It will be on Saturday, April 20, at the Rescue Station Arts Centre in Wonthaggi.
Wonny Olives is the brainchild of Liane Arno and Matt Stone – the 600kg Italian-made beast of a presser is their gift to the community.
Bass Coast Post |
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THE olives are ripening early this year, not surprising given our glorious late summer weather, and so the first pressing of the year for Wonthaggi’s community olive press has been brought forward. It will be on Saturday, April 20, at the Rescue Station Arts Centre in Wonthaggi. Wonny Olives is the brainchild of Liane Arno and Matt Stone – the 600kg Italian-made beast of a presser is their gift to the community.
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By Dan Drummond
Darkness found in every tunnel Yet lamp light finds its way there Splint coal shovel and pick Skip pony haulage Lizzy waits on orders Found wanting Mullock heaps played on by Truants wagging school McBride Billson Murray Miners' cottages kept neat Some in ruin Shop girl teacher plumber Postie peddles hard against the wind Farmer shops before evening milking Concrete curb and channel Town drain lamp posts bollards In the distance cypress trees of old Hang their sad branches down No more now going Under ground. With apologies to Dylan Thomas By Helen Zervopoulos THE recent community recovery meetings were an opportunity for council, emergency services and AusNet to understand how the devastating storm on February 13 affected the community in order to improve strategies to deal with natural disasters in the future. The meeting at the Grantville hall was extremely well attended by both residents and emergency service representatives, including the SES, CFA, Police, Ambulance and allied emergency service personnel, as well as AusNet. Western Port councillor Geoff Ellis introduced the agenda and praised the community and emergency response teams on the way everyone had worked together to find ways of community support and give help to those in need. IT IS hardly thinkable that your house could catch fire while you are out, at exactly the same time as power is returned after a three-day outage. Add further devastation to find that a clerical error has left you without the financial protection of home and contents insurance. Just writing it now makes me feel a bit sick. But it happened. And as I've found, it happens not infrequently to people in our society. (NB. If you are reading this and not sure if you have home and contents insurance in place, now might be a good time to check.) The words of my next door neighbour, Dave, still ring in my ears. He called me as I drove home from Kernot, where I work as a personal care attendant. I was about 15 minutes from home. The power had just come back on and I was daydreaming about life after our three-day power outage. I thought about the tiny speck of ice that remained in the chest freezer in the garage that was keeping my milk and dog food cool. The timing was perfect for me, as in three days was about the limit of comfort in my house without power. No lights, hot water, refrigeration, stove ... inconvenient. By Beryl Farr IT’S all very well to expand to the north of Wonthaggi (Wonthaggi set to double Jan 18, 2024) but what about the forgotten south? Less than 1.5km from the Bass Coast Shire Council offices, we have unmade dirt roads, streets with no footpaths, or uneven and overgrown footpaths. Add open mosquito-filled drains that overflow when it rains. All of it unhealthy for residents. Years ago we could speak to our ward councillor about such matters but not any more. Remember we also vote in the South. By Ron Kousal THE Sicilian mafia, La Cosa Nostra, can be traced back to the mid-19th century when the following peculiar, unlikely and some untrue events transpired that eventually brought the fledgling enterprise to Rhyll. The malevolents, known here as La Causa Nostril, portray a sad tale of underground destruction and unconscious hidden malice. Mafia men are braggarts and laggards, men of “honour” who intimidate, kill and steal. Like other organised crime groups, they profit from conduct hidden behind closed doors, deeds done in dark. But this model of behaviour was actually one they learnt, by experiment, at their first unlikely Sicilian outpost in Rhyll. LAST week the State Government gave the green light for massive new estates that will more than double Wonthaggi’s population from the current 8500 to 20,000. Under the Wonthaggi North East Precinct Structure Plan, the paddocks to the north-east of the town will be turned into housing estates, parklands, a school, shops, a village hub and factories over the next 30 years. Our little country town is destined to become a major regional centre. Many of us will be long gone by the time it’s finished but we will see rapid growth in the next few years. In fact we’re seeing it already. Whoever dreamed we’d see gridlock in the Wonthaggi CBD most days? Who envisaged our million dollar houses, our display village, our car rental depot, our massive new hospital, our Bunnings megastore? By Selena Routley Being alone, homeless (I am currently living in a van) and a writer, I often seek spaces like cafés and pubs to be in an environment where people, especially families with children, are enjoying each other’s company. Most proprietors in Inverloch know me by sight and are lovely to me. Most people in the area likewise are wonderful. On New Year’s Eve, I was in a local hotel. I had been wonderfully uplifted and inspired by the gorgeous sunset and was busy writing and enjoying my wine when one of a heavily drinking group intruded on my space with a “Ow’s it goin, Luv?!”