Clover Hill Diaries - Join Me and Be the Change - #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

The Goodreads reading challenge and other suggestions I declined.

Every January, Goodreads acts. It prompts readers to set a reading challenge, choose a number, track progress, and share results. The message sounds cheerful. The structure sits underneath it is managerial.

I feel frustration at an app assigning me homework. I want to scream.

Reading entered my life as refuge, curiosity, argument, and pleasure. I read when a sentence catches or a character resonates. I follow books that open doors I did not know existed. None of that needs a target. None of it improves when measured.

When Goodreads introduced the challenge, reading changed shape. A private exchange turned into a task list. Pages became units. Books became ticks. A progress bar stepped into the space where attention once lived. Speed started to count. Comparison followed. A long novel began to feel like a poor choice, while a slim book felt efficient. Pleasure slipped toward performance.

Some readers accept this frame. They describe the challenge as motivation. Life feels crowded. A number promises structure. For them, the system works as intended.

I read in seasons. Some years I read fewer books and let them linger. Some years one novel rearranges how I see the world. Other times I move quickly, sampling voices, following a line of interest wherever it leads. None of those choices respond well to measurement.

A reading challenge does not allow for rereading a paragraph because it sounded better in theory. It does not recognise abandoning a book that feels wrong for this moment. It assumes more equals better. It assumes finishing equals success. Reading does not work like that.

The cost shows up when reading begins to feel like unpaid labour. Daily reminders feel less friendly than supervisory. The act starts to resemble fitness tracking, streaks protected, output optimised. Competition seeps in. Who read more. Who stayed on track. Who fell behind. Numbers replace attention. Curiosity thins out.

So I ignore the challenge. I do not set a number. I do not track progress. I let books arrive and leave as I choose.

Reading gives me enough without asking me to prove anything back.

Why are people listening differently when local history is told through lived experience?

The interest grows from recognition rather than nostalgia. People are asking how using history to share lived experience changes the way decisions, relationships, and reputation are understood in the places they know well. From there the questions deepen

I am being invited to speak to community groups about history, and the invitations keep coming. Each one begins in a similar way. People say they know the dates. They know the names. They know the family trees. What they want to hear is what life felt like. Over time, a pattern has emerged.

The curiosity has grown alongside a book I am writing. It is historical fiction set in my village of Jamberoo around Federation. An elderly widower marries a much younger woman when circumstance leaves them both with few options. The marriage unsettles the family. Relationships strain. Friendships shift. The town steps in and fills the silences.

At its heart, the book is about the courage it takes for a woman to live outside the version of her that a community has already decided on, before they’ve even met her.

That story catches attention because it sounds familiar. Every community recognises how quickly private lives become everyone’s business . Reputation circulates. Memory lasts.

When I talk about the book, I also talk about the research behind it. Family histories tend to preserve facts with care. They record births, deaths, marriages, places, and dates. The outline survives. What slips away is the experience of living inside those moments.

You know what happened. You rarely know what it demanded of the people involved.

That is where people lean forward. They recognise the pressures of the time, the work that filled the days, the skills people relied on, the compromises they made, the losses they experienced, the way change landed differently across households. Place returns to the centre of the story.

At that point, I see it each time I ask a simple question. Who here keeps stories? Hands rise. Photo albums. Letters tied with ribbon. Boxes in cupboards. A drawer nobody else opens. People understand the responsibility straight away.

One story I often share involves a suitcase. A man kept his family’s letters and photographs inside it. When he died, the suitcase passed to his son. The son treated it as something to look after. Inside were photographs of my own family I had never seen. My history survived through someone else’s care.

Experiences like this are common. They rarely get spoken about.

Today, that care can extend beyond cupboards and drawers. Digital spaces allow stories to travel. Ordinary lives become searchable and discoverable. A single record can reach families, researchers, and future generations who have yet to realise what they are looking for.

Each invitation I receive leads to a different conversation.

People want to hear about their own backyards. Their streets. Their arguments. Their decisions. Their innovations. They want to recognise themselves in the record.

What I bring to these conversations is a way of looking at history through lived experience. History shaped by choice, effort, and consequence. The facts still matter. Meaning travels alongside them when someone takes the time to carry it forward.

Why councils confuse consultation with engagement

Community engagement vs community consultation are often treated as the same thing in local government, but they operate very differently in practice.

The difference shapes who holds power, when decisions crystallise, and why trust either grows or collapses.

Communities know the difference, even when councils pretend not to.

What community consultation actually does in practice

Community consultation usually begins after key decisions have already taken shape.

A proposal exists.

Timelines are set.

Constraints are fixed.

