#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
Every hour of every day, around 150,000 people across NSW are volunteering. If NSW volunteers were a company, they would be larger than the Commonwealth Bank. Right now, someone is driving a neighbour to chemotherapy, coaching a child, running a stall, checking on an older person, caring for an animal or setting up chairs in a hall.
On Thursday 23 July, the Kiama Pavilion filled with people determined to make that invisible work visible. The Inaugural Kiama Electorate Recognition Awards, hosted by the Member for Kiama, Katelin McInerney MP, celebrated the local women named on the NSW Government’s Hidden Treasures Honour Roll 2025, an initiative of the Rural Women’s Network that has honoured more than 1,300 women and girls volunteering across regional, rural and remote NSW since 2010.
“These are the women who show up week after week, year after year, and who rarely seek the limelight,” Ms McInerney said. “They would prefer we not make a fuss about them. With this event, we are totally ignoring that.”
The women honoured show that volunteering looks different in every pair of hands.
It looks like Ebony Wilson of Jamberoo, whose first steps into volunteering were inspired by cows, helping young people see a future in agriculture through the Young Dairy Network and speaking openly about resilience and mental health in farming.
It looks like Dr Christa Wood of Gerringong, who co-founded Dementia Inclusive Dancing so people living with dementia can experience movement, music, joy and company.
It looks like Annette Young of Kiama, with more than fifty years of service to the Kiama Show Society, tennis, Meals on Wheels, her church and community organisations. Fifty years of seeing what needs doing and doing it.
It looks like Kate Whitworth of Jamberoo and Maree Shepherd of Kiama Downs, creating places where people find their voice through music, from the Flame Tree Project’s opportunities for hundreds of young people to the confidence and friendship of Sing Australia.
It looks like Jenny Ferguson of Kiama, leading a dementia-inclusive choir where singing becomes memory, movement, laughter and the feeling of still being part of something.
It looks like Karen Renkema Lang of Kiama, creating room for local voices through environmental protection, civic participation and Kiama Community Radio.
It looks like Esther Keenan of Kiama Downs, building a longer table. Through The Everyday Table, people find affordable pantry items, a shared meal and a place where everyone is welcome.
It looks like Rosemary Aldred of Kangaroo Valley, raising guide and therapy dogs and then helping other puppy-raisers do the same.
It looks like Sabrina Kelly of Kiama, creating a social club where neurodivergent teenagers feel accepted and understood, while leading a P&C and fundraising for the surf club.
It looks like Jessy Wiggins of Shoalhaven Heads, giving week after week to Girl Guides since 2013 so young girls can make friends, learn skills and test their courage.
And it looks like Nicole O’Brien of Kiama, running the sports club barbecue before heading off to champion local farmers, producers and small businesses at the next market.
Musical Director Antoinette Raynal, herself recognised as a Hidden Treasure in 2024, led the Katandra Women’s A Cappella Choir in a beautiful performance. Katandra brings women together through music, friendship and shared purpose, while also supporting local women’s initiatives through the proceeds of its performances.
The ceremony paid special tribute to the late Lorraine Ettingshausen, recognised posthumously.
Lorraine helped establish the Voluntary Home Nursing Service and gave decades to Camp Quality, supporting children with cancer and their families from the charity’s local beginnings until her retirement. She organised camps, trained volunteers, sat beside frightened parents and stayed with families as children were dying. She gave fifty-six eulogies, fifty of them for children. When poor health forced her retirement, three hundred people came to say goodbye. A year later she became a Volunteer in Policing and served another ten years.
Her granddaughter said it best: “She didn’t just fill her own life. She filled ours.”
The event also marked the first presentation of the Electorate Community Service Award, presented to the Sunday Community Group, founded by a group of Foxground-based women, in recognition of their dedication to supporting those doing it tough in our own community.
“Establishing this award means we now have a permanent way to say thank you to the groups, not just the individuals, who hold our community together,” Ms McInerney said.
People join to give. Along the way, they receive things they never expected: skills they never set out to learn, mentors, friendships and places where they belong. Every one of the women honoured has made her community stronger, warmer and more able to care for its own.
Think about the women and girls in your own community groups who give their time, energy and care without seeking recognition. Nominate one of them for the next Hidden Treasures Honour Roll at hiddentreasures.awardsplatform.com. Nominations close 31 December. The form takes ten minutes. The hardest part is choosing just one name.
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.
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
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.
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.
On why “save our farmland” is the wrong fight for the right reason.
Wollongong Railway Station, 1900.