. By Ron Kousal THAT’S what it might have been if our guns hadn’t been handed in to John Howard 20 years ago. And we’re all better off for it now because only in my mind was I a crack shot. If I’d let a few bullets fly here at the homestead in McIlwraith Rd, a lot of unintended consequences might have ensued. It’s very unlikely that my quarry would have been hit; it would have just scarpered away and hidden. And learnt not to be around when I had that big loud thing in my hand. Those big loud sticks are pretty useless, anyway. Here at the RK Homestead, we’ve declared war on them, built fortifications to exclude, lock the gates every night and conduct scouting operations many mornings at 5am. And the whole plan works beautifully, except when it doesn’t, which has my scalp rent of remaining hair as I cry out and beat my chest – there it is, in the middle of the lawn, the rabbit. At dusk on November 27 – a full moon – the Inverloch jetty was transformed by a Buddhist ritual: Loy Krathong, or the Full Moon Ceremony. Local Thai people and Karen people from Myanmar, their families and friends gathered with hand-made wreaths decorated with flowers and candles. Ploen Panyo, who helped to organise the ceremony, said it was an important part of Buddhist culture for people from many countries. By Jillian Durance THE school children laid their poppies here yesterday, handcrafted from red paper pasted onto icy pole sticks. Poked into the hard ground in front of the memorial cairn, some have lost their purchase and lie flat; their fragile edges flutter in the southerly breeze; the halyards clank on the empty flagpole. This year the Remembrance Day services have been held elsewhere, but at least the children remembered: yesterday. Today, Saturday, the road through Kongwak is quiet. The trees fringing the northern side stand straight, trunks evenly spaced. All deciduous, they have sprouted a fresh green in the past few weeks; oaks and pinoaks, mainly, some have trunks broad enough to hide behind. European trees, planted over a hundred years now, by women it is said whose sons and brothers had left the district to go to war on the other side of the world. For ‘King and Country’. Jane Ross and Christine Grayden call for a brief pause to remember the harsh reality of war for so many service people and civilians. A century of Legacy By Jane Ross Fear not that you have died for naught; The torch you threw to us we caught! Those evocative words from a poem called ‘The Answer’, written in response to Lieutenant Colonel John McRae’s equally emotive ‘In Flanders Fields’, encapsulates the impetus for the formation of Legacy. A uniquely Australian organisation, Legacy has been assisting war widows and their children for the past 100 years. The spirit of Legacy is service and the torch is its symbol. Legatees pause to reflect on Remembrance Day (November 11) but theirs is an enduring quest for homage to those who fought to preserve our freedom. By Belinda Henderson IN EARLY 2016, my partner & I bolted down the South Gippy highway, incurring a bit of “white line fever” (that’s where you stare at the road ahead, clocking the road signs and hopefully, the speed limits) before arriving at Wonthaggi. Late for our first appointment with a real estate agent, hereafter known as the REA, we apologised profusely before realising, slowly, that we needn’t have been sorry at all. We were there to view three properties, with a view to buy. Why Wonthaggi? A clumsy formula of low house prices + services - not middle of nowhere + I sort of knew the place + six months pregnant = Wonthaggi. As told to Matt Stone MY NAME is Harry Hyper Highpurr. Some people call me adorable – and I think I am with my fluffy coat and my bright blue eyes. But others call me a murderer. They say that I should be eradicated – well perhaps not straight away but over time. I can understand that people might get concerned about feral cats. After all they don’t have loving servants owners to feed and groom and cuddle them. They have to eat and so they do kill a lot where they roam. The trouble is that the professors who did their study try to make out that we domestic cats are a bigger threat. "Whilst each urban cat kills fewer animals on average than a feral cat in the bush, in urban areas the density of cats is much higher (over 60 cats per square kilometre). As a result, cats in urban areas kill many more animals per square kilometre each year than cats in the bush." Now – really – surely that is playing with statistics, isn’t it? It is like saying that my owner eats more when they sit at a large table with friends than if they eat alone. By Jen Riley GETTING older can be a lonely experience for some people. Seeing a friendly face and having a regular visitor can help change that. The Aged Care Volunteer Visitors Scheme (formerly known as the Community Visitors Scheme) matches volunteer visitors to residents living in an aged care facility or living in their own home. The program aims to help diminish the feelings of isolation and loneliness. I asked Antonietta, one of our wonderful visitors in the Bass Coast area, to explain what makes this program so special, for visitors as well as residents. By Ken Blackman
