Marketing guru Gaye Steel is a friend and mentor. In passing, she said something that made me smile and then made me act. If you are not on Google, you do not exist.
She was talking about what lasts.
A digital footprint carries a story beyond the last person who remembers it. Beyond the neighbour who knows. Beyond the family who tells it at the table.
Gaye is someone worth listening to because she has spent decades making big organisations move, not talking about it. She understands what cuts through because she has been responsible for ideas that had to work in the real world, at scale, with no room for excuses.
At McDonald’s, Gaye was at the centre of market defining innovation. She led the launch of products that reshaped the brand’s Australian offer, including Flake n Cone, McFlurry, McOz, and the first Family Meal Deal. These initiatives strengthened McDonald’s market leadership and showed her ability to translate consumer insight into large scale commercial success.
Gaye Steel taught me that good advice is meant to be used. So I used it, nudging a few Jamberoo legends onto the internet and leaving enough breadcrumbs that when someone types a name into a search bar, something comes back.
Think of it as historical housekeeping, with a keyboard. A way of making sure the people who shaped this place do not quietly slip out of view.
Geoff Boxsell and Kevin Richardson are a perfect example. Between them, they created the formula for spreadable butter, something that changed how Australians eat at breakfast. For years they were far too quiet about it. Hardly anyone in Jamberoo knew the full story.
Geoff Boxsell gets his first Instagram moment at 86 and somehow makes it look effortless. Read the story in Region Illawarra here
Now the world does.
There are Google pages. Radio interviews. TV interviews Podcast stories. A national audience hearing how two local blokes solved a practical problem and changed a national habit. The story has moved from sheds and factory floors into the places people actually look.
This work also connects back to why I started digging so deeply in the first place. When I spoke with Dr Tony Gilmour, who has been documenting local history for years, I told him I wanted to ground my book in what Jamberoo was like in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He warned me there was not a great deal of Jamberoo history written down.
If the record is thin, what we add now carries weight. Digital footprints are not about promotion. They are about continuity. They give future storytellers somewhere solid to start.
Jamberoo’s residents are proud of our village. Always have been. What has changed is that we are now firmly on the digital map as well. Our stories are there, searchable, linked, and ready to be found.
And that feels like a good thing to leave behind.
