Goonellabah’s Lynne de Weaver has led a fascinating life, multifaceted life, that’s taken her from education, to the heady heights of the advertising industry, community engagement and regional economic development. Because I speak with an American accent, most everybody I meet asks me: “where were you born?” And I say Glasgow, Scotland. It's kind of funny. My family moved to the US when I was six years old and the first thing you learn to do when you move to a regional town in western New York State is to speak like everybody else or they make fun of you.I've been in Australia since 1969, when I was 26. The whole time I was growing up we had snow and cold so my father would say to my mother: "We should have gone to Australia". His best friend came out to Australia - he was the thriftiest, nicest man you'd ever, ever, ever meet - so we've always been in contact with Australia because of my “uncle” Horace.After we came to Sydney, I did my degree in early childhood education at Ku-Ring-Gai College of Advanced Education. That's where I first heard about the Northern Rivers College for Advanced Education because they used to come down and put on concerts for the Ku-Ring-Gai people.Then my husband and I had to go back to the US for family reasons. I taught first grade there and I got my master's degree but we couldn't wait to get back to Australia. We came back for good in ‘84 and I've been here ever since.I've always been a writer and when I was in the US I wrote a lot of copy for vitamin advertisements, because I was interested in natural medicines and things like that. I got very good at writing direct response copy, which is anything used on a coupon or a 1800 number. They’re all calls to action and you describe products by their benefits, not by their features. There's a whole bunch of little tricks. So when we got back to Australia I ended up working at the advertising agency Wunderman’s, copywriting there, because believe it or not, direct response copywriting is a very special skill. Then I went to work at Brand Direct, which is an international agency, and became their creative director and we opened up offices in Melbourne as well as Sydney and I got to travel back and forth to the UK, to their head office, which was really great fun. And then I had my own business, De Weaver Integrated Marketing. Which was kind of fun to do too because it had some really neat clients.We didn't move up to the Northern Rivers until December 1999. I was going to work remotely because as a writer you can choose to work anywhere you want and I had a great art director in the US. But when we arrived up here to live in Yamba we discovered, believe it or not, that they had pair gain wiring in the houses and you couldn't get any kind of decent internet.So I started working, trying to get them a proper ISP there, and improve the bandwidth going into Yamba. I'd been so used to using the Internet in Sydney and I just thought it'd be no problem, but it would take eight hours overnight to download stuff and that was if your line didn't drop out thanks to the pair gaining. That lead me to my first role in community engagement. I helped Yamba get a community ISP and get themselves up to speed and then I found out about the Community Technology Center program, which the state and federal governments were rolling out, focusing on introducing small regional communities of under 3000 to the internet, how to use it and do work with it and all this stuff. I wound up working for the Community Technology Center New South Wales program as the Northern Rivers coordinator for two years. I had to move up to Lennox because most of the clients were up this end. I worked in, I think, every small community in the Northern Rivers. I just loved it. So many really interesting people worked in Uki and Nimbin and Kygole and Evans head and Woodburn and all of little communities all along the way. And it was just a fabulous experience.That's how I got hooked on regional economic development. I was asked to join the Northern Rivers Regional Economic Development Board, which morphed into Regional Development Australia Northern Rivers. I went from one board to the other and kept my interest in regional economic development.When the CTC program funding ended, I started working at Southern Cross University in their marketing department and I had a wonderful time and then I decided I would do a PHD. I think I was probably one of the older students to get a PHD, but it was all based on the work I'd already done in regional development.My PHD was called Jumping Through Hoops, How to Apply for a Government Grant. Because I had been a writer and a copywriter and a marketing person, I incorporated all that and all the things that I did when working with communities to help them achieve their goals. I finished my PHD but in the middle I got sick. So it took a little longer than normal.I’ve also written three books. The first thing I had to do when I came up to the Northern Rivers, because I had just done a book deal with Pearson Education, was write a book called Marketing for Small Business. I wrote another book about direct marketing for small business and I edited a book for Ric Richardson, who lives at Byron Bay. He’s the man who founded Uniloc and took on Microsoft in court and won. I got to work with him when I was on the Regional Economic Development Board and when he decided he was going to write a book about getting patents approved, he got me to edit it. I think there's a tremendous amount of social capital in the Lismore community. I think Jenny Dowell’s just the most phenomenal person, the energy level that that woman has is just tremendous. Brett Adlington at the gallery, I think he's doing an amazing job. What's happening in the Quad, I think is a fantastic example of Lismore at its best. I think that's why Keen Street has more of a buzz to it than Molesworth St because they're tying in more to the things that are going on in the quad.I think Lismore has great potential but I think people just have to realize that the only way you get things done is to get up and do it. One of the classic things that I think is just absolutely fantastic is the Knitting Nannas. I mean they are the most amazing group of women. I participated with them for a couple of years until with my health I couldn't go on all the road trips they go on anymore. There's an example of community engagement that's just phenomenal. They've got probably over 80 groups all around Australia and there's even groups of Knitting Nannas in the UK and the US. And that all started from the Bentley blockade. There's an awful lot of little pockets of amazing people here and the Knitting Nannas are right up there.I’m retired now but I never really retired, I just got sick. I got guillain barre syndrome which is an autoimmune disorder, about seven years ago, and then it morphed into a more chronic version. I still don't have full use of my hands, but I just make do with what I have and just keep on trucking. I've been keeping myself rehabilitated as best I can. I do Tai Chi and swim and exercise and things like that, but there's no more running on the beach for me and I used to love doing thatNow I'm trying to turn my PHD into a book. There's so many people who do regional economic development and community consultation, but a lot of it is just understanding how to talk to people and getting on the same wavelength. A lot of the stuff the government puts out is kind of like double dutch. I still work. It's just finding the time to sit down and nail myself in front of my computer and I've got so many things, almost half done, but you get interrupted and once you've done a PHD and written all those papers, you look at it and you just shudder. But I’ll get it done. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

Bronwen Campbell was named the inaugural Dunoon Woman of the Year earlier this year for her contribution to the local community. However, the focus of her primary occupation as a leading expert in commercial diver training has her working both nationally and internationally, showing that it is possible to think and act both locally and globally. I'm currently employed almost full time with Phoenix International (Australia) who have won the Commonwealth Government contract to provide submarine rescue services to the Navy. They're a Perth based company so I work remotely most of the time. Phoenix employed me even though I live on the opposite side of the country because of my specialist expertise in training in the diving and hyperbaric industries. It's an interesting role as training coordinator for submarine rescue systems. My job is to analyse all the roles in the team and develop qualifications and training systems to make sure that all the people are competent and ready to run a full submarine rescue at literally a moment’s notice. When you rescue people from a submarine, you need to mobilise an entire team of people and a huge amount of equipment to the site where the submarine has sunk. Then you take a remotely operated manned vehicle down and mate it to the submarine, rescue the people inside then bring them to the surface and if necessary, treat them in a hyperbaric chamber. It's a major exercise and involves a large team all with very different skills. Probably the most high-profile recent submarine rescue attempt was the one in Argentina involving Phoenix International, the parent company of Phoenix International (Australia). The reason I'm working for them from Dunoon, rather than moving to Perth, is because I also work locally for the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme (called ADAS for short) and assist with managing our macadamia farm. And of course, who would want to move away from our beautiful region!Bronwen Campbell and Rob Gatt at a charity fundraiser with the Dunoon United FC. PHOTO: Supplied.I originally qualified as a process engineer in New Zealand and came to Australia in 1986 to work in the oil and gas industry. In 2000, my husband Rob Gatt - who was a police search and rescue diver - was approached to develop nationally recognised qualifications for ADAS, who manage certification for commercial divers in Australia and New Zealand. Because of my background which involved engineering construction, training and diving experience, it made sense to work together. We developed all the qualifications for commercial divers in Australia. We’ve both continued to work with the scheme since then in various capacities. ADAS was a government body and used to be located in Canberra, but the person who was running it managed to convince the Department at the time that he would be able to run it from his beautiful farm in Dunoon, so that's how I was introduced to the local community.  We visited Dunoon and, as many of us do, fell in love with the place and from then on worked towards trying to move the family up here. We bought a macadamia farm here in 2003 and continued to work in Melbourne for quite some time but eventually managed to move up here in 2009 with full time work with ADAS. Rob and I now run the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme, essentially job sharing, although Rob is officially the Executive Director. It's not very often you can work in a professional field with your husband, and I find it really rewarding.  Not many people know that the national certification body for all commercial divers is running out of the relatively small village of Dunoon. So that's always good fun when people look us up on Google Maps and think we're being run from the middle of a field.  