Take a good look at that old photo of the railway station. Timber and tin, a scatter of weatherboard cottages, and open paddock rolling away in every direction. Now go and stand where the photographer stood. There isn’t a vacant block for miles. Every one of those paddocks filled in, one approval at a time, and nobody felt the loss on the day it happened. That’s how it always goes. The green doesn’t vanish in a single bad decision. It goes in slices, each one too small to argue about, until one day you look up and the hills have a rash.
The same station, 1920. Twenty years on
And it didn’t stop in 1920. Local residents Lesley East and Annette Young and their now husbands still remember driving into Wollongong in the early 1960s to see Psycho at the Regent Theatre on Keira Street, then a grand Art Deco picture palace only a few years old. They parked in a paddock right near the cinema. A paddock, in the middle of town. Today Wollongong is a city of more than 200,000 people, the Regent has been a church since 2005, Crown Street is a pedestrian mall, and the idea of an open field to leave your car in near the main street sounds like a tall tale. But that’s the whole point. Every one of those paddocks was “just one block” once.
Nobody stood in it the day it was lost.
So I have a lot of sympathy for the worry behind Graham Pike’s comment on one of my Catch-Up posts. He was referring to a development application on Minnamurra Lane, Jamberoo, a house and a farm shed on a vacant block, the one Cr Lawton sensibly sent off for a second look and independent legal advice at the May Council meeting. Here’s part of what he said:
“We might not be using the vacant lands or the land in question for food production right now. but most of these lands have been used for farming within the past century or less and, most importantly, we’ll need them for food production again as the human population, even in our area, increases uncontrollably and unsustainably and the resulting suburbanisation sprawls across and fragments this same agricultural/food producing land. The zoning of the land as RU1 or RU2 is a human construct and immaterial. It is still land that we have used and will in future need to use, if any is left uncovered by concrete and asphalt, for food production.” Graham Pike, Jamberoo
I’ve turned that over for days, because there’s a lot in it I agree with. The slow creep of houses and sheds across those hills is real. I’ve watched it happen. And his bigger worry, that we keep paving over the very ground we’ll need to feed ourselves one day, is a serious one.
In a later note, Graham went further and put his finger on what he sees as the root of it all: too many people. Human overpopulation, driving an economy that chews through the natural world. It’s a heartfelt view and plenty of thoughtful people share it.
That’s too big for me to sort out. What I’d say is simpler: whatever any of us thinks about how many people there ought to be, they’re already here. They were born, they need a roof, and saying “there are too many of them” doesn’t put one over a single head. So my mind goes to the thing we can actually do something about, which isn’t the number of people, but where they’re going to live.
The thing is, all that green didn’t go in one big decision anyone could point to. It went in slices, a block here, a shed there, each one too small to worry over on the day. Nobody ever stood up and voted to lose it. It just happened while we weren’t looking.
So maybe the better thing isn’t to fight every single house, but to decide on purpose where the houses should go, instead of letting them turn up one at a time until the hills are full again and we’re left wondering how.
And there’s a part of these “save our farmland” conversations that almost never gets said out loud. Farming is a business. For most farmers, the land isn’t only where they work. It’s the biggest thing they own, the nest egg meant to see them through old age after a lifetime of hard years and thin margins.
So when we say a paddock must stay green forever, I think we should stop and hear what we’re really asking. We’re asking that farmer, and only that farmer, to lock away the worth of their own land so the rest of us can enjoy the view on the drive past. A person in town can sell their house for whatever it’ll fetch. The farmer gets told their paddock is a community treasure and they ought to keep it green for a fraction of what it’s worth. I’m not sure that’s protecting farming. It feels more like asking one family to foot the bill for everyone else’s nice outlook.
I’ve stood on that side of the fence. I dairy farmed for decades, and I know what it is to look at a paddock and see both a lifetime’s work and the only retirement you’ve got. So I find myself asking the question that doesn’t get asked much: is that fair?
And it’s a slippery word, fair. Everyone in this thinks they’re on its side. The people in town feel it’s only fair the hills stay green, they get the view and lose nothing. The farmer feels it’s only fair they get to realise the worth of the land they’ve worked their whole life, the same as anyone else can with what they own. Both are sincere. Both are “fair.” They just can’t both have their way.
And it tends to be the farmer’s fairness that gets left out, because the farmer’s usually not in the room when the rest of us decide their paddock is too precious to touch.
So where does that leave me? Not where you might think. I’m not saying build everywhere. And I’m not saying the green hills don’t count, they’re a good part of why people love this place, and why the visitors come. The slow spread of sheds and houses across those ridgelines is real, and worth watching very closely.
