Don and Ben – the hero, the villain and the rest of us.


Today’s thoughts on the latest mess the bullies have delivered ……

Initial media coverage followed a trope as old as time.

Iran cast as the villain.
The United States and Israel riding in as the heroes.
The rest of us cast as the people who need saving.

Every culture tells this story.

The villain threatens the village.
The villagers wait to be rescued.
The hero arrives on the white horse.

War reporting regularly slips into this pattern. The roles feel familiar. We all recognise them.

Every story like this skips the same question.

What outcome is the operation meant to deliver?

The SMH’s Peter Hartcher has already warned where this road can lead, an early military success drifting into what he called a “politico-military muddle”.

Military strategist Mick Ryan points to Iraq and Afghanistan. The bombing opens the story. The political outcome writes the ending.

Remove a leader and the next questions arrive immediately.

Who governs Iran?
What stabilises the region?
What outcome marks success?

Each time Donald Trump speaks about the objective the explanation shifts. Prevention. Regime change. Deterrence.

Strategy begins with a destination.

Without one, events take control.

History contains plenty of examples.

Most end exactly where Peter Hartcher suggested. A politico-military muddle.

Sue Eggins receives the Kiama Electorate Woman of the Year award

There are awards that recognise a moment. Then there are awards that recognise a lifetime of turning up.

Sue Eggins has been named Kiama Electorate Woman of the Year for 2026, a well deserved recognition for someone whose dedicated persistence to heritage has shaped this community for decades.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing Sue for my Stories written so they can be found series, the project where I sit down with women across our district to record their life stories so they are not lost to time.

Sue’s story is highly entertaining.

It begins with insistence on hospital facility sterilisation standards in an ambulance heading toward Camperdown in 1948 when her mother refused a roadside delivery. It moves through science teaching, travelling the world in her twenties, a period Sue cheerfully describes as following a musician boyfriend around the country like “a brazen hussy”, and eventually lands in Kiama where her energy has been poured into protecting the history and heritage of this district.

Along the way she trained as a school counsellor, worked for decades supporting young people through some of the most complicated years of their lives, and became one of the driving forces behind the Kiama Historical Society.

Her younger years also included a stint at boarding school under a strict Catholic regime. Sundays involved Mass, Benediction, Rosary and several other services all in one day. Bread for school lunches arrived once a week and by Friday it was often mouldy. The nuns toasted fresh bread for themselves and tipped the leftovers into a bucket for the chooks, a bucket the permanently hungry girls often raided. Dormitories opened onto verandahs where winter wind snapped the canvas blinds and Sue remembers piling eleven army blankets onto her bed to keep warm.

Boarding school also came with a formidable rule book about modesty. Talcum powder was sprinkled across the bath water so the girls could not see their reflection while bathing. Even school dances were tightly managed. Boys were required to place a handkerchief between their hand and a girl’s back so skin never touched skin.  Sue remembers those years as very character forming. A decade travelling overseas and following a boyfriend and his band around the country looked positively wholesome by comparison.

If you have attended a heritage talk, heard the story of Orry-Kelly, visited the museum, or followed one of the long running campaigns to protect historic buildings such as Barroul House or the Pilot’s Cottage, chances are Sue has been somewhere either guiding a tour or behind the scenes reading the documents, asking the questions and turning up to the meetings.

And when Sue turns up, people listen.

They know she has done her homework. She understands the history, the planning rules, the legislation and the process. By the time she walks into a room she is ready to get the best outcomes for the cause.

Her approach to community life is simple. Know your subject. Make your case carefully. And never walk away simply because it looks too difficult.

Great leaders do their homework. They listen carefully. They build a case that stands up to scrutiny. They keep showing up, even when the process is slow or the outcome uncertain. Over time, people learn that when they speak, it is worth paying attention. Sue Eggins has practised that art for decades.

This award recognises exactly that kind of contribution.

And if you want to hear the full story, from ambulance drama to international travel to heritage picket lines, keep an eye out for the full Sue Eggins life story coming soon in the series.

