Tag: Shoalhaven history

Where are tomorrow’s community leaders learning to lead?

What two cousins, a dairy factory and a football club can teach us about growing community leaders

When I wrote about Geoff Boxsell and Russell Fredericks, the two cousins whose careers began around the Jamberoo dairy factory, I was struck by how many opportunities they had been given to learn, take responsibility and develop their abilities.

The manager of the Jamberoo Dairy Factory Wallace (Wally) Boxsell recognised Russell’s potential and encouraged him to learn every aspect of the factory. Geoff adopted a similar approach, ensuring employees understood how different parts of the business worked. Both men went on to lead substantial organisations, and both made a point of giving others the opportunities they had enjoyed.

What happens to a community when businesses like these disappear?

The dairy cooperatives were major economic institutions, employing local people, buying milk from surrounding farms, supporting transport businesses and creating demand for an extraordinary range of goods and services. Their products reached households across Australia and overseas.

A selection of the 41 dairy products manufactured at the Shoalhaven Dairy Factory in Bomaderry. The range demonstrates how the regional cooperative developed into a major innovator and food manufacturer. 

Their influence extended into the social and cultural life of their communities. Farmers served on boards, employees learned new skills, young people found mentors, and relationships developed through work carried into sporting clubs, service organisations and community projects.

These were places where people learned to negotiate, manage money, solve problems, work with different personalities and make decisions that affected others. They could practise leadership long before anyone thought to give them a leadership title.

As regional businesses have become larger and more centralised, many of those opportunities have moved elsewhere. Decisions that were once made by people who lived and worked in a district are increasingly made in offices hundreds of kilometres away.

Consolidation brought benefits, including investment, improved technology and access to larger markets. It also changed the opportunities available to people within their communities.

Geoff and Russell developed their abilities in workplaces where experienced people recognised potential and encouraged others to try something new. Their factories were places where people understood the entire business, from the milk arriving at the receiving dock to the finished products leaving for market. Employees learned how different departments operated, how their work affected their colleagues and how problems could be solved by drawing on everyone’s knowledge.

In much of the work I do today, I see what happens when organisations lose those connections.

People work in silos, concentrating on their own responsibilities with little understanding of what is happening elsewhere. Departments operate independently, organisations working towards similar goals rarely speak to one another, and opportunities to collaborate pass unnoticed.

The consequences extend well beyond duplication of effort. When people have little understanding of what their colleagues are doing, they struggle to see where the gaps are, where resources are being wasted or where someone else may already have the answer to a problem they are trying to solve. Employees become frustrated when their ideas go unheard or decisions are made without considering their experience. Innovation slows because the conversations that bring different perspectives and knowledge together simply aren’t happening.

Some of the most promising opportunities emerge when people from different backgrounds discover what they have in common, recognise what each can contribute and begin working together. Yet our increasingly specialised workplaces can make those encounters surprisingly difficult. We have become very good at developing expertise within organisations and departments, while overlooking the knowledge and possibilities that exist between them.

Local dairy factories have largely disappeared, along with many of the local institutions that once provided these experiences. Their history leaves us with a challenge.

How do we create workplaces and communities where people can see beyond their own responsibilities, learn from one another and discover what they could achieve together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It soon became clear that historical research begins with persistence.

Our ancestors could not always spell their own names.

Neither, apparently, could the people recording them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then a Kiama silk mystery appeared.

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

It also raised a new local question.

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

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

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

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

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