But if we want our farmers to keep the hills green for the rest of us, the least we can do is be honest that we’re asking them to give something up, and decent enough to talk about who carries that cost rather than pretending it’s free.
Lock the gate on a farmer’s land and we haven’t saved farming. We’ve decided their retirement is a fair price for our view.
Good on Cr Lawton for asking for a proper look before anyone signs anything. That’s the kind of careful, eyes-open thinking this deserves, on this block and the next one. The conversation I’d like us to have isn’t “green or houses.” It’s “if we want the green, who pays for it, and is that fair on them?”
I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure there is one. But I think we owe the farmers at least the courtesy of asking.
A note on the photos: I came across these two images on Facebook, where they were dated 1900 and 1920 and identified as Wollongong Railway Station. I haven’t been able to independently verify the dates or the photographer, so if anyone can confirm the details or knows the original source, I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch.
Sixteen years, one very narrow road, and several quietly skeptical dinner parties later: Michael aboard Archimedes.
There’s a question that creeps up on people somewhere in their sixties and seventies. It arrives quietly and starts sitting in the room. What do you want this stretch of life to be for? Some people decide the answer is rest. Some chase the places they never got to. Some pour themselves into grandchildren, or a garden, or finally restoring the car that’s been under a tarp for twenty years. And a stubborn, wonderful few decide that what they want is to build something enormous and improbable with their own two hands, just to prove it can be done.
Michael is one of those few.
On the side of Saddleback Mountain, at Jamberoo, he set out to build an ocean-going catamaran. A self-designed, eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat, built in his own backyard. He’d talk about it with this great, infectious enthusiasm: the big idea, the plan, the vision of it finished and on the water. And beside him, as she always is, his gorgeous wife Susie would sit and smile. What a woman she is.
He’d bring it up at dinner parties, the way other people mention a renovation or a recent trip, and around the table you’d see the same look settle on every face. We were all thinking something. We were each, I suspect, thinking something completely different. Somewhere in that circle was jealousy, and amazement, and flat incredulity, quietly calculating the boat’s chances against a road that accommodates cows and precisely one car at a time. We’d nod warmly and pass the wine. Then we’d go home to our perfectly normal backyards, containing no catamaran whatsoever.
How on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?
When he started, I doubt Michael imagined it would take sixteen years. The big idea rarely comes with the small print attached. Somewhere along the way there was even talk that the ABC might make a documentary of it, that the grand finale would see the boat lifted out by helicopter, surely the only sensible way to get a thing that size off a mountain. Anyone who knew the narrow road he lived on was asking the same question we all were: how on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?
The helicopter stayed on the ground and the documentary went unmade. What happened instead was better: the boat was cut into pieces and crawled down a narrow road, metre by metre, over the better part of a week. The polished launch footage you can find online skips all of that and shows the dream going into the water, clean and triumphant, with the difficult and stubborn and real parts left on the cutting-room floor. Watching it, knowing what it actually took, I find myself quietly amused. That’s a long way from how it looked coming down the hill.
The building is the thing. Some people garden. Some people restore cars. Michael and Susie built an ocean-going boat by hand, for sixteen years.
Where they take it, and whether they take it anywhere at all, almost feels secondary to having proved it could be done.
Michael built something else, long before the boat, and I have carried it for twenty years.
When I started out in agricultural advocacy, I was wrestling with the question the whole industry wrestles with. How do you get people to value farmers when most of them will never set foot on a farm? The standard answer then, and the standard answer now, is to teach people how food is produced, on the theory that understanding leads to appreciation.
Michael, over the side fence, put it differently. You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it. He pointed at the mobile phone. Almost nobody can explain what happens inside one, and almost nobody would give theirs up. Appreciation grows from knowing the people, admiring what they made, and feeling some tie to the place it came from. The mechanism barely comes into it.
You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it.
That sentence changed how I built every project after it. I stopped explaining the supply chain and started introducing people to the makers. A child who meets the man who turned a tiny valley factory into a national champion, or spends a day on a farm with a young dairy farmer who loves the life, comes away admiring them. The admiration is the appreciation. How the milk gets processed can come later, or never, and it holds either way.
It is the same thing I felt watching Archimedes come down the mountain. I could not tell you how Michael engineered an eighteen-and-a-half-metre catamaran in a backyard, and I do not need to. I appreciate the sixteen years and the four hands. The building is the thing, and the builder is who you come to admire.
That is what I want for farmers: a nation that admires the people who feed it. Whether they can explain how it is done matters far less. Michael handed me the key to that twenty years ago, over the fence, and then he spent sixteen years on the side of a mountain proving it.