People often don’t realise that you can live in an area like this and still have those global connections and international influence. It’s easy to think you have be in the big cities, but we have adequate infrastructure and technology to be able do amazing things – of course we could still do with more, such as fast internet and good mobile phone reception. When we first moved to Dunoon, we were managing a large project which was still Melbourne based, building a dive supervisor training simulator – the first of its kind in the world. I was spending a month in Melbourne and then coming back here for a month or two and then back to Melbourne. Rob was very involved in the community right from the very start, getting involved in soccer with the Dunoon United Football Club. I wasn't really a sports person and it took me a little longer to get involved in football. I did look for some community involvement and contribution and initially managed the Dunoon Gazette website. I then became editor of the Dunoon Gazette, although it was supposed to be an interim role while they found an editor, as I really didn’t feel that I had the time to do the role well enough, due to all my travel commitments. But it has been more than five years now and here I am, still editor! Being the editor gets me involved with all sorts of different people, the schools, our contributors, advertisers and so on, so that's been fantastic. However, it wasn't really until I joined the local soccer team that I began to feel much more a part of the community from a social perspective. It’s difficult to fit in my soccer commitments amongst all the travel, but I do my best, particularly because it's good for your health as well. I try and make sure I get back in time for games and schedule my travel around them if I can. And we also need to make time to volunteer, such as helping out at Pink Sports Day for Breast Cancer fundraising and awareness. When I signed up, I was the oldest player in the football club. I was a little bit unsure whether I could actually manage to play soccer at my age, as I'd never played before, but I met other people through the soccer competitions and so on who were actually older than me and they were really important role models for me to keep going. Every year I would try and find someone older than me to inspire me to keep going.  I was initially dubious that I could manage another year of soccer with my work this year, but we are working hard as a club to engage the community and particularly to enhance female participation. I figured that it might be good to be a role model both for female participation and for continuing to play sport even as the oldest female member of the club. And without that commitment to a team, I knew I would end up working too hard and start to neglect my own health and wellbeing.Bronwen Campbell walking the Costa Brava recently. PHOTO: Supplied. Living in a regional area while working with a team on the other side of the country can be a little bit challenging, despite having fantastic technology to keep in touch with people that you're working with. I think face to face contact is still really valuable so I try to get over there at least every couple of months. It's critical to have support networks when your work takes you away from home. For example I have a co-editor of the Dunoon Gazette who was able to finish off a few things when I went to Spain recently for work. We have also been lucky to have family and close friends to make sure our children have been looked after when Rob and I have had to go away together. They are adults now, so that has made things much easier. One of the fantastic things about a community like this is the fact that we are able to build those strong community networks and support networks. I think that's valuable from a whole range of perspectives. For people's general wellbeing, it's good to be surrounded by community that has your back, so to speak, and to enable us to do the things that we do. We knew from the first day we visited Dunoon that it was a very special place. It took us a long time to make the move, but when we did it was like coming home. We count ourselves as very privileged to be able to live and work in this wonderful community, contribute locally and at the same time maintain our global networks and international influence in our professional lives

John Ryan - who joined the Lismore Pipe Band in 1952 and became drum major in 1961- recently passed on the baton after announcing he was retiring from the role earlier this year. He's been a significant figure in the community over the years, winning numerous awards for his service. He spoke to the Lismore App this week about how he got into the role, what he got out of it and how the band - and Anzac Day - has changed over the years.On Anzac Day this week I went down at 8am and watched the march from outside the Civic Hotel. Afterwards, I went in with the boys and had a chat to them when they finished. It was the first time in 67 years I haven't marched and sat on the sidelines and watched instead.It was different. Let's put it that way. It was sort of sad. Yes and no. I knew the time would have to come. The road was getting longer and I was getting older.I was born in Coraki. Mum and dad were at Lismore but then I used to spend a lot of time with my grandmother on the other side of Coraki. When I first went to school it was at the East Lismore school, which is Lismore Public now, and then I went to the old high school in the CBD.I got a job as a joiner when I left school at Lardner and Jones, just across the two bridges, which burned down. Then I was 43 years at Dayal Singh's. I was in charge there when I retired. People today change jobs like they're changing shirts these days but I had two jobs. That's all.Apart from that my life has been soccer - I helped found the Lismore Thistles Soccer Club - and the pipe band.I had mates in the band, when I was about 17, so I decided to join as well. After I was in the pipe band for a while, I joined the 31st army band as well because we got paid there. I think it was once a week we got two pounds or a pound. You got paid every three months and got six or seven pounds, which was a lot of money back then.We used to get the bags from Scotland and they were made out of sheepskin, but they used to rot out in the climate here so we got kangaroo hides instead. They used to have to fill them with honey which would seep into the seems to seal them, but then you had to watch that the cockroaches didn't get into them, or the ants.Bagpipes are hard to learn because other instruments you've got the music in front of you but with bagpipes you have to learn and memorize all the tunes. The circular breathing is tricky too, because when you take a breath you have to push the bag to get the same pressure going through all the reeds; you have to coordinate it. Once you get it, you're right, but it takes a while.I was a piper for about nine years before I became the drum major. Our old drum major McPherson, he got older and left, and the guy they put in to replace him didn’t last long. We were going to a highland gathering in McLean and we had to have a drum major so they put me in and I had it since then. A fresh-faced John Ryan at Coffs Harbour in 1961, not long after being made drum major. PHOTO: Supplied.To be a good drum major, you've got to have a good voice - your drum major is there to drill the band - and the band follows you when you march. In the army, they dress to the right and in the pipe band you dress to the centre, which is the drum major. So when I go that way, they go that way. When I go into the pub after the Anzac Day ceremony, they go into the pub.The band used to have engagements, I'd say at least twice a week, years ago. Every weekend you'd be playing at something. They used to have the garden parties for the church, all that stuff. We didn't charge, it was always a bunch of flowers or a cake or something, but then we had to start charging. John Ryan carrying the Haggis at the 1974 Highland Ball. PHOTO: Supplied.We used to have the Chincogan festival, the Fairymount Festival at Kyogle, all those, but the insurance became too expensive. The band's insured for $20 million, which costs a lot of money. That's the minimum. That's the killer.There are other costs as well. Only 12 months ago, we got new drums and it cost $13,500. People don't realise the money that's in it. When we used to have full dress, mine would be worth over $2,000. The kilt alone is $500 and it's nearly $500 for the jacket, and then your sporran is $200 or $300. It soon adds up. It costs a lot to keep a band going.Today the pipe would do Anzac Day, Beef Week, the Billy Cart Parade at Bangalow at the Lantern Parade and probably the Lismore Show, that's it. We might only do six events a year.I always enjoyed being in the band. I made a lot of friends. You meet a lot of nice people. You travel a lot. The band was like one big family. Two or three of the members, their daughters or sons would be in the band too. So it was sort like a family in itself.My wife Barbara and I made some of our best friends in the band. Us and two other couples have been to New Zealand together, and trips in Australia. Our closest friends would all be in the band. We're booked to go to the tattoo in Sydney in October. We've been two of them, this will be the third.In 2007 at the McLean gathering. PHOTO: Supplied.Years ago, when I first started in the band, on Anzac day we used to start at the Presbyterian church and it would go right around the block. It also used to start at 10 o’clock instead of 9 o’clock. There's less diggers today. There's not as many of them now. If you took the school kids out there wouldn't be very many in the march now at all. They used to have a brass band in Lismore. A good brass band. You had the Salvation Army band, the South Lismore school had a band, Woodlawn had a band and they were all along... now there's just a pipe band and there's a band that sits in the middle of the street that plays.The Catholic schools used to practice marching before Anzac Day but the kids today just sort of walk along. Woodlawn had a drummer to try and and give them a bit of a beat this year. He was beating the Christ out of the drum.But the number of people who come along hasn't changed much. There's always been a good crowd. And they're letting Vietnam Vets march now, which they should have earlier.Membership of the band has fallen off over the years since I first started. We have a lot of young ones come in but when they leave school they go away for uni or jobs. We have a ladies auxiliary who do a terrific job raising money, doing lamington drives and everything and their membership is dwindling too.But that's an issue everywhere, for all community organisations.John Ryan at the 2014 Glen Innes Celtic Festival. PHOTO: Supplied.We've got two or three learners that are coming now. If you get young ones, we find they're in there for a while and then they either get boyfriends or girlfriends or jobs and they go, whereas if you get someone who is 25 or 28 you're more likely to keep them for a while. The two learning are up around 30. So they should be good.I think there always will be a pipe band in Lismore. We had our 70 years reunion a couple of years ago. The band, we've had our ups and downs, we’ve been down to six pipers and we've had it up to 14 or 15 pipers. At one stage we had a girls band for a little while. We had too many in the band so we started a girls band but it didn't last long.The new band leader Glen will go alright. You've got to give him a go. It's something that if you're in the band you're following someone, and when you're in front you’re out there by yourself and if you make a boo boo or you make a wrong signal, they'll follow you. It's lonely out there.Anzac Day was his first day. He's got a lot to learn, but he'll learn. We all have to start that way. Every job you can never criticise them because if you don't have a go you'll never learn and never go anywhere.