Will Australia show courage or sleepwalk past it

Courage isn’t surviving a paper straw. Courage is leadership that refuses another war.
Canada has stepped up and said what we are all thinking.
There comes a point where caution stops being wisdom and starts looking like fear.
Canada has shown some courage.
Australia now has the same opportunity.
The question is whether our leaders recognise the moment
or sleepwalk past it.
Read this excellent article in The Conversation here

The Epstein Coalition wants to rule the world

Michael West Media has asked the question out loud we have all be thinking. Are we led by fools and sycophants?
MWM coverage is a welcome antidote to the desperate coverage of this epic balls-up, which is not being covered by the corporate media. Read it here. https://michaelwest.com.au/australia-and-the-epstein…/
The pix is a bit of a TL:DR image BUT do read it – its horrifying and to top it all off the Iranians are calling the US and their supporters the “Epstein Coalition”
The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.

Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.

The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared – even winning the war – that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.

Like George O, Grahame Parker nailed it with this song

Milk and men (no women) and the archive we inherit

I am writing the history of the Jamberoo dairy factory.

The minutes are thorough. Motions moved. Votes carried. Chairmen thanked. Directors named.

The record is male because in that era authority was male.

That is the structure the archive preserves.

From the 1940s through to the 1970s the dairy industry ran on family labour. Women rose for early milking. They fed calves. They sterilised equipment. They kept the production books and the household accounts. They stretched the milk cheque across machinery payments and grocery bills. They managed rationing in drought years. They hosted meetings. They sustained community networks. They carried the emotional load when prices dipped or disease struck.

None of of that appears in the official file.

Board minutes record motions. Newspapers quote chairmen. Legislation names directors. The kitchens and calf sheds rarely make print. Even our local retrospectives, rich in civic detail, move through institutions and office holders.  In the Kiama Independent Our History Supplement the pattern is consistent. Public life is recorded through public roles.

The tragedy sits elsewhere. The women who carried half the enterprise are now largely gone, and their voices were rarely recorded in their own words.

Oral history could have balanced the record. Time has narrowed that opportunity. It is archival reality.

When I read through factory reports and industry correspondence, I can trace leadership decisions with precision. I can follow drought policy, milk zones, compensation debates. I can name the men who chaired meetings and negotiated with ministers.

I cannot hear the conversation at the kitchen table when the milk price fell.
I cannot see the private calculations made after a vet bill arrived.
I cannot read the words of a woman who rose at 4 am and went to bed after the books were balanced.

Half the enterprise sits between the lines.

Wanting to change that makes sense. It shifts the lens forward rather than back. It asks who is documenting women’s lived experience now, while those voices are still present. It asks whose work is counted as leadership.

If we are serious about industry history, we record the boardroom and the calf shed. We record the motion and the margin. We record the lived experience

Interviews, recorded conversations, written reflections. These are not embellishments. They are structural repair.

An industry history written only through formal office leaves half the story implied.

I am writing “Milk and men (and no women.)”

The next chapter needs different sources. I hope those voices can be found

Australian values belong to the people who live them not to politicians who weaponise them

 

Source https://tinyurl.com/ycxnp6rk

When Pauline Hanson claims “Australian values”, I cringe.

When Angus Taylor mirrors it, I cringe again.

These are leaders who trade in suspicion. Who elevate culture as a test. Who talk about countries that supposedly fail us. Who tighten the definition of belonging and call it strength.

Then they reach for “Australian values”.

The Australia I know runs on a fair go. Equal treatment under the law. Decent schools. Decent healthcare. Work hard and get ahead. Once you are here, you stand in the same queue.

Researchers writing in The Conversation asked Australians what a fair go means. Strong support for equal opportunity. Strong support for access to education and healthcare. More than half gave the highest possible agreement to recent migrants having the same opportunity as everyone else to get ahead.

That feels familiar.

When I shared the article, my Facebook tribe responded in minutes. Fairness. Decency. Treat people properly. Play by the rules. Give newcomers a chance. It read like the country I recognise.

So when “Australian values” is used to narrow the circle, I recoil. The phrase belongs to all of us. It does not belong to the loudest voice in the room.

Read the article in The Conversation here 

Thank you one of my Facebook tribe for this wonderful sentiment image

Ht to Bill Piggott who shared this with me on Facebook

“Australian values are visible when kindness, care, collaboration, compassion and reciprocity are recognised, encouraged, embraced and rewarded.”

A night at the museum when the captain ran a tight ship

 

Dr Tony Gilmour ( Vice President) and Sue Eggins ( President) who led the conversation on the history of the Pilot’s Cottage which houses the Kiama’s Maritime Museum – Composite photo

If you are going to host a Night at the Museum, it helps when your historian arrives dressed to command the harbour.

Dr Tony Gilmour stepped forward in full captain’s cap, gold braid catching the light, shirt crisp, microphone steady in hand. He arrives on time, every time. History may roam across centuries. Tony keeps the schedule.

