#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 – for all of it." Kristin Armstrong
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.
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’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)
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.
Last night six women from six decades stood up and told stories about the older women who shaped them.
The format was thoughtful. The decades spoke to one another. The diversity on stage reflected the diversity in the room. The stories were strong. Entertaining. Moving. Generous. The audience listened.
We have become very good at this.
Across the country there are TEDx talks, Ignite nights, storytelling salons, leadership breakfasts, panels, keynotes, lightning talks, lived-experience spotlights. Five to ten minutes. A tight narrative arc. A personal story. A moment of recognition. Applause.
We have perfected the short-form epiphany.
A well-told story shifts something inside a room. It connects strangers. It honours experience. It reminds people they are part of something larger.
Last night did all of that.
YES a well-told story can move a room. The question is whether it moves anything beyond it.
That was the question that followed me out the door – where does this go?
We have become fluent in describing the problem. We gather and name what is broken. We articulate the gaps. We platform lived experience. We elevate voice.
Then everyone disperses.
Across the country there are organisations devoted to women’s leadership, mentoring, storytelling, social change. Capable people run them. They apply to the same limited funding pools. They build parallel programs. They host adjacent conversations.
What I see far less often is a serious mapping of who is already doing what. A decision to strengthen an existing framework rather than create another one alongside it. A willingness to consolidate instead of duplicate.
Do we really think we are the first to recognise this pattern? Do we imagine history disguises its repetitions so completely that each generation encounters them as new?
I spend my time recording the lives of women in their eighties and nineties. They recognise repetition quickly. They have watched enthusiasm surge and fade. They have seen institutions splinter and reassemble. They have lived through periods when cooperation was survival. They spent decades holding families and communities together.
They want to see something built that gives them confidence their lived experience is valued
The operating system is what determines whether insight moves anywhere.
Here is what that operating system looks like.
Governance — who is accountable to whom, and for what. Coordination — who is already doing this work, and how efforts align. Funding architecture — whether we are duplicating grant applications instead of pooling bids. Infrastructure — shared platforms, shared administration, shared databases, shared back-end support. Decision pathways — how stories influence policy, practice, or program design. Succession and continuity — what lasts beyond one charismatic founder or one funding cycle.
If intergenerational storytelling is to carry weight beyond an evening, it has to shape how we build, how we fund, how we collaborate.
Otherwise we are collecting wisdom and leaving it where we found it.
It is based on a true story. It is set in a dairy valley at Federation. There is courtship. There are buggies. There will be a wedding.
Yet none of that is what lingers.
What lingers is this.
Who speaks first. Who waits. Who protects. Who grants permission. Who withdraws. Who makes room.
In this valley, no one arrives and takes a place. You are given it. Or you are not.
A father moves. A mother sees what others miss. A young man waits to be called forward. A young woman chooses her moment.
Not scandal, legitimacy.
Its the small gestures. A father stepping between a young woman and a threat. A quiet welcome offered in passing. A line about being properly home. A wedding that marks recognition, rather than spectacle.
The politics of intimacy unfold long before the church doors open.
I am drawn to earned standing.
Protection without dominance. Authority without humiliation. Recognition without erasure.
I am not writing a fairy tale where the man saves the woman.
I am writing the moment when a family recognises her.
Much of my life has circled questions of voice, legitimacy, and who gets to speak without being diminished. It is no surprise that the same questions surface here, inside a dairy valley more than a century ago.
So on Valentine’s Day, while the world sells romance as performance, I am writing about consent inside families.
About being allowed to stand where you stand.
Love is not a fairy tale smothered in roses. Love is who you are proud to stand beside. And who is proud to stand beside you.
When Angus Taylor stepped up to lead the Liberal Party of Australia, this was the pivotal moment. Fresh page. Fresh language. A chance to widen the tent.
He could have said this:
Australia is strong.
We are entering a decade defined by productivity, housing supply, energy transition and technological change.
Our task is to grow the economy, lift wages through innovation and manage migration with discipline so infrastructure keeps pace.
We are the party of aspiration. We back small business, we back home ownership, we back families who work hard and want opportunity for their children.
We will listen, we will modernise, and we will build a serious alternative government.
That would have framed the future.
Instead, here is what he said.