Institutions then ask for feedback within those boundaries. People respond through surveys, drop in sessions, or submissions. The process records participation. As a result, the project proceeds, sometimes with small adjustments.

Consultation can be genuine. Even so, it remains narrow by design. It collects opinion rather than shared understanding. Because of that, disagreement often gets framed as resistance. Frustration follows, on both sides.

Community consultation answers one question, what do people think about this?

What community engagement looks like in practice

Community engagement starts earlier and runs deeper.

Engagement involves listening before options are fixed. It brings people into defining the problem, not simply reacting to a solution. It recognises local knowledge and lived experience, including impacts that reports often miss.

Because engagement unfolds over time, it requires continuity and trust. At the same time, it demands that institutions accept discomfort. Engagement does not promise agreement. Instead, it builds legitimacy.

Community engagement answers a different question, how do we understand this together?

Why the two keep getting blurred

Institutions often default to consultation because it feels safer. It fits legal requirements, procurement cycles, and delivery schedules.

In contrast, engagement shifts control. It exposes assumptions. It slows momentum. It makes power visible.

So consultation gets relabelled as engagement, even when nothing structural changes.

What good engagement shows on the ground

Strong engagement appears in ordinary, practical ways.

Early conversations.

Clear explanation of limits.

Feedback that explains what changed and why.

Ongoing presence rather than one off events.

People may still disagree. However, they understand the process, the trade offs, and their place within it.

Consultation seeks permission. Engagement earns confidence.

Communities know the difference immediately.

Links

NSW Department of Planning guidance on community engagement

IAP2 Australasia Core Values for Public Participation

When family love stops you from speaking up

I have been estranged from my family for twelve years.

I grew up knowing I had little in common with the family I was born into. Later, I married into another family where the same gap appeared. Years after that, my son married into a family where it surfaced again. The pattern repeats. Honesty stays close.

Tradition insists that DNA overrides everything else. In practice, it often overrides values, curiosity, and disagreement. Because of that, difference gets framed as risk rather than reality.

Estrangement carries grief. However, it also creates room to act.

Over the last twelve years, I have taken positions I would never have taken while managing family approval. I have worked publicly on social and environmental justice. I have challenged institutions. I have stayed with issues that attract pushback rather than praise. As a result, my life reflects what I believe rather than what others can tolerate.

That determination comes at a cost. Putting your head above the parapet is mentally demanding. It brings scrutiny, conflict, and sustained pressure. My family worried about that. They often framed their concern as care, stress, health, too much exposure, too much risk. Meanwhile, I experienced those same pressures as the price of doing work that mattered to the public, even when it unsettled people close to home.

Psychologists who work with estranged adults describe this pattern clearly. Karl Pillemer defines estrangement as intentional distancing in response to a relationship experienced as damaging. In contrast, Sherrie Campbell writes about families that rely on control and dismissal while presenting it as concern.

That framing shapes outcomes. It allows families to describe public action as recklessness and persistence as fragility. It also explains why attempts at staying connected often shrink into silence rather than dialogue.

I care about taking action on things that carry weight now. I accept the cost of being an outlier. I accept the strain without pretending it was avoidable.

DNA explains origin. It does not dictate alignment.

Twelve years on, the life built outside family approval carries coherence, agency, and direction. It is not a consolation prize. It is the point.

What happens when a letter to the editor meets Cathy Wilcox’s line of sight

Sometimes, you do not need a megaphone at all. Sometimes a cartoonist who helps shape the national conversation sees the point you are making and signals it for you.

Cathy Wilcox read my letter and chose to share it. I value that decision.

This post looks at how arguments travel once they enter public institutions.

It sets out my thinking on influence, media, and leadership under scrutiny.

I wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald this week.

For the first time.

And it was published AND Cathy Wilcox tweeted it with this comment.

As ever the letter writers bring the wisdom

Within three hours, around 90 people had retweeted it and close to 300 had liked it. I am not on Twitter, that decision dates back to Elon Musk buying the platform. I only know because someone sent me a screenshot.

The Herald is a national paper. Along with The Age, it continues to play a significant role in setting the public frame. What appears there travels well beyond the page.

I have spent enough time around local government to see how power reacts to scrutiny. When I was reporting on council matters, council publicly refuted my articles on their website . They lodged complaints with the Press Council. It was deliberate, and it wore me down.

Stepping away from that role changed the method, not the issues.

Writing a letter imposes a different discipline. You make the argument, then you step back. The words have to stand on their own.

Letters to the Editor signal where the public temperature is sitting. They show which language is beginning to stick and where the fault lines are forming.

Advocacy through media is often confused with volume. Say it everywhere. Say it repeatedly. That confuses exposure with influence.