Popular Lismore local Noreen Colley reopened the relocated Duck Pond Espresso Bar this week in Union St, South Lismore, but “cafe owner” is actually only the third - and possibly not even final - chapter in the story of her working career. In 1966, I started working at New England apparel, which was a menswear factory over south. I can clearly remember the first day when the boss was walking along and the girl that was teaching me was capable of doing 450 pairs of trousers, doing the back seams each day, and I hadn't completed eight. I could see the boss coming and thought, oh, this isn't going to be good. He's going to fire me. And he just walked past and went "see you tomorrow". That was on the Monday. And then by the Wednesday I had managed to do actually 15 back seams. And then on the Friday he walked up and pushed the trousers aside and sat on the box beside me and he said, "How do you think you're doing?". And I said: "Well, if you're going to fire me, make it short and quick". And he said: "No, no, no. I can see a lot of potential in you. See you Monday." And with that he walked off and I looked and I looked at the girl that was training me and I said, “So how long did it take you to get to 450?” She said: "Probably about six months." So within eight weeks I was doing 600 and she told me to slow down because I was making her look bad. So that was my start and my introduction into the fashion industry.After I left New England Apparel in about 1982, a bride asked me to do her three bridesmaids dresses. None of the girls liked what was picked out for them, so after the wedding was over, they brought them back to me. After they left, another girl walked in the door and she said, “Oh look, I'm just looking for three bridesmaids dresses. What can you do cheap?” These three dresses were hanging on the door and she said, “Can I hire those?” That was the start of Lismore Bridals. It started from three bridesmaids dresses, then I started to supply some other bridal stores and eventually I was getting them manufactured overseas over in Taipei. In about 2007, my husband fell ill. Basically, the doctors said he needed 24-seven care. He had what they call a mielodisplasia. It's really dreadful. MDS is the abbreviation. It's a really bad formula leukemia to which there is no cure. You basically survive on blood transfusions. And that was the first of eight years with a massive downhill slide.So I had to just basically shut down and walk away from my business. A friend of mine who could sew, she decided to buy it. I was sitting there beside the bed because my husband would be in hospital for five, six, seven days at a time. So then whilst it was there, I just started helping other patients in the room if they needed to get across to the bathroom or whatever and then I decided, well, while I'm here I might as well start and hit the books to become a nurseI think it was just spending so much time at the hospital, in probably one of the worst wards you could be in, the cancer ward, and to see how these people could put on such a brave face and a smile. I happened to be sitting beside the bed one day and the NUM walked in, the nurse unit manager, and she said, “Oh, you've got covered footwear, navy slacks, white top? Come with me.” And I said, “what am I doing?” She said, “Well, if you don't mind, can you do a day's work.” And I said, “:Yeah, but I'm not employed here at the hospital.” She said, “You are now. Do you mind starting in the pan room?” I said, “You've got to start somewhere.”I had eight years at the Lismore Base Hospital. My main role was what they called specialing, so if we had someone with dementia come in or an elderly person, a lot of times their memory doesn't work properly, so they get very confused. There was some alcoholics. It was just one heck of an interesting job.Then about two years ago, I just decided I'd have a change of life and then the little Duck Pond Cafe come up and I thought, yeah, a whole change of scenery. That'd be nice. So hence then I just happened to say to Will one day if you ever want to sell out, make sure I'm the first one you tell and it was only a matter of months later that he said he was closing down and I said, no, you're not because I want to buy it. So I went from nursing to a cafe and I love it. Just love it.It's much like nursing, only in hospital your customers are usually in pajamas or hospital gowns. You still get people from across the board. People that want to say hello, have a chat. You know the ones that are in a hurry, you sort of try to jump their coffee over the queue but most people when they come in, they'll order a coffee, step back pull out their phone, have a chat to the next person. To meet people over coffee is one of the best things you can do. It's a time where you actually put your phone away and actually sit and talk to somebody. If we did more of that, they'd be less stress, less rage. Life would be a lot simpler I think.I can see myself doing this for long time yet because I've made some absolute wonderful friends and customers. Honestly, over the last few weeks while we were setting up, we were averaging up to 40 a day walking past asking, “How much longer to go? When are you opening? You're going to be open this week?” It was great to see on our first morning, they all rolled up. As soon as they saw the gates open, they were here. And I thought, one, that's good friendship, and two, that's loyalty. So you can't ask for better than that. It's just perfect. Really.

In just a few short years Kate Stroud has established herself as a mainstay of the local music scene as a curator, organiser and singer-songwriter in her own right and last year, with the opening of the Dusty Attic Music Lounge, she hopes to have created a new home of the Lismore indy music scene. I grew up with parents who are big music lovers. There was never any dead air in our house. There was always a radio or a mix tape or a CD on in the background. When they would wake up in the morning, I'd hear the flick-flick of the radio and it was on. So I guess music has been in my day-to-day forever. I was the kid at parties in a bassinet underneath the table while it was blaring. So it's in me.I've always found a lot of joy singing and found it's been a big part of my overall wellbeing and means of expression. I was in the Perth Children's Choir for a time and I always loved music through school but I didn't have any formal lessons as a kid. When I got to early adulthood and kind of took charge of my life and my own, I guess, financial situation, that’s when I began lessons.I started with singing lessons and piano lessons. I did a couple of units at WAAPA [Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts] doing theory and aural, which was terribly boring, and had various teachers over there. That's actually what brought me to Lismore because I did the contemporary music degree here at SCU.This area offered, I guess, the kind of that kind of learning and that kind of acceptance and nurturing that I needed.I tend to throw myself in the deep end because that's how I learn and my ambition is always bigger than my skillset. So when I came to uni, I couldn't play an instrument. I'd just played a few odd gigs with friends. So I bought a guitar and I started learning, teaching myself. Eat/Drink/StayIt was tricky because I found myself being quite behind the level of everyone else, but it was also very inspiring to have a bar to raise myself to. I got to a level where I was able to do that and overcome my lack of belief in myself and my feeling that I was terribly uncoordinated. One of the biggest things is learning that you are deserving and people do want to hear what you have to say and that there is a level that they can connect with you on. Playing music is a really vulnerable thing to do in front of people, especially if it's something that you've written. But there's something really empowering standing in that vulnerability and delivering a part of yourself to strangers.After three years at uni, I was pretty immersed in the community. I'd been running the open mic for three years at the uni and I was working with Red Square Music, Mullum Music Fest and all of those guys. So I had a lot of things within the industry that were tying me here, but I also had nothing tying me there. So I did go home to check and was there for a couple of months but I'd gone past that tipping point of feeling where home was. Running the open mic was really significant because I got to learn about what makes people want to gather in places, about consistency and community, about how people need things like that to have a sense of belonging. I guess I've always been a really strong, I guess, coordinator and organizer.I was also running a series of naughty house shows - pushing the limits a bit - and there were many nights underneath the stars with too much of everything and a lot of fun. Health & BeautyHaving those house shows was kind of like the platform for where I've kind come to now. Those nights where you've collected all of these people in a really special secret intimate location to have these interactions with these artists that are just so intimate and special, it's those moments in time when time does stop and you're like: “how is this even happening? You can't pay for this. This is just one of those special moments of life.” So I guess all that lead up to Dusty Attic. I had a very relaxed conversation with some friends who were passionate about this kind of stuff as well, and we decided to be like, well, why don't, why don't we just do it? There's no reason why we can't do it. I missed having that consistent go to on a Friday or Saturday or whatever night that you knew that there was going to be something good on. And if you wanted just to have that little fix of culture, you could go get it. So I decided that that was what I was going to do. So we found a space, we signed a lease, we started the proceedings with council to get it rolling. And, you know, unfortunately we had the whole flood incident, which was really devastating. And it we had to start again and that set us back a year to open. And I guess that's what I've been working on the last few years to try and create and to have a platform for local musicians to play out.It's a small business, so of course it's challenging but I've received amazing support from the community, which is brilliant. And I feel like I'm in that phase now where it's like everyone needs you to prove yourself, unfortunately. I feel like I'm in the slugging it out time now where people are waiting to see if it's going to be delivered consistently and if it's going to be something that's going to have longevity or if it's something else it's going to pass. I'm just doing my best to wade through that time and to