The launch video carries a line as its title: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It’s the closing line of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem about old age and the refusal to stop. Whoever chose it understood exactly what this was: a way of answering that quiet question that arrives in your sixties and never quite leaves.
What do you want to do with the years you’ve got left?
Michael and Susie answered it on the side of a mountain, one piece of fibreglass at a time. And the boat is finally on the water.
Want to hear more from Michael and learn what does it take to pull off an incredible Project like ” Archimedes” ?
Wouldn’t life be easier if we knew when to calm the room like David Attenborough, when to hold the line like Nelson Mandela, and when to roll up our sleeves and push like Bob Hawke?
Joseph Weston understood timing.
He was the editor of the Kiama Independent in the late nineteenth century, a farmer in an earlier life, and a fierce advocate for systems that moved farmers from price takers to price makers.
He had range.
Emotional range.
Strategic range.
Editorial range.
I’ve spent a long time watching how change actually happens. It often slips in while everyone is busy arguing about something else. Weston seemed to understand that instinctively.
Start with women.
As editor of the Kiama Independent, Weston strategically expands who appears in the public record. Women begin to show up with careers. Paid work outside the home becomes part of everyday reporting. Secretaries. Clerical and office roles. Assistants in business and administration.
His commentary ensures these roles sit comfortably on the page.
Education is assumed. Literacy is assumed. Organisational skill comes with the territory. Women appear as capable participants in the life of the town.
Alongside this, the paper notes the first woman to graduate university with an Arts degree. She takes her place among the day’s business and the paper moves on. Education, work, and opportunity sit naturally within community life.
This is Weston in Attenborough mode.
He trusts readers to notice. He lets repetition do the work. Over time, expectations widen because what people see keeps widening.
Then he switches gear.
When the dairy industry is at stake, Weston becomes very Hawke. Energy up. Purpose clear.
He writes under the pseudonym The Dairyman. Farmers start asking each other who The Dairyman might be. They argue about the ideas and speculate about the author at the same time. The conversation spreads. Momentum gains traction.
Cooperative dairying becomes something people are talking about in sheds, kitchens, and at the factory gate.
This is Weston mobilising attention.
Running through both approaches is a third instinct, the Mandela one. A sense of timing. Knowing when to slow things down and when to apply pressure. Knowing that influence works differently depending on the moment.
With women’s roles, Weston widens the frame until it feels familiar.
With cooperative dairying, he sharpens the focus until it demands action.
Same person. Different tools. Wisdom we all can aspire too.
Joseph Weston understood how communities change. He worked with that reality. Low-key when low-key works. Direct when direction builds momentum.
For me
Joseph Weston is a role model who shows us how to rearrange the furniture, and when to do it.
L to R Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan, Sue Eggins and Dr Tony Gilmour
The Kiama District Historical Society’s October event drew a full house, standing room only, as locals gathered to hear Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan and Dr Tony Gilmour explore the deep Aboriginal history of the local area.
The crowd loved the didjeridoo performance by Quinten Dingo-Donovan – a moving tribute that connected the past and present.
The audience, mostly baby boomers, was visibly engaged and moved by what they heard. Many said afterward that they had learned more about the South Coast’s Aboriginal history in one afternoon than in all their years of schooling.
Aunty Joyce, a Wodi Wodi Elder and local hero recognised for her work in Aboriginal health and education, and Dr Gilmour, historian and Vice President of the Kiama District Historical Society, presented a powerful overview of Wodi Wodi Country, focussing on Kiama, Jamberoo, Minnamurra, and Gerringong. They described how the area’s saltwater people lived along the coast and gathered at Kiama to trade salt, arrange marriages, and pass on law; how Jamberoo and Minnamurra were key meeting and birthing places; and how Aboriginal names like Kiama (“where the sea makes a noise”) and Minnamurra (“plenty of fish”) connect the landscape to its stories.
Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan is presented with a certificate by Kiama District Historical Society president Sue Eggins, marking her appointment as the Society’s first Aboriginal Elder Patron — a recognition of more than 15 years of collaboration and contribution to keeping Kiama’s shared history alive.
They also revisited the history of King Mickey Johnson and Queen Rosie, whose lives in the late 1800s and early 1900s show that Aboriginal people remained part of community life long after colonisation. Their stories now form part of a new, evolving display at the Pilot’s Cottage Museum, a living history project that welcomes new knowledge, corrections, and contributions.
“This is a living history,” said Aunty Joyce. “We’re still learning, still listening, and still adding to what we know. History belongs to everyone, and it grows stronger when we share it.”