What counts is placement, timing, and less is more wisdom.

Say less. Place it better.

A blog gives room to think. Facebook meets people where they already are. A letter to a national paper places an argument inside an institution that shapes public conversation.

You don’t need to say everything. You need to say one thing well, in the right place, and leave it there

That’s strategy.

Old media still matters. It forces clarity, limits excess, and leaves a public record that can’t be edited away.

For anyone thinking about advocacy, the question isn’t where can I speak, but where does this argument belong.

And sometimes, you do not need a megaphone at all. Sometimes a cartoonist who helps shape the national conversation sees the point you are making and signals it for you.

I won’t be using a grocery app that doesn’t know what’s in my fridge

Lets start with the problem – after all if we don’t have a problem we don’t need a solution and I love solutions

Any grocery app that helps me buy food without knowing what I already have is part of the waste problem.

Woolworths has announced a partnership with Google to upgrade its Olive chatbot with agentic artificial intelligence. The system will plan meals, read handwritten recipes, apply loyalty discounts and add items directly into your online basket.

The full analysis is laid out clearly in this Conversation piece.

The concern raised there is about nudging, autonomy and who really makes decisions when AI starts assembling baskets for us. Most households are already wrestling with a more basic problem.

The app doesn’t look in your fridge. The app doesn’t look in your pantry.

Without that, everything else is noise. Meal plans mean nothing if half the ingredients are already sitting at the back of the crisper. Discounts don’t help if you’re buying something you forgot you owned. Adding items to a basket just accelerates the cycle.

Here is my favourite bit. What could the solution be?

What people actually want is much simpler.

Scan the fridge. Scan the pantry.
Here’s what you already have.
Here’s what needs using.
Here are three meals you can cook with it.
And sometimes, here’s the best advice of all, you don’t need to shop.

Instead, we’re being offered another system that speeds up buying and shifts the consequences back onto the shopper.

I won’t be using it.

Food should be practical. It should fit around tired nights and changing plans. It should not become another place where we are nudged to feel inefficient or inadequate.

Build a tool that starts with what’s already in my fridge and pantry and tells me what I need not what will increase returns to shareholders. Until then, I’m not interested.

And what’s in it for Woolworths you ask?

What’s in it for Woolworths is trust, loyalty, and a system people believe is on their side.

Identifying and action on the root cause is how change actually happens

This post is inspired by Melinda Lawton.

While reading about Jackson Katz, I recognised the same discipline she brings to every conversation, start at root cause and address it first.

Jackson Katz campaigns to prevent violence against women by challenging male culture, silence, and the systems that excuse abuse.

Like Melinda, Katz works from this key discipline. He starts at root cause. He asks why violence is learned, normalised, and excused, rather than turning the spotlight onto the behaviour of women who are harmed.

This single discipline changes the conversation. Responsibility moves to culture, peers, institutions, and the systems that allow violence to become ordinary. It forces the question away from personal vigilance and towards cause.

This way of thinking is not limited to domestic violence. You can see it playing out, or being avoided, in other issues sitting close to the surface right now.

Take the Bondi massacre.

The media response followed a familiar cycle. Click bait headlines set the frame. It shifted rapidly, from Islamophobia, to gun control, to demands for a Royal Commission. Attention moved faster than understanding.

Public grief was converted into competing explanations and visible demands for action, without staying with the harder question of what would actually reduce risk.

Into that noise stepped NSW Premier Chris Minns, treating the moment as an opportunity to move against large peaceful protests. He used claims about social division and policing pressure to restrict large pro-Palestinian protests, despite no evidence linking those protests to the attack.

This is the same short-term logic that makes Royal Commissions feel irresistible. They look decisive. They feel serious. They create motion. They rarely deal with root cause. Outrage is absorbed. Responsibility is delayed. Governments appear active while avoiding targeted action.

The pattern is consistent. After shock, we reach for spectacle. Media amplifies it. Politics exploits it. Prevention slips out of frame.

Climate Action sits in the same pattern, though it is often approached sideways. The conversation is kept at the level of personal behaviour, resilience, and adaptation. That framing feels practical, even responsible, but it avoids harder questions about policy delay, economic incentives, and systems that reward risk while spreading the cost. Starting at root cause shifts the conversation out of individual adjustment and into collective responsibility.

Across every issue there is a unifying pattern

Surface framing individualises blame
Root cause framing interrogates systems
Silence is rewarded where power is concentrated
Speaking up carries social cost unless culture shifts
Language determines where action is allowed to land

The same question keeps surfacing. Where do we begin.

This is where Melinda Lawton stands apart.