keep doing what I'm doing and learn how to do it better because I'm still learning in this process.So far I think some of the best moments at Dusty Attic have been performances from people who were still even starting out. Maybe it's because I can resonate with them, but they walk off that stage feeling really loved and supported and heard, which is a pretty incredible feeling. Other nice moments, I'm going to get on my little feminist high horse here, are when I’ve met people who at first go “oh, are you the owner?” Yes, I'm the owner. “Oh, okay.” And then want to speak to you about the tech specs and sound gear and things like that and I can answer them because I do know what I'm talking about and to have that moment of feeling like: no, I deserve to be here. I bloody do know what I'm talking about. And yeah, you can wipe that surprised, look off your face. I do know how to roll lead. Yes. Thanks for asking. One of the highlights was when Liz Stringer come through. Liz has been doing this for 10, 15 plus years, the hard yards around pubs around Australia, around Canada. She's an Oz female singer, songwriter icon. She came through and I got an email from her afterwards in reflection thanking us for what we're doing, because in her opinion there are not many spaces left like Dusty Attic - dedicated spaces for music - and that it is really special. Another part of who I am and stuff I do is sign writing, which is also really important for me. It’s the thing that actually pays my bills - usually late - but they get paid. I’m a sign writer and hand letterer and I also do graphic design work. So I've been doing that since 2012 and I moved that over with me and started doing cafe chalkboards and friends’ gig posters and stuff like that, which evolved to handle lettering and brush work. So that's also something that I need to get a little bit more balance for because it's a skill that takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s something that I find really fulfilling and integral for my happiness I guess. Another community event that I run is the Reel Abrupt Film Festival with myself and two other friends. We've had community arts grants for it twice now and run it in Nesbitt Lane in conjunction with a The Loft. It’s another very different kind of festival, but also one that's really lovely because it's accessible for any kind of creative which is I guess another thread of the inclusion and community, which I believe is really important for places like Lismore and just humanity in general.I'm really interested to see how Dusty Attic will grow and evolve because in the six months it's changed a lot. I want to see if I can grow it to be a little bit of an icon in the way that spaces have been to me. If I can be that for other people, I'm going to be stoked. I want to expand to be able to hold more people and open up that back space, so I can have larger events. In regards to the community, I want to be able to make it accessible for people who are ability challenged and the deaf community I've started working in that kind of way. So I guess continually growing an inclusive space. I believe it’s a stepping stone, to what I have no freaking idea, but I just know that it is a stepping stone and that I'm just exciting to see what future collaborations will pop up out of it. I'm just open to and excited to see what will happen.Dusty Attic Music Lounge is located at 149 Woodlark St, Lismore, and for more information on Kate's sign writing check out the Stroud de' Signs Facebook page.Retail/Shopping

Bernardine and Barry Cooper are known as local cricketing royalty in the Lismore area. Barry, as President of Lismore District Junior Cricket Association, has overseen a dramatic improvement in the skill level of children playing cricket in the past twenty years. He was behind the popular switch to playing the Unders 16s on Friday afternoons after school, which allowed the kids to play on turf wickets. Berni has for the past five years been the organiser of the biggest cricket carnival in Australia, the Under 12s Lismore Cricket Carnival played on turf wickets annually in January.They have lived in Corndale for more than 28 years, and nearly all their children have played cricket. Their 32-year-old son Tom, who started off in Lismore District Junior Cricket, played an impressive role in Melbourne Renegades’ finals victory against Melbourne Stars in the recent Twenty20 Big Bash League final. It was close for the Renegades with a 13-run victory and Tom scored the most runs for his team with 43 runs not out – one third of the runs for the whole team. Tom also plays in the nation's first-class cricket competition, the Sheffield Shield. He represents South Australia and has played for Australia A.“It was a real up and down game,” remarked Berni of the Big Bash final, “It was a nail-biter that had me on the edge of my seat. It's hard when it's your son out there. The fact that the Renegades got that result and he was a part of it was amazing for me as his mother and a spectator.”Tom Cooper played a match-winning innings for the Melbourne Renegades in the Big Bash League final. Photo: Melbourne Renegades / TwitterTrades & ServicesSon Ben, 27, who returned home to play for Marist Brothers in the Hooker League last Summer, lives and plays cricket in The Netherlands. He started playing club cricket in Amsterdam and then made the national side. The Netherlands is an associate nation within the International Cricket Association.At the time of this interview, Ben was playing T20 cricket in India for the Dutch national side, getting ready for the T20 World Cup qualifiers.Ben and Tom Cooper celebrate a wicket for The Netherlands. Photo: SuppliedBarry takes up a stance of defending T20 in the discussion about traditional Test Cricket versus the newer T20 form. There has been a lot of debate between cricket enthusiasts regarding whether the new play of cricket detracts from the overall game.“It’s like anything. You must go where the demand is. If you’re not a keen cricketer, you would probably enjoy yourself more at a T20 game. It doesn’t take as long and is all over in three hours.”They have one son who is not a cricketer – Sam (28). “We call him the nerdy boy because he got a computer degree, and now he works for Apple. He’s a gamer and lives with other gamers.”They also have a daughter Kate, 30, who works as a school learning support officer at Clunes Public School, where Berni also works as an office manager. They still have two children living with them - Jack and Rachel, who are 17-year-old twins. “They’re in their final year at St John's College, Woodlawn. Jack still plays cricket, and Rachel finished up last season.”Rachel Cooper was part of the first all-girls team, Far North Coast Sixers, at the Under 12 Lismore Cricket Carnival. Photo: Berni CooperJack, who captains the St John's College, Woodlawn, all-conquering cricket team, represented Queensland Under 17 at the 2017 National Championships and is in his third season with the Gold Coast Dolphins and has been selected in First Grade this season. He wants to play State Cricket like older brother Tom.Jack Cooper, who captains the successful St John's College, Woodlawn side, plays a shot representing Queensland Under 17s. Photo: Berni CooperRecent additions to the Cooper family include grandchildren Natasha (9) and Rosalie (six), mothered by Kate, who currently stay with Berni and Barry. Tom’s first child is also due in March.Bernardine and Barry met somewhat circumstantially at the Victoria Hotel in Goondiwindi in Queensland. Barry grew up in Wollongong and went to Wollongong University to study his Bachelor of Education. He was appointed to his first teaching position at Toomelah, an old Aboriginal mission and he lived in Boggabilla.Barry went to the hotel for a couple of drinks and to meet a girl called Bernadette. She stood poor Barry up. However, Bernardine was at the hotel and they got to meet.“I asked what her name was, and she said Bernardine. I said “well, that’s close enough.””Bernardine Cooper was born at Lake Santini in the Netherlands New Guinea, which is the western half of New Guinea. Now part of Indonesia, Netherlands New Guinea was part of the East Indies under the control of the Netherlands kingdom from 1949 to 1962. Berni's father escaped Holland during WWII and joined the RAF. He was based in Singapore and met her mother in Indonesia after WWII. Indonesia had gained independence after World War II and Indonesian nationalists claimed Netherlands New Guinea and all of what was the East Indies as part of their natural sovereign territory.Berni and her family were forced to flee from the territorial conflict and they went back to Holland in 1962. Berni’s father didn’t enjoy the climate back in Europe, so the family decided to move to Australia in 1964. However, the White Australia policy was in place, which excluded people of non-European and non-Protestant origin applying for citizenship until 1973. Berni, her mother and brother weren’t allowed to come into the country due to their Indonesian birth, whilst her father and sister were allowed in because they were born in The Netherlands. They fought the decision and immigration relented to allow Berni and her mother and brother into the country on sympathetic grounds.On arrival, Berni and her family stayed at an immigrant camp out in the far western suburbs of Sydney near Windsor for the first few months in Australia. Her parents bought a motel in Amberley, near Ipswich,Queensland, near the RAAF base. “I remember driving from Sydney up to Queensland, and there was a lot of tall trees and bushland. Also I remember it wasn’t green like Holland was,” said Berni.Moving to Corndale and running carnivalsBerni and Barry married in 1984 and lived in Wollongong where Tom and Kate were born. The couple moved from the Wollongong area to Corndale in 1990 where they would stay as a stable family unit.Barry laughs, “It’s actually Tom’s fault we all got into cricket.” Tom was seven at the time he began playing cricket when he signed up with some other kids to play under-12s cricket.Barry got involved in 1996 with cricket through Lismore District Junior Cricket Association with such figures as Gail Foran, who ran the Lismore Under 12 cricket carnival for many years, and people like John McMahon, Roger Boyd and Ralph Gregory.“Once Gail was finished, we encouraged junior clubs to run the carnivals, so any profit they made could be put back into their clubs. It was reasonable because you make some money out of the carnival from sponsorship, registration and lunches," said Barry.