As Vice President of the Kiama and District Historical Society, he knows his brief. And he knows his audience.

We began outside at the Pilot’s Cottage. Basalt. Blue metal. The same stone that built fortunes and fuelled arguments. The same stone hauled down Terralong Street on a tramway that managed to become famous for all the wrong reasons.

Tony retold the story with relish.

During the 1880s Kiama Council built its own tramway to move blue metal from the quarries to the harbour. A bold civic enterprise. Public ownership. Local pride. A locomotive ordered from England. Vacuum brakes admired. Aldermen impressed.

There was one small problem.

The gauge.

The line proved too narrow for sensible interchange and too awkward for the engine that was meant to run on it. The blue metal still travelled. The logic did not. Within a few years, the rails came up and the engine found another home. It also sent the council into debt.

Ambition in iron and basalt. Standing beside the Pilot’s Cottage, Tony pointed out that this sturdy building rose from that same volcanic rock. Basalt blocks that once left Kiama by ship now hold firm against the sea air.

The local press, in its day, had strong opinions. The Kiama Independent described the cottage as “a building which has otherwise no architectural pretension,” condemning its exposed black rubble as “a flagrant violation of all the principles of good design.” Rendering would have made it respectable. Raw basalt did not meet the aesthetic brief of the 1880s.

Even architectural taste carries a timestamp.

Tony then turned our attention to the Robertson Basin.

Opened in 1876, the Basin changed everything. Before it, vessels moored to a heavy chain stretched across the harbour. After it, proper ships could berth, load blue metal efficiently, and leave with dignity intact. The harbour shifted from hopeful to operational.

From the verandah of the Pilot’s Cottage, the pilot managed that transformation. He recorded arrivals, issued weather reports, raised signals, coordinated rescues and kept order in a working port that was loud, dusty and lucrative. This small basalt building once oversaw a busy stretch of coastline and the industry that shaped Kiama’s identity. It was operational authority, grounded in experience.

The story stretches into living memory. The last pilot lived in the cottage until the early 1980s. This was a functioning government residence on Crown land. When the pilot and his family moved out, the future of the building entered a new chapter.

One proposal from the state government involved demolition, another converting the building into a fast food outlet. Harbour views. Prime land. Commercial logic.

The community formed a different view. Through careful advocacy, persistence and steady engagement with council and government, local voices made their case. The cottage became a museum rather than a takeaway counter.

That history remains important today. The Kiama Historical Society currently operates under a one-year licence. Council has offered no long-term guarantee that the cottage will remain a maritime museum. For a building of state and national significance, that uncertainty is of grave concern.

The Society understands long campaigns. It holds one of the largest membership of any historical society in New South Wales. It has defended heritage before. It knows how to assemble evidence, cultivate allies and return to the table until the outcome reflects community best interest.

Kiama Historical Society President Sue Eggins

From there, we moved inside where Sue Eggins, President of the Historical Society, kept the room thoroughly entertained. Sue draws out character and colour with ease. Where Tony charts the terrain, Sue brings the people into the room.

Between them, the evening flowed. We heard of councils arguing over sewerage with missionary zeal. Of hospital roofs surrendering to coastal storms. Of electricity arriving with ceremony and consequence. Of ratepayers scrutinising every loan and levy with familiar intensity.

And then there were the hosts. The Kiama Historical Society did itself proud. Wine flowed. Nibbles circulated with impressive efficiency. Conversation hummed. This is a society that preserves archives by day and knows how to throw a party by night.

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By the end of the evening, the museum felt less like a building and more like a conversation across time.

History stood before us in a captain’s hat, precisely on schedule, anchored in basalt, overlooking the Robertson Basin, and entirely alive.

And inside, under Sue’s watchful guidance, it continued to sparkle.

Exciting News

Given the popularity of the sold-out ‘night at the museum’ last week the Kiama History Society is rolling it out again on 31 March 2026. This event will be open to everyone. Book your ticket here 

 

 

 

Kiama and the art of the almost plan

Kiama’s principal public car park has been sold and the gates are now closed. The alternatives referenced in council papers are long-standing proposals, discussed and deferred over many years. Identification has never been the problem. Implementation has been.

If that feels familiar, it’s because it is.