When she meets with people who can drive change, she starts at root cause and keeps the conversation there. The focus is on what produced the problem, what incentives are operating, and what systems allowed it to take hold. From there, the work turns to what needs to change and how to do it.

This is Melinda’s key discipline.

It is strategic. It resists distraction. It keeps responsibility where it belongs and pushes the conversation toward action rather than explanation.

Pivotally this is project management 101 which is Melinda Lawton’s professional background.

Start with diagnosis. Identify root cause. Map incentives and systems. Then decide what needs to change and who owns it. These are core principles taught in leadership courses, management training, and governance frameworks everywhere else.

What is striking is how often this discipline is missing in local government. What should be standard practice is treated as optional. Conversations drift to response, optics, and containment instead of staying anchored in cause and decision. That gap is not about capacity. It is about whether discipline is applied.

And that is why Melinda’s approach stands out. Not because it is novel, but because it should be normal.

If you open this link you’ll find a PDF with more examples that apply this same discipline across other current issues.

A shout out to Melinda Lawton for modelling an approach that moves from diagnosis to decision. Imagine if change conversations started here every time.

A moment in The Choral that shows how lived experience changes everything

I recently saw The Choral . It is a magnificent movie. It broke my heart in a good way.

Partly because it is so beautiful. Partly because it is so powerful. And partly because of one moment that keeps opening out into other moments long after you leave the cinema.

A choir member who is also a Protestant minister stands and says there is no such thing as purgatory. In his faith, the soul goes straight to heaven or hell. No in between.

Then Clive speaks.

He has come back from the war with one arm. He says purgatory is real. It is the space between two sides fighting, the moment when you step forward and you don’t know whether you will live or die.

The room goes completely still.

I am confident that minister would never stand up and say there is no purgatory again. I don’t think anyone else in the room would either and everyone who sees the film.

What moved me was not only the moment itself, but what it unlocked. How often lived experience cuts straight through belief. How two people can stand in the same place and see entirely different things, shaped by what they have lived, what they have lost, what they carry in their bodies.

It felt like a reminder to slow down in conversations. To listen more carefully. To leave room for the fact that someone else may be standing in a place you have never been.

Who will be laughing at us in a hundred years

Old newspapers are a gift. They show us a community concentrating very hard on the business of being right about the small things.

In Jamberoo in the late 1800s, people worried about the name of the colony. Australia felt flimsy. Too casual. Too much like a place where people might relax. A proper society, it was argued, required a name with authority and a whiff of empire. Something that would sit comfortably on official letterhead.

KI The -foolish- bid for Jamberoo to become Australa's capital

The name survived. It now appears on passports, Olympic medals, and road signs without incident.

Beach behaviour also drew close attention. Men bathing in underwear sparked outrage. Editorials were written. Public standards were defended. The issue hinged on fabric, fit, and the preservation of decency. The town believed civilisation rested on correct swimwear.

KI Scandal Men bathe in Underwear Vol 7 Page 11

Electricity prompted years of debate. Poles were discussed. Tariffs were dissected. Who should pay occupied many meetings. When power arrived, streets were lit and grievances brightened along with them.

Women voting caused genuine concern. Serious men warned it would alter women’s nature, upset social balance, and weaken chivalry. These arguments were delivered with confidence and a straight face.

Marriage advice was also a public service.

In 1886, the Kiama Independent offered bachelors a guide to finding a wife. It advised men to observe women closely in the morning. To check her hair. Her dress. Her energy levels. To assess whether she complained of cold, executed unreasonable projects, or wrote too many letters. A man was cautioned against leading a woman to the altar if she showed signs of extravagance or ambition. A good wife, readers were assured, would not be a boaster and a slattern. This bible of rules was apparently the gold standard.

This guidance was published earnestly. Presumably clipped. Possibly discussed over tea.

At the time, all of this mattered. These were serious conversations held by serious people trying to protect their world from decline, disorder, and women who might write letters.

Seen from here, the intensity is impressive.

Which brings us to the present.

We have our own certainties. Our own moral alarms. Our own debates conducted with absolute conviction. We argue about productivity, visibility, optimisation, self branding, and being constantly available. We hold strong views about how people should live, work, partner, parent, age, and perform success.

Future readers will find these pages too.

They will smile at the confidence. They will marvel at the energy. They will wonder how so much attention landed in such particular places.

History tends to be generous. It shows how people worked with the ideas they had.

The more useful question is which of today’s decisions will still make sense once everyone involved is dead and no one is defending them.

Those choices are rarely the ones anyone is busy congratulating themselves for.

They do not come with rules.

And they show zero interest in what a woman looks like before breakfast.

How a small town editor changed the landscape by channelling Hawke, Mandela and Attenborough

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.

FYI

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