Dr Gilmour agreed, describing the project as a way of completing the story of Kiama rather than rewriting it. “We’re not taking anyone’s history away,” he said. “We’re filling in the missing chapters. The story of this place didn’t start in 1797 when explorer George Bass landed in what is now Kiama harbour. And it hasn’t stopped. It’s a continuing story that connects us all.”
The energy in the room suggested more than nostalgia. It reflected a wider hunger for understanding and a recognition that history told only through rose coloured glasses leaves us poorer.
As one attendee remarked.
“It’s time for Aboriginal history and culture to become a genuine, continuous part of the curriculum, not an elective reserved for the senior years. In a global world, young people are hungry to understand where conflict comes from and how empathy begins with truth. It isn’t about rewriting history. It’s about completing it.”
Around the world, societies are re-examining how their histories are told. When people study the past honestly, whether it’s the brutality of Europe’s religious wars or Australia’s frontier conflicts, they begin to see why divisions persist and how understanding grows from truth.
When ratepayers gave the mayor boxing gloves in 1890, they weren’t kidding. 140 years later, council’s still trying to stop the money leaking out, one glove at a time.
If you’ve heard whispers that Kiama Council is in financial strife and thought, “Surely this is new?” — allow me to introduce you to the long and time-honoured tradition of municipal money woes. Because, dear reader, we’ve been broke since before board shorts, streetlights, or even bridges were cool.
In 1882, Kiama Council approached Parliament to borrow money for, you guessed it, a tramway. At the time, it was seen as a visionary move. The blue metal trade was booming, basalt was being hauled from the hills to the harbour by horse and dray, and the dust and mud on Kiama’s streets were choking businesses and water tanks. A tramline was proposed to streamline transport from the quarries to the port and keep Kiama competitive in the shipping trade. It might have been brilliant, had it worked.
Instead, it went over budget, underused, and over the edge of financial logic. By 1890, the council was broke. Properly broke. Ratepayers were so fed up they literally handed the mayor a pair of boxing gloves at a council meeting. (Fact, not metaphor.)
By 1894, Kiama Council was saddled with a £4,000 debt to the bank, couldn’t afford basic street repairs, and had to sweep Terralong Street with brooms while dust blew into shops and ruined water tanks. The situation was so dire that they considered lighting the streets with acetylene gas instead of paying their overdue bill to the gas company.
Electricity? That was another slow burn. While towns up and down the coast were already flicking switches, Kiama was still dithering over tenders, tariffs, and the staggering cost of poles and wires. The council’s reluctance to commit funding meant Kiama lagged behind in the electrification stakes, and when lighting finally arrived, it lit up more resentment than roadways.
Water supply? That, too, was a long and thirsty road. For decades, residents relied on rooftop tanks, wells, and carted water. By the late 1800s, a proper water scheme was desperately needed. Eventually, the solution came in the form of Fountaindale Dam,
located at the confluence of Tangalla Gully and Fountaindale Creek, approximately 10 km west of Kiama. A concrete wall was built to hold back the water, and in 1909 the dam was completed as an on-stream storage facility. It officially became part of Kiama’s water supply system in 1909 at a cost of £7,073 (roughly $1.1 million today). Pipes were laid, tanks were constructed, and water finally flowed. It was a triumph, briefly.
Fast forward to today and the irony is hard to miss. Fountaindale Dam still sits there, perched on what is now my family’s farm. It no longer supplies water to Kiama, having been decommissioned in 1977, yet the dam’s massive wall remains council’s responsibility, a costly, aging relic of early infrastructure dreams that now brings nothing but maintenance bills and engineering headaches. It is not accessible to the public.
Public buildings? Repeatedly proposed, repeatedly defeated, sometimes by referenda with fewer than 20 votes. A grand new civic hall was once declared too ambitious. Central Park was dismissed as a “disgrace to the title,” filled with weeds, quarry rubble, and good intentions.
And the consequences of all this financial floundering? They were significant.
In 1890, after years of frustration, Gerringong and Jamberoo both seceded, forming their own municipalities and taking with them not only their rates but also a good chunk of local identity and political momentum. The split was celebrated with banquets, and the division remained in place until the mid-1950s.
Even surf culture faced municipal delay. When locals pushed for public bathing and beach access, council’s response was to fine the first man caught swimming in view of the street. It took years, and another round of public outcry, before bathing laws were finally revised and surf clubs allowed to form.
So if you’re feeling nostalgic about balanced budgets and visionary spending, maybe don’t. The truth is, we’ve always operated somewhere between ambition and overdraft.
