue and the people who still make the hats use the palm differently now. They take the unopened leaf from young palms in a way that allows the tree to keep growing.

The 19th century method took the palm out of the landscape. The current one leaves the tree standing.

The same palm that was once stripped from this landscape is now being planted back into it. Landcare Illawarra’s Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm project is planting cabbage tree palms around Jamberoo, below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand.

Cabbage tree hat making workshop proved to be very popular and the workshops will return in 2027. See bottom of blog post for contact details

The second workshop was at the Pilot’s Cottage in Kiama, run by Alison Wishart and hosted by the Kiama Historical Society.

KHS Oral History Workshop 25th June 2026 (4)

KHS Oral History Workshop 25th June 2026 (1)

KHS Oral History Workshop 25th June 2026 (2)

KHS Oral History Workshop 25th June 2026 (5)

Alison Wishart and attendees at Oral History workshop. The Historical Society always offer a superlative morning tea.

This was familiar ground. I have spent years helping people tell their life stories through written memories. Alison was talking about oral history, and the power of recording it.

As Alison reminded participants, the recording keeps the emotion for others to interpret. You hear the hesitation, the humour, the catch in the voice. On the page, I have to find another way to express it.

I keep noticing how much people here care about memory. Our local “remember when” Facebook pages come alive when someone posts an old photo. Within an hour, people are naming faces, houses, streets, teams and families. Someone always knows something. Someone else adds the bit they missed.

I understand that feeling more now than I did when I was young.

Earlier this year, when the council floated moving the Pilot’s Cottage Museum from Blowhole Point into a small space under the library, the reaction was immediate. Dr Tony Gilmour and the Kiama Historical Society volunteers led the campaign, and people who rarely write submissions wrote in. In five days, the idea was reversed.

Around the museum, they still joke that the council wanted to turn them into a KFC.

The museum is here to stay (but it is still looking forward to council giving it a 5 year lease – if only council worked as fast as our community)

I grew up in a family that took history seriously. Years were spent writing down who came to this country, where they settled, what the men did, how wonderful the wives and mothers were at raising children and keeping house. Which women never married because they stayed home to look after their parents or their ten plus siblings. Not an era I would have thrived in.

I always thought I should find it fascinating. I didn’t.

I did well in history at school, but I learned the dates to pass the exam. I realise now I wanted to know what it felt like to be alive then.

I am grateful for the people I meet today who are prepared to share their story.

When I sit with someone to record their life, I am listening for what it was like to live through their sixty, seventy or eighty years. How much changed. Who stood beside them. What they learned through grief, love, disappointment and endurance.

When I ask people what they would say to young people now, the answers are the same.

Find a way to live in peace.

Be kind.

At the oral history workshop, someone asked the obvious question. If you are recording one person’s memory, how do you know it is accurate?

It is a fair question.

Memory shifts. Families remember things differently. History is full of confident versions that do not line up. Put ten people at the same accident and the police will take ten different statements. Each person saw it from where they were standing.

So you listen for how that person remembers it. Their version may differ from someone else’s. It may differ from your own. But it is their story.

That does not mean anything goes. A life story is not a place to settle a score with family. The highs belong there, and so do the lows, but the purpose is to understand a life, not punish people from the page.

The other thing I came home thinking about is how different every person is to record.

Some people give you gold in the first ten minutes. Some hold their story so tightly you wonder why they agreed to begin. Some families want every sentence to serve a different purpose. Some people need audio. Some need a written story. Some need a patient interviewer who can sit with silence. Some need structure before they can begin.

There is no single right way.

The cabbage tree hat workshop showed me that a craft survives because people keep practising it, slowly and carefully, with their hands.

The oral history workshop showed me that a life story survives because someone listens, then chooses the way to record it that suits that person.

Anyone can keep the dates and the places.

I am focused on the voice behind them, and whether I can express enough of that voice on the page for the person and their loved ones to recognise them.

Three exciting things to share

Dr Tony Gilmour the Vice President of the Kiama Historical Society told me the majority of the Oral History workshop participants would like to turn their workshop learnings into recording people’s lived experiences; Contact the society at E: kiamahistory@outlook.com P: 02 4232 1001
The Cabbage Tree Hat making workshops will return in 2027. Contact Kate Malfroy E: kate@lampshadeworkroom.com.au
Landcare contact is Meredith Hall E: coordinator@landcareillawarra.org.au
M: +61 (0) 499 027 770

The palm we cleared for a hat, and the people planting it back

I have spent the past 18 months buried in local history, much of it around the Jamberoo Dairy factory and the families who built our community.

The deeper I went, the more I learned to be careful with certainty. One story about the dairy industry can quickly split into three versions, each told by someone who is sure they have the right one. They cannot all be right.