“We had Marist Brothers Club do it for a while, as well as Goonellabah. John McMahon then ran it for a number of years, and then Berni came on board.”Berni has organised the carnival for the past five years with the assistance of LDJCA and Lismore City Council events management unit. A typical day for Berni running the carnival consists of early starts, uncovering the wickets, taking food deliveries for lunch, meeting teams, getting umpires on the ground, helping out players and coaches with their queries, taking photos of kids and looking after them, helping make lunches, then talking with families and everyone else. “Then we would prepare in the evening and do the same thing the next day for the next four days. There would also be adjustments that were needed if it rained.”Berni Cooper at the Unders 12 Lismore Cricket Carnival in January. Photo: Berni CooperIssues with current behaviour in Australian CricketAt this point, Barry allows some disappointment to show through about incidents in recent years of Australian cricket.“There’s been all that stuff going on in Australian cricket such as the sandpapering incident in South Africa. For me personally, I will have difficulty supporting the Australian cricket team if David Warner gets selected again. I think we’ve only scratched the tip of what’s going on, and the worst thing about it is that younger Australian cricketers mimic the behaviour of the sledging and histrionics.”“With Associate cricket, the Dutch players all stay at the same hotel as the other teams during a tournament. They have meals together and have a much more sports-like environment.”“In many ways, the women are playing a much more honest game in Australia and still follow the sort of traditional ethics of our cricketing culture, what with sportsmanship, respect and managing egos.They play cricket the way it’s supposed to be played – without scandals.”“In comparison, Australian Women’s cricket is really coming up. I feel the Australian women’s team is in many ways performing better than the men’s. Women’s cricket has exploded in Australia and now women are getting paid a modest living for their cricketing capabilities, which is great to see.”“There’s lots of young girls out there playing cricket who have a pathway, thanks to the current women’s team as role models. There’s a young woman from Clunes called Sammy-Jo Johnston who plays up the Gold Coast now who is doing exceptionally well.”Berni adds onto these recent episodes of hazing in cricket.“It’s really interesting because I ran the under 12’s carnival for five years, but this year I had two teams contact me from Sydney prior to the carnival. They said there had been some sledging recently that was not acceptable between 11-year-old kids.”“Sledging” is essentially bullying and intimidation, either with body language, eye contact and verbal language that is still considered inappropriate by cricket gatekeepers like Berni and Barry.“The manner outside of cricket could be called the sport of life has taken a bit of a hit, and needs to be re-established and reinforced,” finishes Barry.Present daysBarry Cooper, as President of Lismore District Cricket Association, presents a medal at the Under 12s Lismore Cricket Carnival. Photo: Berni CooperBarry muses over the question presented of what is happening now and what comes next.“It was an impacting sort of moment when we had the twins. Things might have been different if we didn’t have them. We might not be talking to you right now. We might be divorced, or Berni might be looking at me thinking “Is this as good as it gets?”, or we might be sitting down in Adelaide with our next grandchildren. Who knows?”One thing is for certain, both Barry and Berni are both ready to take a step back from cricket and are getting ready to relax outside of working commitments.Barry now works as a casual teacher in rural primary schools like Dunoon and Modanville, after his duties as Principal at Modanville Primary School finished in July 2017. He had taught at Modanville in a full-time capacity for nine years and previously taught at Corndale for 20 years.“I’m at the point now where the twins are 17, and I’m ready to take a step back. There’s lots of other younger people coming who are ready to take the reins. I’m a bit of a homebody, so I’ll probably potter around the farm a bit.”When asked what comes next for her, Berni replies and laughs “Holidays! New Zealand, Scandinavia, where-ever. We’ve been busy with cricket and carnivals for many years. It's time for family life and I feel it’s time for a nice break.”Berni and Barry are currently planning with some of their family to spend three months in Holland to take a well-deserved break after more than two lives worth of cricket.

Janelle Saffin is expected to be officially confirmed as the new MP for Lismore this week, marking a successful return to politics for the former Page Federal MP who was also an MLC from 1995 to 2003. She spoke to the Lismore App this week about the significance of the win, how this latest campaign was different for the veteran politician and what her priorities are for the next four years. You were the first woman to be the MP for Page and now you’re the first woman to be the MP for Lismore as well. What does that mean to you?I wear that mantle, and enjoy it but for me being the member for the Lismore electorate is the best. It's an honor. Whether you’re a man or  woman or whatever gender, it doesn't matter, the role is more important. People do highlight it of course, because it's a first, so that's lovely. As a society it indicates that we've really come a long way and people will elect someone irrespective of their gender now. Which is a good thing. Although some parties still have a long way to go.How many campaigns have you run now and what was different or interesting about this one?It must be eight that I’ve been the candidate and I've worked on a lot more.The only thing that was really different was social media. There was a lot more Facebook. Facebook provides immediate contact with thousands of people that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to make contact with. I think traditional media is still important but with social media you can talk directly to people and get responses back. Some people would ask questions. For example when I made an announcement around the arts, somebody asked: "But what about health and what about education?" So I'm able to answer directly. Social media also allows for a lack of respect. If we're talking to people face-to-face or on the telephone or we're writing a letter, we tend to observe protocols around how we engage with each other whereas Facebook grew up without those protocols and I see that as problematic. We all think things, but do we necessarily say it in a letter or face to face? With Facebook sometimes we just fire off like that. And also there are trolls who are just there to dog everything you say and do. It doesn't matter. I could announce everybody in the Lismore electorate is getting $1 million and they'd still find a problem.I think it's a problem from the point of view of society. Respect is the basis for relationships, whether they're personal, political, professional, broader across societies. So I see it as damaging.This is the first time you’ve sat in opposition. How do you think that will be different to your previous experiences?It will be different in that when I went to parliament the other times I was able to say: ‘Well these are the policies’ and roll them out but my previous experience in government means I have experience and successes working with the opposition and working in a bipartisan and multipartisan way and I'll be able to bring that to bear. The premier and the deputy premier have made it clear that election commitments they gave will be honored and I'll obviously advocate for the commitments I made. There's a few of them that are the same or similar, and the other ones I'll advocate that we get them implemented. So I'll just work hard at it and I'll develop relationships with the government and the ministers and the public service, who deliver a lot of the things.What leverage do you have when you’re trying to get things done for the electorate?Even where you’re in opposition, there's still respect and regard for the Members of Parliament. Any government has that respect and regard because you're the member and you are the voice, a big voice, for your community. So any government, even if it's an opposition one to my party, will still have that basic regard and respect. I expect that to prevail. It's like a protocol. That means I can get access to advocate for us. I work extremely hard at developing those good relationships. I seriously believe that the premier and the deputy premier will not want to ignore the Lismore Electorate or starve us of things that we need. What are your primary objectives now you’re the MP for Lismore?I'll work to advance the commitments I gave during the election and the commitments that the Nationals made. I’ll keep them on the agenda. I’ll represent people in the best and strongest way that I can on all of the issues that arise day to day. You can't know them all, but they come up frequently. So try and make sure the people feel they've got a voice. Even though we've now got more of a progressive vote I have to represent everyone and I will and try and bring the community together. I put it this way, I'm your servant and I serve, but I'm also your community leader and I have to be able to try and lead to say: Even though this electorate is diverse, we need these things to happen, so let's get some basic understanding and agreement and go forward together, particularly with what I call it the bread and butter basics. I think we're all clear schools, hospitals, jobs, the economy, our CBDs, our roads, tourism, arts, all of that are priorities. But then there’s the environment and we really get some agreement on that. Like climate change for instance. You know, we've still got some people who don't believe in it or deny it: it's just a fact. It's a scientific evidence based fact and what it means is a lot more renewables and a transition, that's not going to hurt us. That's only going to benefit us. We'll have cheaper and cleaner power and we'll have cleaner rivers. People also do want to protect the koalas and our farming community, our agricultural base, how can we best support them? So I'll be very mindful of how I work with everyone.Do you have any priorities, specific things that you think are more urgent than others?All those things are urgent but the transition to renewables and climate change, they're clearly issues that need to be tackled now. We've had such a debate over so many years and I've lived through a lot of that debate and I think, can't we just stop debating it? Look how long we debated same sex marriage and then ended up passing it. Climate change does impact on us all and let's just get on with it.What KPIs would you like to be judged on? What