The real question isn’t, “How did we get into debt?” It’s more like, “Do we ever learn?”
Nola Irvine’s life was a testament to love, resilience, and community spirit. Her ever-smiling face, unwavering friendship, and compassionate personality left an indelible mark on all who knew her. As we remember Nola, we celebrate a life well-lived, filled with joy, strength, and an enduring faith in God.
Irvine Family- L to R Back Row Sisters Nola, Valma, Olwyn and Molly, Front Row Parents Ivy ( nee Fredericks) and Robert Irvine
Nola Marjory Irvine’s life is a beautiful tapestry woven with threads of love, resilience, and an unwavering spirit. Born on July 21, 1926, at “Brooklyn,” a private hospital in Kiama, Nola was baptized and christened in the Church of the Resurrection (CoE), where she remained a devoted member throughout her life.
Nola grew up on Clover Hill, a dairy farm run by her parents, Robert and Ivy Irvine, since their marriage in 1920. Despite the untimely passing of her father in 1949, the family continued to manage the farm with the invaluable support of share-farming families like Ray and Avril King and later, Michael and Lynne Strong. These families provided much more than labour; they offered genuine friendship and neighbourly support, enabling the Irvine family to stay rooted at Clover Hill.
Education was a challenge in the early days, with Nola and her sisters often riding horses and walking long distances to attend Jamberoo Public School. Eventually, Nola completed her education through correspondence with Blackfriars’ Correspondence School, which later became known as the School of the Air.
Nola Irvine is 2nd from the right in the bottom row at Jamberoo Public School circa 1931-1932
Nola’s childhood memories are filled with joy and laughter. Visits to Clover Hill were marked by her great sense of humour, engaging board games, and delicious treats. Her love for animals was evident as she cared for her chooks, cats, birds, and cows, always accompanied by her faithful feline friends during farm chores.
Diagnosed with Coeliac disease in 1985, Nola faced her health challenges with remarkable strength and positivity. Her condition, undiagnosed for many years, never dimmed her spirit.
Her favourite saying, “it’s only a problem if you make it one,” encapsulated her approach to life. Nola’s calm, loving nature and unwavering faith were a testament to her resilience and courage.
Nola was an active member of the Girls Friendly Society during the war years, participating in hikes and picnics. Her loyalty and warmth were highlighted by her pen pal relationships, particularly with friends in England, which spanned over 50 years. A visit from her pen pals about a decade ago was a cherished moment, allowing Nola to proudly showcase her beautiful district.
Her passion for photography, inherited from her father, and her interest in family history were integral parts of her life. Nola played a significant role in researching and publishing the Fredericks Family History in the 1970s, preserving the legacy of her ancestors, including her two great-great-grandfathers who fought in the 1815 Battle of Waterloo.
Nola’s life was a testament to love, resilience, and community spirit. Her ever-smiling face, unwavering friendship, and compassionate personality left an indelible mark on all who knew her. As we remember Nola, we celebrate a life well-lived, filled with joy, strength, and an enduring faith in God.
Nola Marjory Irvine, born July 21, 1926, passed away on June 20, 2004. Her legacy continues to inspire us, reminding us of the power of love and resilience.
Despite the relentless challenges—the physical labour, the long hours, and the emotional toll of sustaining a legacy—the passion for dairying persists. For the Irvine sisters, Clover Hill is more than just land; it is a testament to resilience, a beacon of heritage, and a promise of continuity in the face of adversity.
Molly and Olwyn Irvine Photo Sylvia Liber Illawarra Mercury
As in McLeod’s Daughters, the Irvine women of Jamberoo have dedicated their lives to keep Clover Hill Dairies in the family.
Olwyn Irvine, 83 sparks up the combustion stove in the old Jamberoo farmhouse – it will cook the nightly meal and heat water for their daily shower. Her sister Molly, 81 carts in the firewood as she has done since she was a girl. The stove is solid and reliable – a reminder of a simpler life.
“We’ve had this stove for 50 years and never thought to get a new one,” says Olwyn.
Step outside the Irvine’s front door and 30m away is some of the most advanced computerised technology known to the dairy industry. Along with farming partners Michael and Lynne Strong, the four sisters, including Valma and Nola, have helped transform Clover Hill Dairies into one of the most productive dairy farms in the country. Deregulation forced their hand. The sisters, accustomed to sacrifice and hard times, didn’t blink when in 2000 the Strong’s put forward a daring proposal to keep the farm afloat.