So when Sue Brian told me her PhD was on cabbage tree hats, I had the predictable reaction.

Four or five years on hats?

Then she started talking.

I was sitting in the Jamberoo Youth Hall at a cabbage tree hat making workshop held over two days, three weeks apart on 6 and 27 June, so people had time to do the plaiting between sessions. Our village sits below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand, and it is now where they are being planted back. The workshop promised a rare chance to learn from a master hat maker and leave with a finished piece of living Australian history. I left with something more useful than a hat. I left with a different understanding of the palm, the craft, and the people needed to bring it back into the landscape.

Sue has been making traditional plaited and sewn hats for years. She learned the craft on Norfolk Island and brought it home to the cabbage tree palm, the same palm that gave eastern Australia one of its most familiar nineteenth century hats.

The hats are slow to make. The unopened leaf spear is boiled, dried, dipped again to take out the crinkles, shredded to width with a tool a bit like a rasp, plaited into long sennit, then sewn with a running stitch.

Sue can plait a little over two metres an hour on a wide pattern. The sewing takes about as long again.

You can see why people did it at night by the fire. In Australia plaiting was first taught as a convict skill, something to keep men occupied after dark, and the craft was still being practised in some prisons into the 1930s.

Sue has also corrected parts of the story that have drifted over time. I had assumed the plaiting was a First Nations skill. I was wrong. It came here by sea. It is a simple four-strand plait found across the Pacific, in the English straw-hat trade, and in parts of the United States. Whalers carried it around the Pacific during the idle stretches between catches. It reached Norfolk Island through the Pitcairn Islanders.

It was also a man’s hat, despite what is often repeated. Ladies’ cabbage tree hats were first advertised in 1900. Before then, when women appear in the records wearing cabbage tree hats, Sue says they were usually wearing their husbands’ hats.

A quarter of a million palms, cut for the fashion

Behind every hatmaker is a husband happy to be the mannequin.

Then comes the part that turns a small craft story into something much larger.

Sue has gone through the shipping records out of the Illawarra. Between 1840 and 1870, she can document more than a quarter of a million cabbage tree palms cut for the trade. The leaf spears were shipped to Sydney and turned into hats.

By the 1840s, readers were already writing to newspapers complaining that the palms were becoming rare.

It is easy, from this distance, to blame the settlers. The truth is more uncomfortable and more useful.

Clearing was the law. A land grant required it. A felled palm also brought in cash, about ten shillings a hundred in 1850. Tell a settler to clear the land or lose the grant, then pay for the palm on the way out, and the palm comes down.

The farmers did what they were told, and they were paid for it.

In today’s version farmers are being invited to partner with Landcare to replant the palms.

Planting them back needs the farmers. Slowly the palms are now going back in.

Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project comes to Jamberoo

Landcare Illawarra is working with local property owners in the Jamberoo area to preserve this unique species, replanting cabbage tree palms, with seedlings raised in a local nursery and planted in the riparian corners of private properties.

Planting is the easy day. The years after planting are the hard part.

Young palms need to be fenced from stock or they will be eaten. They also stay small for a long time before they become the tall, spiky trees people picture when they think of a cabbage tree palm.

On some properties there is an easier way. Where there are already fruiting palms, fencing them off from cattle can allow them to regenerate on their own within a few years.

The barriers will be familiar to anyone who has farmed this country. Kikuyu is an important summer feed for cattle, which is why farmers value it. It is also a headache for Landcare groups, because it can smother young native seedlings before they get going. Mature cabbage tree palms can stand above it. New ones need help.Deer are another growing problem.

Fence off an area, shade out the kikuyu with fast pioneers such as bleeding heart, keep the stock off, and the palms have a chance.

What the project needs now is farmers and a small section of their land.

There is a neat loop in all of this.

The same farms that cleared the palms under government order now hold the creek lines, gullies and corners where the palms can come back.

If the project reaches those farmers, the hat that helped strip the Illawarra of cabbage tree palms may become the reason a few hundred of them are planted again.

I began by thinking a PhD on cabbage tree hats was an odd way to spend four or five years.

Then I spent months inside the dairy industry’s history and watched one story fracture into a dozen confident, competing versions

This is where the value of PhD research can never be overestimated .

A topic can sound small until someone spends years following every thread. That is how old assumptions are tested. It is how family stories, local legends and confident retellings are put beside the records and asked to hold up.

The well researched version, the one with shipping records behind it, is usually the one that stands up.

Whether the palms get back into the landscape in time will depend on something much less academic.

It will depend on someone turning up at the gate to talk to farmers about cabbage tree planting partnerships.