should people judge you on at the end of your term? Two things. One is how I acted for people, how I represented them strongly, how I listened to them, how I was able to work across our communities by bringing people together. So my whole approach and my advocacy. And the second one would be looking at some of the deliverables. Some things I was able to help us at a local level rollout, like more nurses. The Labor Party committed to a safe patient to nurse midwife ratio, which is what the nurses and midwives wanted. The government didn't commit to that but they committed to more nurses. So can we still at least get some extra nurses and would the government consider at some point committing to ratios but overall really looking at what I was able to advance here across the things that we need, the frontline services.This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Former Lismore girl Anna Seymour is making a name for herself as a contemporary dancer whose deafness allows her to approach the discipline from a different perspective. She talked to the Lismore App about what Lismore means to her, having her portrait painted on a building seven-storeys high, appearing on the hit comedy show Get Krack!n and how deaf people can enjoy music and dancing.I live down in Melbourne now but I was born and went to school and university in Lismore. My family lived in Wyrallah then later moved to East Ballina. I went to Lismore Public and Lismore High because that’s where all the Deaf kids went (because of the Deaf Unit and the teachers specially trained to teach Deaf students).Anna at the UK's Royal School for the Deaf in 2001 with her aunt Bronwyn Watson, who learned sign language after Anna's birth and became a Deaf advocate and sign language interpreter. PHOTO: Supplied. After I finished Year 12, I went to the UK for work for a year and did some travelling around Europe. It was when I came back to study at Southern Cross University that I saw Lismore with fresh eyes and fell in love with the place and people. I just remembered Lismore being hot and muggy all the time when I was at school! I love how eccentric it is and how welcoming it feels. It's full of memories and stories for me. I have a lot of nostalgia for Lismore.I feel very lucky to have grown up in Lismore and the Northern Rivers as a Deaf person. There is a very strong grassroots Deaf community there. Lismore was the second biggest Deaf community in NSW after Sydney. There was the Deaf Centre first established by Karen Lloyd, a wonderful woman who is sadly not with us anymore, and my aunty Bronwyn Watson. Karen was the first qualified Auslan interpreter in Lismore and my aunty Bronwyn was the second.Karen and Bronwyn established the Deaf Centre which was really just a safe place for the Deaf community to meet and chat. I remember visiting the Deaf Centre and being surrounded by Deaf adults chatting away. There were theatre nights where anyone could perform skits. Us Deaf kids from school would often perform daggy skits such as converted fairy tales. We always made the characters Deaf and swap genders. Instead of losing Cinderella's shoe, we'd have her lose her hearing aid.The Deaf Centre also provided services for the Deaf community such as phone calls and assistance with filling in paperwork. They were the days before the national relay service and mobile phones.There were about 10-15 Deaf people at school which is really lucky as that is quite uncommon. There must have been something in the water to have so many Deaf kids in a small country town! I was in a Deaf class in primary school but was mainstreamed in high school.Looking back on my childhood, I feel really proud to be part of Lismore's Deaf community, and that gave me the grassroots community values, as opposed growing up in the city.Anna (far left) as a youngster with her dance troupe. PHOTO: Supplied.I started dancing when I was six years old. I did jazz, tap and ballet. I didn't last too long in ballet! I did classes in Alstonville with Suzanne Whiteman who is still teaching now. I was in the dance group at primary school but I stopped when I was in high school.I have always loved dancing and yearned to be a dancer but I pushed that desire down as I just didn't think it was possible for a Deaf person to be a dancer.When I was about 20 years old, I saw Bangarra (an all indigenous contemporary dance company based in Sydney) perform and I was blown away. I literally had an epiphany. "That's what I want to do" I thought. It was like a "voice" was screaming at me "What are you waiting for? You know you need to do this!" and it was what preoccupied my mind for a long time. I decided to move down to Melbourne to explore that avenue. I was terrified. Eventually, I studied a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Contemporary Dance and now I am here…I love how empowering dance is. I love how physical it is and how it keeps me strong, alive and connected.I am always asked: how can you enjoy dance and music despite being deaf? To me, that shows a limited mindset about dance. It shows the high value society places on sound, audio and spoken languages as being somewhat superior to visceral, nonverbal communication and signed languages.Anna says Deaf people can enjoy music and dancing in a different way to how hearing people usually do. PHOTO: Supplied.Sure, of course I enjoy music and dancing to music - I just do in a different way. Deaf people often are made to feel that we are not meant to enjoy or have access to music or dancing. But music and sound can be experienced in different ways - through our body - not just the auditory channels of our body. Our bodies are very complex and intelligent. You just need to tap into your body and trust that your body knows.I love the work of Christine Sun Kim, a Deaf sound artist based in Berlin. I love Keith Flint from the Prodigy. I did room service for him when I was working at the Beach Hotel in Byron and he was so warm and friendly. I grew up dancing to musicians of Jack Johnson, Michael Franti and John Butler at various gigs in Byron.But what I love most of all is disco music!These days I work on different projects. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that artists do that people are not generally aware of.I am working with a visual artist on a video work, a filmmaker on a new script, preparing my work SPIN for touring, preparing for a new creative development for The Delta Project choreographed by Stephanie Lake in June. The work never stops!I also do some casual teaching at Victorian College for the Deaf and Auslan Consultancy. My teaching work varies from teaching a high school class, teaching Auslan for Victorian Police and tutoring a Deaf man from Bhutan. I also keep up with my training in dance and yoga.My last major work was SPIN which was in the Melbourne Fringe last year. SPIN is a participatory dance performance with a DJ and Deaf hosts. It was inspired by my travels in New York, San Fransisco, Mexico, Cuba and Berlin in 2017 when I was there for two residences; one in New York and one in Berlin.Anna's performance piece SPIN was a big hit at the Melbourne Fringe last year. PHOTO: Supplied.I performed my duet work (Distraction Society) at the International Deaf Dance Festival in San Francisco and the afterparty had a huge impact on me. It was a throbbing dance party and the dance floor was packed full of Deaf people. The DJ was Deaf. There were some people there who could hear but most people in that room were Deaf - and they had full command of the dance floor. I have never seen anything like that before. Certainly not in Australia.Then I went to Burning Man in the Nevada desert, Mexico, Cuba and Berlin where I observed social dancing formations and experienced different dance clubs. I saw different uses of public spaces for dancing, individualistic and collective expression, different attitudes about bodies and sexuality.Those experiences got me thinking about subcultures and the presence of Deaf community in those spaces. I wondered what a subservie dance party with Deaf Hosts would look and feel like?That inspired me to re-create an experience for audiences in Melbourne.I am hoping to do a national tour of SPIN this year and next year – NORPA in Lismore is on the bucket list!In 2017, a mutual friend contacted me and told me Guido van Helten was looking for a dancer for his next commissioned work and would I be interested to meet him? Guido paints enormous murals on public buildings, often in collaboration with Fintan Magee who recently painted a mural on the Lismore City Library.I met Guido for a coffee and chat. I didn't have much information about the project to start with so I wasn't sure what to expect. I had the understanding he was looking for a dancer to model for a painting which would complement the angles of the building.When he told me which building it was, I couldn't believe it. It was the Melbourne Polytechnic building in Prahran, which is the home of the Diploma of Auslan course and Deaf ConnectED. The Victorian College for the Deaf is just around the corner. It is a significant space in the Deaf community. It was very special for me to contribute to a public space where Deaf people congregate, and to bring more recognition to the Deaf community and Deaf artists.Guido van Helten's mural of Anna on the Melbourne Polytechnic building in Prahran. PHOTO: Supplied/Glenn Snashall.Guido wasn't aware of the significance of the building either. After coffee, we went to this building in Collingwood which had a lot of abandoned spaces. I was given free rein to do what I wanted and I improvised different movements inspired by the architecture of the building. Guido completed the mural in only 5 days.It’s pretty incredible to see myself up there on a building. It’s a honour.Recently I had the opportunity to appear on an episode of Get Krack!n, which is a satire comedy TV show on the ABC. The episode, written by Jess Walton, was focused on disability and was a brilliant commentary the ignorance and discrimination about disability. My character on that episode was an egotistical, unprofessional and unethical Auslan interpreter. It was a fun role!Anna (bottom left) appeared on a recent episode of the ABC's Get Krack!n as a sign language interpreter. PHOTO: Supplied.The first day on set was daunting. There were so many cameras and screens and crew. But the two Kates and the crew were all really nice and made us feel welcome.I am definitely hooked. I love acting and want to do more acting for TV, film and theatre.In the future I’m just keen to do more dancing, acting, producing, travelling, adventures, community and spend lots of time in the ocean. For the time being that means staying in the big city, but eventually I want to come back and live in the Northern Rivers.