Nick Strong continues the Irvine Sisters’ legacy
Clover Hill has been a bit like the television series McLeod’s Daughters. After their father died in 1949, the girls stayed on the land to help their mother run the farm – finishing their schooling by correspondence. They never married or had children and they’ve always lived in the farmhouse, enjoying each others company around the old kitchen table.
Nola, Valma, Olwyn and Molly ( Myra) Irvine with their mother Ivy and father Robert Irvine
In 1939 a battery run wireless was their only link to the outside world, but today a television positioned in the kitchen keeps the women informed.
Valma, Molly and Olwyn continued to play and active role in the dairy into their 80s
In the last two years Valma, 83, and Nola, 78, have died leaving Olwyn and Molly to make the tough decisions. But dairying is in their blood and the women have shown the same resilience their forefathers did 150 years ago.
The original Clover Hill homestead and dairy
The farm has been in their family since 1851, when their great great grandfather James Irvine and his son purchased the land naming it Clover Hill. With 180 degree views of the ocean, the Irish settlers cleared the rainforest and forged a new life for themselves in a strange environment.
Molly and Olwyn’s grandfather James and his wife Sarah ( nee Purnell ) on their wedding day
There have now been four generations of Irvine’s farming on the side of Saddleback Mountain. When the sister’s were young there were 300 dairy farms in the Kiama area – today there are just 30. In the six years since deregulation 50 per cent of dairy farms in NSW and Queensland have disappeared.
Deregulation has halved the farm-gate price of milk, but the drought has been the tipping-point for many asset rich, cash poor farmers who’ve made the agonising decision to walk away from their land.
Those who survived were forced to change. More milk had to be produced to make the same amount of money. A decision was made at Clover Hill to “ramp-up” the operation and to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the farm. It was a defining moment for the Strong’s.
Lynne, a pharmacist for 25 years, gave up her career to return to the land full-time, so too did their only son Nick, who had just completed his HSC.
“Most people sold their cows, but we did the opposite,” says Lynne. “We’re now running four times the amount of cows per hectare than we did before deregulation.”
To finance the move the Strong’s and the sisters sold a 280ha joint investment property out west. With the money they built a state-of-the-art $300,000 milking shed which has the capacity to milk 28 cows at a time. Now instead of 80 cows a day, they milk 300.
It was 28 years ago when Michael, then 23, began share farming at Clover Hill. The women took a chance delegating responsibility of their livelihood to someone so young – but it wasn’t to be their last leap of faith in him.
The sisters had grown up with Australian Illawarra Shorthorn cows (AIS), but Michael was keen to swap the herd for Holsteins, a breed which produces more milk. Just before deregulation they reluctantly agreed.
Each cow is now considered a potential elite athlete and the farm hires a full-time nutritionist to feed them a combination of pellets, vitamins, grain and corn.
“If you change a cows diet overnight and you get it right there’s more milk in the vat the next day, but if you stuff it up you get less milk,” explains Lynne. “The results are instant, it’s just so dramatic. There’s a huge amount of research into the science of this industry.”
Hard work and clever decisions have paid off and now Clover Hill Dairies is regarded as one of the most productive farms in the country, with four of its cows this year becoming Australian record holders.
In the show ring too they’ve had success winning the All Australian Three-Year-Old, the first time the farm has ever taken out the award.
“This farm would be up there with the best in the country,” says Lynne. “But people are out there doing it equally as well.”
The view from Clover Hill is spectacular, but Michael Strong isn’t taking in the scenery. Instead he casts a critical eye over his herd of Holsteins. Despite having some of the best and most productive cows in the country he’s still not content. He’d like all of his cows to reach an elite level.
“When you win at the shows you think well I’ve done an alright job,” says Michael. “But when I stand there and look at the herd, I’m pretty critical, I want them all to look wonderful every day of the week.”
Every 12 months the Strong’s and the Irvine’s reinvent the farm. This year they made another decision to increase milking from two to three times a day -starting at 4am and ending at 10pm.
Nick’s decision to follow in his father’s footsteps, although celebrated by both families, also increased the pressure to produce more milk.
“You’ve got to produce a million litres a year to support one family, so obviously we had to double that,” says Lynne. “Now we produce 21/2 million litres and we’re now heading towards three million.”
Before machinery the sisters would have to milk 50 cows by hand twice a day.
“I was very good at milking,” says Olwyn proudly. “‘I used to milk eight cows in one hour and that was good going. It’s hard to deal with all the progress, but we’ve just accepted everything as it’s come, you’ve got to move into the modern world.”