“I’m particularly conscious that we got some big calls wrong – especially on personal income tax. And it won’t happen again.”
“If an election was held today, our party may not exist by the end of it.”
“We’re in this position because we didn’t stay true to our core values – because we stopped listening to Australians, because we were attracted to the politics of convenience rather than focusing on the politics of conviction.”
And in a time that calls for social cohesion, here is the immigration frame he chose.
“In this country, our borders have been open to people who hate our way of life, people who don’t want to embrace Australia, and who want Australia to change for them.”
He could have said this
Control of our borders is a fundamental responsibility of government.
Migration must serve Australia’s national interest, support economic growth and maintain social cohesion.
We will ensure that every intake strengthens the country and reflects the standards Australians expect.
One version expands the horizon.
One version narrows it.
One version invites aspiration.
One version centres anxiety.
Politics is not only about policy. It is about tone and imagination. A first speech as leader is about defining tomorrow.
Australia is confident. Voters respond to leaders who sound that way.
The difference between these two speeches is altitude.
And altitude is everything.
If there were a masterclass in how to shrink a moment, yesterday’s speech from Angus Taylor would be the case study.
I have watched the commentary around Grace Tame spiral into familiar territory. Some defend her. Some attack her. Some wait for any misstep. The arguments become about slogans, tone, delivery.
Meanwhile, the original political decision sits largely untouched.
Reading through the comments on a right-leaning news site, I came across a thoughtful defence of her right to speak. It reminded me that human rights advocacy does not vanish because someone disagrees with the politics of the moment. Courage is not conditional.
I would have preferred that a particular slogan not be used. It distracted from the substance. Yet focusing only on the slogan misses the larger question.
What was the judgement behind inviting the Israeli president at this time?
Leadership is not only about protocol. It is about reading the room. It is about understanding how divided the public mood already is. It is about recognising when symbolism inflames rather than steadies.
We can debate Grace Tame’s language for days. That is easy. The harder and more necessary question concerns political judgement at the top.
If we are serious about social cohesion, that is where attention belongs.
This playful AI avatar trend feels light, instant, almost weightless. A few seconds in the cloud and out pops something clever and personal.
Behind it sita data centres that drink electricity and water at scale. Physical infrastructure, physical limits, physical footprints.
Worth holding both ideas at once. Delight in the tool. Curiosity about the cost.
The cloud leaves tracks on the ground. Read my post on Substack here and do read The Conversation article that inspired it. Wow the graphics alone are worth the visit
A commenter on my Facebook post about vaccines is someone I respect. They are a committed climate action advocate. They run an effective sustainability initiative. They speak clearly about evidence, consensus, and corporate responsibility. Then they recommend a book arguing vaccines are unnecessary or harmful.
Those positions collide.
Climate science and vaccine science rest on the same foundations. Large bodies of evidence. Decades of data. Overwhelming expert agreement. Around 97 percent of climate scientists accept climate change as real and human driven. Around 97 to 99 percent of doctors and medical scientists support vaccination.
So what changes in people’s thinking?
Corporate behaviour sits front and centre.
Fossil fuel companies funded doubt and delayed action. Pharmaceutical companies overcharge, lobby aggressively, minimise tax, and protect shareholders. People see this pattern and draw a straight line. If corporations distort truth in one arena, they must be doing it everywhere.
That reaction sends attention in the wrong direction.
Vaccines sit across countries, health systems, and decades. Their impact shows up in fewer outbreaks, fewer children living with preventable disability, hospitals that cope during crises. Those outcomes appear regardless of which company supplied the product.
Here’s the problem.
When regulation weakens and transparency thins, trust drains away. Science takes the hit. Evidence gets treated as suspect. Risk shifts onto children and vulnerable people who never agreed to carry it.
What does being concrete about what to do next look like.
Regulate pharmaceutical power as seriously as carbon emissions.
Demand transparency in trials, reporting, and regulation.
Reject the idea that corporate misconduct cancels public health evidence.
Call out misinformation dressed up as justice.
Distrust unchecked power and protect evidence-based public health at the same time.
If you care about climate action, apply the same discipline here. Follow the evidence. Target the power structures causing harm. Protect the people who carry the consequences when trust collapses.
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
