A Friend in Need

It's raining enough to wash out my planned job this morning at my friends Pat and Mal's place. Pat has had some bad luck lately, the worst of it being a broken foot, two breaks in main bones and foot in plaster to seriously curtail her normal busy gardening.

The rain will clear but I have to move to foliage picking for three customers who come Friday afternoon and Saturday. I went to the post office and found in our mail a letter and Xmas card from my old friend Nicki Bridges at Moyhu. Our friendship goes back nearly forty years to when I lived at Moyhu renting a house on a neighbouring farm.Nick and John showed me considerable kindness often inviting me for a meal or to share a social gathering with them. Nick even had a couple of tries at matchmaking me with local ladies and all in all I have to say it was a very happy time for me the 18 months or so I lived out there.

I went to the post office to post a letter I'd written last night to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. This hand written letter followed a meeting in the Gembrook Community Hall last night between Gembrook residents concerned at the impact the Puffing Billy Masterplan will have on the community, and Puffing Billy CEO John Robinson.

I was home early enough to have a quick bath and put on clean clothes and be up there at 7pm. The meeting slowly progressed with most of the talk being a monologue by the CEO on the virtues of Puffing Billy and its enormous value and potential, and about his own personal history with the organisation. On and on he went, I had to ask the chairperson could he be interrupted so that we could ask a question. My turn came; his answer was that there would be no change to the number of PB events held in Gembrook in the completed Masterplan. This despite his earlier comments that everyone's submission had been considered - I made a submission in early October - no reply as yet - and that as a result of submissions there would be a flow on resulting from the strengthening of the document in the nearly completed final master plan.

At this point I said I was leaving the meeting, I could see no point in me sitting there listening to the CEO spruik about how wonderful he and Puffing Billy was, and that I wanted it recorded how I deeply resented the intrusion to our quiet little rural town, and that I had heard enough bullshit to last me a life time.

As I walked to my car I could hear loud laughter coming from the meeting room and I assume I had created some mirth in the gathering, which if was at my expense, did not make me feel any happier.

I went home and resisted the desire to open a bottle of serious red and slashed down a few Edenvale no alcohol glasses with my chicken schnitzel. Later I went to Facebook and saw a post about how the Victorian Government was to be the first in Australia to initiate legislation to allow assisted dying.

Now I don't think Daniel Andrews is very popular at the moment, especially with the Herald Sun newspaper and radio 3AW, but above that I have to say I admire the man for his courage, and that was the basis of my letter to him, one of congratulations on being a politician with a bit of spine, a commodity in short supply in Australia. Of course I also vented a little of my frustration with the Puffing Billy bullies and PB's entrenchment with councils and governments.

My opinion, which I will repeat loudly at every opportunity, is that PB is a symbol of the industrial revolution. It manipulates authorities with emphasis on Thomas the Tank Engine and Santa Claus and happy children. A smokescreen, literally and figuratively. If we sit back and rely on Chinese tourists coming we will end up like Greece and Italy on the precipice of bankruptcy. We are in a new age of technology and environment restoration and sustainability. Tourism needs to fit this new criteria. Australia is unique for its flora and fauna and magnificent landscape, not for Thomas the Tank Engine or a bloody steam train hooting its way around the hills spewing coal smoke and cinders. We need new industry, new crops, new forests, new ideas, real work opportunities; not 900 volunteers mucking around with a steam train. Imagine what good use 900 people could do in volunteer work for something useful. You wouldn't have a weed or bit of litter in the district. As it is now the feds are throwing $millions to PB and $millions to dubious weed eradication projects somehow mysteriously (to me) linked to bush fire protection. It's all to catch votes, never mind how effective any of it is.

Anyway, Nicki said in her letter she reads my blog and savours it. That made me feel a lot better, even if she said she feels some dissent with my comments sometimes. This post is for you Nick. Thanks for your friendship over the decades.

It has stopped raining, I'd better get cracking.