The farm has always been the centre of their lives and they never had any desire to travel overseas or have a family of their own. They still have their jobs around the farm to do, Olwyn mops up the buckets after each milking and Molly teaches the calves to feed.
“We grew up in the war years so I suppose we just stayed on the farm and worked,” says Molly. “I did have some admirers though.” “So did I,” chimes in Olwyn. “But none I wanted to marry.”
Olwyn admits that as a girl she never imagined that the farm would always be her whole life.
“It’s been a hard life I suppose in a way, it’s the same thing over and over, but there’s been lots of pleasures.”
The farm house has always been full of children, either relatives or the offspring of the share farmers working on the farm.
Nick spent his afternoons after school sitting around the Irvine’s kitchen table playing with toy farm animals waiting for his father to finish the milking. Clover Hill has always been his home and the sisters consider him part of their family.
Lynne doesn’t fit the farmer mould and happily admits to never having milked a cow in her life. But having grown up on farms she’s not scared to get dirty and it’s her job to look after the calves. She’s also in charge of the never-ending bookwork and data-entry with each cow having a record since birth.
Since deregulation the dairy is run more like a business. “In one way deregulation was good for us,” says Lynne. “We’ve made wise choices and we’ve become more efficient.”
But it’s been a risk and at times they’ve wondered if it will work – particularly as the drought begins to squeeze.
“The drought is tough, it’s really tough and because the animals are so important to us we don’t downgrade the amount of feed we use, we take the view that the cows are number one in our operation and they have to be looked after. I think though if it goes on for another year all dairy farmers will have to review their situation.”
Grain has doubled in price in the last month and 2007 is already shaping up to be a bleak year for many farms. Thanks to Lynne’s bargaining skills the farm was lucky to have locked in grain at the old price until the next harvest.
The drought has turned cows into a valuable commodity and there are now plans to diversify the business. In the future they hope to sell 30 high pedigree cows a year on the international market – so the dairy won’t be so dependent on the farm-gate price of milk. But first they need to improve their progeny. Twice a year a specialist vet from Victoria transforms a section of the farm into a mini fertility hospital. In August 14 cows of high genetic merit were chosen as donors and were super-ovulated. A week later the embryos were flushed out of the cow’s uterus and viewed under a microscope with the live embryos then being either frozen or implanted into surrogate cows.
“Each year there’s a new development in the research,” says Lynne. “It’s like the dairy industry is the frontier of IVF and I imagine that a lot of the success on dairy farms actually goes back into the human research.”
There have also been massive changes to the farm’s physical boundaries and a road now runs through the middle of the property. To ensure a sustainable and viable dairy long-term, in 1998 they swapped two parcels of non-farmable land for 40 farmable hectares. Today there are seven Torrens Title lots on the 120ha property, of which two-thirds is rainforest, creating a rural hamlet within the working farm.
With the sale of each lot came a list of covenants to ensure Clover Hill Dairies always had the right to farm. There are never any complaints about the odour, the lights or noise and there are strict rules about pets and priority water for the farm.
“It’s a fairly unique situation,” says Lynne. “We have urban and rural co-existing together. “The sub-division has been developed around the dairy and the sizes of the blocks haven’t impacted on the farm at all – most of the lots are rainforest and allow for only a small section of land to be built on.”
But even with close neighbours dairying can be a harsh and isolating life.
“It’s not so much hard work, but hard hours, you get tired of course and you get your down moments when you wish you’d done something else with your life,” says Michael. “But it doesn’t last long, the cows are my passion and that’s what keeps me going.” “I’m always thinking about the heritage of the farm, it’s been such a privilege to live here. The sisters have made a lot of sacrifices to keep the farm going and I’d like to think that there will be a dairy farm on Clover Hill for many years to come.”
This blog post is a reprint of a story by Jodie Duffy in the Illawarra Mercury Weekender 21 October 2006 and is part of the Irvine Family history series
Every hour of every day, around 150,000 people across NSW are volunteering. If NSW volunteers were a company, they would be larger than the Commonwealth Bank. Right now, someone is driving a neighbour to chemotherapy, coaching a child, running a stall, checking on an older person, caring for an animal or setting up chairs in a hall.
Behind every hatmaker is a husband happy to be the mannequin.
Wollongong Railway Station, 1900. 
The crowd loved the didjeridoo performance by Quinten Dingo-Donovan – a moving tribute that connected the past and present.
Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan is presented with a certificate by Kiama District Historical Society president Sue Eggins, marking her appointment as the Society’s first Aboriginal Elder Patron — a recognition of more than 15 years of collaboration and contribution to keeping Kiama’s shared history alive.