DECADES ago, you could camp in The Glade; the old stone shelter survives, but the sites that once stretched west for over a hundred metres are gone. All were moved to provide more and better camping – and to re-purpose focused public open space in a central location. The way the township has slowly grown since, in activity and amenity, has left its central coastal zone as a key environmental asset. The Glade, part of that, is the town’s natural outdoor-gathering area. Its reasonable preservation – from environmental degradation, from built penetration and oversight-pollution - is clearly of primary importance to the town. By Maddy Harford
REFUGEE Week in Bass Coast is a time for celebration. With a long history (about 15 years) of welcoming and supporting refugees from various corners of the globe, we can reflect on successful settlements and integration and the diversity these have contributed to our community. Our most recent arrivals are the Ali family who arrived in Wonthaggi from Syria, via Iraq, in November. Lukman and Khadija Ali and their four young children came to Australia under the new Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot (CRISP to its friends), which engages groups of everyday Australians to wrap comprehensive support around the new arrivals. By Brett Tessari FOUR weeks ago more than 300 people turned up to the Wonthaggi Workmen’s Club on a cold and wet night because they want to save the State Coal Mine. With underground tours suspended and the café closed, the State Coal Mine is doomed unless something changes – and fast. The passion in the room was obvious as person after person spoke about what the place meant to them and their families, not just as a historic precinct commemorating our coal mining history but as a gathering place for the community. By Catherine Watson MONASH Liberal MP Russell Broadbent believes Australia’s First Peoples have shown “deep mercy and a pure heart” in the Uluru Statement from the Heart in inviting Australians to walk with them into a better future for all. Mr Broadbent will not be actively campaigning in the lead-up to the referendum on a Voice to Parliament, but he has made his position clear over many years. He contributed to Statements from the Soul, a book of essays published in February which featured Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish and Hindu religious and cultural perspectives on the Uluru Statement from the Heart. By Margie Matheson SOME time ago, I was researching Henry’s Creek Sanctuary, Loch. It led me to a story about Gordon and Joan Henry written by Gill Heal and shared in the Bass Coast Post in 2014. Gordon’s and Joan’s passion and vision for this property lit me up. As I walked the property with a local real estate agent a year ago, shivers ran through my entire being. But my heart sank to see the property in its current shape. Bridges had collapsed. Bush tracks were almost unrecognisable. Two foxes ran out of the bush. By Rob Parsons
IN HIS Mayor’s Message of February 14, Bass Coast Mayor Cr Michael Whelan writes: “Modern Councils are charged with responsibilities that go beyond the traditional three Rs: Roads, Rates and Rubbish”. He wrote that last year he joined 38 mayors from across Australia to sign a joint statement in support of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. There are 537 councils in Australia so this represents around 7% of all Australian councils. Obviously the other 93% have seen the sense in staying out of it. By Jen Rutherford SOMEBODY asked me recently what I do in Corinella. (With that feel of “What could anyone possibly do in Corinella?!”) Here’s my answer. Learn swing dancing, teach a self-evolvement course, run a business consulting to the community housing sector, run a monthly community gathering called Waterline Living Library, volunteer for wombat mange management, propagate and plant mangroves, help community connect via the Corinella Residents and Ratepayers community building subcommittee, organise social events, lawn bowl, walk my dogs two or three times a day, swim, visit old people, ride my bike, bake sourdough bread, which I’m planning to teach, planning a clothes swap event, grow fruit and vegetables, help in the community garden, smile at strangers and make time for spontaneous chats with neighbours, tend to chickens, planning a women’s dancercise class for Corinella hall. By Hilary Stuchbery THE worldwide Repair Café movement was started in 2007 by Martine Postma who had the first session in Amsterdam in 2009. The Cafés teach people to see their possessions in a new light. Our landfills are full of vast amounts of good stuff with almost nothing wrong, which could get a new lease on life after a simple repair. It’s often easy and a lot of fun. If things can be used for longer, it saves money, reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products and cuts CO2 emissions. I first heard about it in 2019 and, with the e-waste problem growing, thought it was time for a similar initiative here in Wonthaggi. By John Cobbledick AS A proud Australian of English/Irish descent, “transported as convicts on the first and second fleets”, I am disgusted with the attitude of the Bass Coast Shire Council regarding Australia Day. What a disgrace no national anthem was played as part of the official ceremony on January 26 for those who proudly received their citizenship. We proud Australians of Bass Coast apparently do have some representation on the council in the person of Deputy Mayor Cr Rochelle Halstead who invited those attending to join in singing the anthem. Thank you, Councillor. I remind the council and shire officers that Australia Day is a day of celebration for all Australians: black, white, and those by choice. It is unforgivable that I and many others have been excluded from celebrating this day as it should be celebrated, by a shire that claims inclusiveness and tolerance. |