After 50 years with the Lismore Kart Club, Goonellabah’s Barry Fisher this month received a Premier’s Community Service Award. However, as the award recognised, his contributions to the community have not just been on the kart track.I was always into sport. I got picked up by a talent scout for tennis and every school holidays went off to tennis camps and I was into surfing too because I lived at Brunswick heads. After school I moved to Sydney for a while to work with the PMG (Postmaster-General's Department) and took up roller skating and speed skating and played A grade roller hockey and roller game at Rushcutters Bay Stadium. When I got back to Lismore I worked as a skating instructor for the late Harry Rigby. I also got back into boxing and training boxers under the banner of the PCYC in the old scouts hall in Magellan St, prior to the current PCYC being built, with Stan Hayward and Ron Davis. We trained boxers and I had a few fights under their banner. I used to also do a fair bit around Show time with Les McNab's boxing troupe. "Get yourself up here young Fisher, you reckon you can go a round or two?" he used to say. So I'd do that and he used to give me some cash in hand out the back of the tent. As an amateur you weren't supposed to get paid but he always made sure I didn't go home empty handed, so that was good.The old karts Barry Sullivan used to work on and race in 1969. PHOTO: Supplied.I got involved in karting in January of 1969 at the kart circuit called Round Swamp Raceway on the Tenterfield Road west of Casino. I started out as a pit crew driver and drove other people’s karts in return for me helping them. My first kart was an old-home made chassis with a McCulloch 30 motor. I think it cost around $100 and we raced on an oil sealed circuit.At the end of 1969 the lease ceased on the Round Swamp Circuit and the club was without a home. I called a meeting of interested parties and was given the task of obtaining land to establish a kart circuit. This was done with the then local member Bruce Duncan MLA and Show Society President Spencer Spinaze. The new circuit started in 1970 with a small band of members.Over the years, I’ve travelled and raced from Sydney through to Bundaberg in Queensland and won a National and a number of State championships all whilst preparing and servicing my own equipment.The thing I enjoyed most was the friendship. There was a great bunch of guys. I enjoyed going out there and racing hard and yet we were still able to socialize and be friendly about it afterwards, which was great. I must admit, as the years have gone on, things have changed a bit to the early days. But that's how life changes.I also enjoyed the adrenaline of going quick. The last kart that I put together that I've got in the shed at the moment, it's got two engines on it - twin 125 water-cooled, electric start engines - and it's capable of over 160km/h.Barry Fisher gets some air on the kart track. PHOTO: Supplied.It's a real buzz with your bum 20-25mm off the ground. If you hit a rough section of the track, you can feel it in the bottom of the seat. It's just the adrenaline of going fast and going around corners fast. And if you haven't driven one you haven't experienced the real thrill of cruising cause that close to the ground, it feels like a thousand miles per hour.Me and my daughters always attended meetings as a family and a highlight was when my middle daughter took up driving. She is my son and daughter in one. Absolutely loves motorsport. Loves driving. Another highlight for me was when my son-in-law and my three grandsons also took up the sport. Karting was always marketed as a family sport and it certainly was for this family.When we first started in Lismore, there was an old tin wash shed we used to use as a canteen, just a table and that. Very primitive. The club has grown and the facilities have come a long way since 1970. We started with a membership of six and now today have about 170. The club has a bitumen circuit with covered outgrid, and a state of the art control tower and so on. We’ve hosted a National Championship and two State Championships.Everything has been funded and built by the club and while it might just look like a big paddock, it would be about $2 million to redevelop it if you had to go and build it again. We have only had one grant in the club's lifetime, the 50 years I've been there. We got a $19,000 grant which allowed us to put up the brand new control tower and that went up last yearI reckon 25 years out of the past 50 I've been president of the kart club and when I wasn't president, I was always doing something. After a number of years officiating, I was nominated to a grade 1 official which gave me the opportunity to travel to various states in Australia - with the exception of West Australia and Tasmania - to conduct both National and State championships. I also did 11 years in the pit lane at Indy Cars on the Gold Coast.About eight years ago, I started driving for the Leukemia Foundation. Friends that we go old time dancing with lost their son to leukemia. He was about 28 or something, young. My friend said one day that they were stretched for drivers, would I be interested in doing some driving? And I said, why not. I was also happy to do it because I lost my dad to leukemia as well. So it's giving something back and I've been doing it ever since.We're rostered on basically once a week but sometimes when we're really busy, we're running two or three days. It's great. You meet some lovely people, unfortunately most are elderly and have either lost their partner or they don't drive. The lady I picked up yesterday, she's on her own and doesn't have a lot of friends so when she gets in the car it's very much shut up and listen, but she's got a heart of gold. When you lose one it's like losing a family member because you do get attached. They're all really nice genuine people.Barry Fisher receives his NSW Premier's Award from Lismore State MP Thomas George. PHOTO: Supplied.My wife knew about the Premier’s Award for about six months beforehand. The night I was due to receive it, she said we have to go to the kart club meeting. I told her I didn't want to go, I wanted to watch a show on telly. And she said: "We'll record it". She insisted, saying something was happening and I had to go.I walked in and Thomas and Austin Curtin were there and I thought they must be going to give something to the club as part of their election campaign. Then Thomas started talking and I realised he was talking about me and gave me the award. I had no idea, didn't expect it. I went to Sydney the year before last and got an award for the Queen's birthday and the same year I got a life membership with Karting NSW, so this really tops it all off.Looking back, what I’m most proud of is my family; my wife and daughters. We've always been a pretty close knit family and always there for each other.I worked at Telstra for 43 years and when I retired in back in 2006 I was planning manager for the North Coast. Looking back the achievements I got through work were a highlight. I didn't expect to achieve what I did.My time with the kart club has been good and bad. The things the club have been able to achieve make me very proud, even though there are some issues the with which club hasn’t been able to get an acceptable result.Barry Fisher's current kart. PHOTO: Supplied.These days, I’m keen to do some some caravanning and let the younger membership progress the club but I’ll keep my competition licence. I haven't driven a kart for over 18 months because of my hip replacement so I'm still waiting to see how that goes. Hopefully I can get back in the thing and have another couple of pedals before I give it away altogether. 