Kiama hesitated over a town water supply in the 1890s, and the hesitation was framed as prudence. Debate ran not only through the township but across the municipality, particularly in Jamberoo and Gerringong Wards, where ratepayers questioned why they should fund projects centred on Terralong Street ( Kiama’s main street) from which they would see little direct benefit. Debt was feared. Overreach was feared. Spending on prevention felt optional.

Sanitary reports described open drains and contaminated tanks, and typhoid brought urgency to the discussion, though years still passed before execution followed debate. Pipes were laid along Terralong Street, but they were not connected to a dam, a reservoir or a pumping system. They were infrastructure in appearance only, awaiting a network that did not yet exist.

Then the fires came.

In October 1899 a blaze that began in Wood Brothers’ premises tore through the commercial heart of town, taking the Royal Hotel and a string of businesses as high winds carried flames from roof to roof. In December, before recovery was complete, another fire destroyed six more shops. Across the two events, twenty-two businesses were lost and families were displaced in a matter of hours.

The pipes were still not connected.

The cost of hesitation was ash, unemployment and reconstruction. A fire brigade without an adequate water supply can only do so much, and buckets have limits. Kiama did eventually build its water scheme, and in 1900 Fountaindale Dam was constructed as a declaration that the town had absorbed the lesson of fire. Fifty years later Jerrara Dam was added, another declaration of security and permanence.

Today, Kiama buys its water from elsewhere while both dams remain on the books, requiring maintenance even though they no longer perform the function for which they were built. There is something instructive about that, somewhere between heritage and hydraulics.

Before the dams there was the tramway, constructed at public expense on a gauge that prevented integration with the coming railway. Jamberoo and Gerringong Wards helped finance it, even though its benefit sat squarely in Kiama township. The locomotive could not properly negotiate the line, and within two years it was sold. The rails were lifted soon after. It was ambitious, and it was brief.

None of these decisions were taken lightly. They were made in good faith and under pressure, often in the belief that acting boldly demonstrated leadership.

We build for permanence, and we fund the consequences when permanence proves temporary.

Perhaps we are not poor at building. Perhaps we are optimistic about timing.

When you look at the decision before us now, what pattern do you see? Are we sequencing properly before we divest what currently works? Are we modelling the full life cycle of what we build and what we sell? Or are we confident that the future will accommodate the present?

History rarely repeats itself in identical form. It does, however, submit variations on a theme.

Source of Historical Information Kiama Library – Kiama Independent (1890 to 1909)

Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

 

At this stage of my life, The Narrow Road to the Deep North reads as a study in justification.

Richard Flanagan moves through every camp, every mind, every moral universe. Prisoners. Surgeons. Lovers. Japanese officers bound to the Emperor. Each inhabits a logic that makes sense from the inside. Honour. Duty. Survival. Desire.

History turns on those private narratives. People act. Then they explain. The explanation hardens into belief. The belief becomes identity.

Flanagan’s range unsettles because it removes the comfort of certainty. He shows how lived experience shapes language, posture, allegiance. A man formed by hunger speaks differently from a man formed by command. A nation formed by defeat remembers differently from one formed by empire.

The novel widens the frame. It reveals how easily righteousness takes root. It shows how repetition grows from persuasion rather than ignorance.

The horror sits in the background. The real force lies in the anatomy of self-justification.

I read “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the way I now read many war novels, I moved past much of the graphic brutality. I understand what the railway was. I did not need every blow described. I was fascinated by Flanagan’s willingness to enter the minds of the Japanese officers and show how honour, obedience and Emperor worship formed a moral world in which cruelty could be framed as as duty, even virtue, and suffering recast as proof of loyalty.

This mythic language, set inside an operating theatre, shifts the scale. A surgeon who once carried himself with absolute command feels the weight of his own humanity. The hand that once cut clean now trembles.  The body remembers. The past intrudes.

“He had stolen light from the sun and fallen to earth. For a moment he had to turn away from the table and compose himself, so that the rest of the team would not see his scalpel shaking.”

The horror in the book becomes more unbearable because the prose is so luminous. Beauty heightens contrast. When a writer can render tenderness, love, memory, even desire with such precision, the brutality feels sharper.

You do not need to read every detail of suffering to recognise that power. The architecture of the book carries it. The moral weight is present in the pauses, in the fractured relationships, in the way time folds back on itself.

Flanagan writes extremity, yet he also writes longing. He writes shame. He writes the ache of love that never resolves. That is what makes the novel extraordinary.

The railway is the crucible, yet the book is about what remains afterwards.

I responded to the beauty of the sentences as much as the history.

For me that is enough.