Jisnu Dowsett had kidney problems since he was 18 months old, was continually having surgery as a young child and eventually had to have a kidney transplant to save his life when aged 28. However, he tells Kristian Hatton, the strength and purpose he found in kung fu, the martial art he now teaches children in Lismore, helped him survive and prosper.I was born on the first of November in 1978, at Stanthorpe Hospital, across the border in Queensland. When I was seven my family moved to Nimbin and I went to school at Nimbin Central. I moved to Lismore four years ago and now live in Lismore Heights with my wife Molly Magahy and two children Cedar (six) and Kye (15).I’ve had kidney issues most of my life and it started when I was 18 months old. I had kidney reflux, which is where it kind of backs up from bladder to kidney, which puts pressure on the kidney and causes them to fail and can cause infection. That resulted in me having chronic renal failure (or chronic kidney disease (CKD)).All it takes these days is a relatively simple corrective surgery to fix things, but back then I had to have multiple surgeries. They still didn’t fix the problem and I had like seven surgical procedures up until the age of six or seven. The thing is about CKD is that it affects hormones and everything like that too. I was anaemic and iron-deficient, quite short compared with other kids, low on energy and breath, slow in development and had difficulty concentrating.In 2004 I had full kidney failure and was on haemodialysis for two years. I felt like I was slowly dying at that time, and had infections and hospitalisation and so on. In 2006, I had a transplant which was donated by my father. After that, I got well quickly and I’d never had more energy.It was kung fu that helped me recover - it enabled me to develop my endurance. The art of kung fu has helped in many areas of my life. An important aspect in that development was more of a mental thing, very important when my physical health was deteriorating previously. The arts gave me the feeling that I was achieving something, when I had to focus on my training in the moment, in the zone.Things To DoJisnu Dowsett had chronic renal failure and needed a kidney transplant to live.Eat/Drink/StayMy whole focus was on learning the new material I was given in any one moment of training. It might be the same with any sort of hard work that’s rewarding, and for me I needed that thing of being in my body and mastering myself. It’s a sort of synthesis that works within the principles, that in turn govern actions and overall well-being.I had started training kung fu with Sifu Gavin Cook in 2002, shortly after the masters for the area’s school – Sifu Bob Margotts and his wife Stephanie – started their school in Ballina. I was in the same Southern Cross University class as Gavin, doing Naturopathy. We loved it and never missed a class after we started.The real journey and challenge for me started after the orange belt grading (which takes longer than other arts to access) when I started learning to teach classes. We set up a kung fu class in Lismore in 2004, in the classrooms under the Lismore City Hall.Students and teachers develop their own unique style and approach to the (kung fu) arts, and Gavin is more into the physicality of his art. He insisted on a physical grading to obtain the degree of Sifu, whereas normally you’re graded on how you have applied the six principles of kung fu within your overall teaching and perspective of the art. He likewise does very physical gradings as a practitioner of the arts, and is into that aspect of developing the local schools.I guess some of my favourite stuff is technique over force, like with Hsing-I where you journey through someone’s arms and you find the entry zone and range. I personally find I have a gentler approach to the art, and I love training weapons through Hsing-i arts. I also love teaching even though I’ve never been much one for rules. I would rather see that my students get their results and come to their conclusions through their own guidance and understanding of their kung fu.I don’t really think there’s any sort of big success stories of obtaining your belts and doors (which are like Dans) and so forth, it’s more an accumulation, progression and discipline of all the hard work you put in over the years. It’s something you have to keep up with, and you get further insights as you go along. When you obtain the actual belt or door, it’s more like something you already have, and you just gain a recognition from the outside of that.Kung fu is scientific but in a progressively intuitive fashion of insight after insight, which you get with constant practice of smaller things like stepping. Then maybe one day you can do those amazing superhuman things like the one-inch punch or being able to launch someone across a whole room, but by then you’d never need to use anything like violence because you’re more in tune with things and there’s always alternatives to physical combat.The martial art kung fuA lot of people think about kung -fu and they immediately think about all the flashy moves that they see off the movies.There’s a lot more to it than that, and The literal translation of ​Gung Fu​ is "hard work” and Wu-Chi Tao means "journey (or) art to perfection” There’re also principles, morals, ethics and operating within your community to aspire to. In China, young monks train from six years old for hours and hours every day and work their whole life to achieve self-mastery and it never stops. Kung fu is something you aspire your whole life to perfect – it literally is hard work.Our school, the Wu-Chi Kung-Fu school of arts #4, adheres to six overall principles of respect, love, honesty, truth, purity and contentment. Kung-fu ​Si-fu ​(eldest brothers) in China were sages who were sought for wisdom and life advice when people have lost their way, rather than being fighters to be feared. There’s eight arts of Kung-fu within our school - ​Wu-Hsing, Tan-Tui, Hsing-I, Chi-Kung, Nei-Kung, Shuai-Jiao, Pa-Kua a​ nd ​Tai-Chi​, some of which (like ​Chi-kung​ and ​Tai-chi​) utilise underlying energetic principles and breathing techniques – but it’s nothing mystic or esoteric.Our students start their Kung-fu journey with ​Wu-Hsing ​(five elements or bodies)​, ​which is more about strikes and movement. It’s more of a flowing art where 12 positions can "load” from either left or right side to enable delivery of 18 different strikes. This allows flowing combinations of hundreds of hits.The art of ​Tan-Tui​ operates within these beginning classes, which is about stepping and kicking. We get into ​hsing-i​ (body-mind) along the way, which is about movement. It’s about lining up your opponent, moving through their hands/hit zone and applying your own hits.You eventually learn to direct your opponent’s flow based on "asking a question” about how they will move, then they give their answer and you give your response. It’s like learning to have a conversation with your body and learning how to articulate yourself properly.The school and its New Zealand origins have a pretty amazing story, but that’s another story and you can look up the history at our website. However, there’s a lot of speculation about our school, Kung-fu and concepts behind it. The only real way to understand it is to be there training it, there within the moment. It’s something that has to be learned with the body, although mentality has a lot to do with it, but that sort of comes back to being in the body in the moment too.There’s a lot of physical training and conditioning involved, and it’s all personal stuff where you find more about how you operate internally as well as externally, based on the six principles of Kung-fu.You sort of develop your own art that’s unique to you, after some time of going through basics. That’s why it’s an art, it’s an individual and creative thing, but one that always requires that you work hard to get results.Retail/ShoppingCareer and the futureI ended up doing my Bachelor of Nursing for another three years at Southern Cross University, and completed my education in 2010. I have been working as a mental health nurse at the Tallowwood ward (formerly Richmond Clinic) at Lismore Base Hospital four days a week. I’ve been working there for nine years now.Around 15-20 nurses have retired or left since I started there. It can be a difficult job at times. We work with people who are in a very unwell and vulnerable state at the time they come in.There’s people who come in from the court, like those who have committed some sort of crime and are in for assessment. They can become progressively threatening and we have to call in the police when that happens, which is really sad for everyone.However, those are the most challenging times. Generally, the picture is good. The job is rewarding for me to see our patients come through to the other side of their journey and have that deeper understanding of themselves and life that not many have. The north coast is as popular as ever for mental illness, and we have more patients than ever. It’s really something that doesn’t stop and there’s a lot of problems out there. We try as best we can to manage things in a difficult climate.Health-wise, I’m doing great now, better than ever. I’d rather not focus on the past aspect of when I had the kidney issues, and be thankful I have good health now.As so far as my family goes, my wife Molly and I met in 2001, at the time I was at uni and starting kung fu. She comes from Melbourne and was friends with someone who lived in the same share house I was in, and is in the same health industry as me as a psychologist. We got married in 2017.My fifteen-year-old son Kye goes to Richmond River High. He is into street skateboarding and has been ollying (jumping) off this 13-stair up in Lismore Heights. He’s also interested in pursuing a career in legal defence, so he can help people. He endures school and is in the high achiever’s class there. He’s also a pretty good writer.My six-year-old boy Cedar goes to Lismore Heights Primary School, loves running and has been training karate for six months.Jisnu Dowsett, Kye Dowsett (15), wife Molly Magahy and Cedar (6). Photo: SuppliedToday, I’ve just been doing some repairs on my boat and trailer. I like being on the water rather than in the water, because I have a bit of a shark phobia. I just like how the land looks from the sea, so I thought it’d be nice to learn how to sail. I got a twelve-and-a-half foot boat, and been sailing around four times on the Ballina river. It's been going pretty good and it's always something I wanted to do.Currently with kung fu, I’m learning the lance or spear, and I’ve been teaching the Chinese broadsword out with students. That utilises the arts I learned from the beginning with Wu-Hsing.There’s a lot of guys out there who want to be Bruce Lee overnight but it doesn’t happen that way.There’s not just training but all that life stuff as well for people who have been (doing kung fu) for years too, but the arts and principles help in day-to-day life too.For me, it’s mostly about being healthy in body and mind. People take their health for granted, but when it craps out then everything else in life becomes irrelevant. If you’re not well, you can’t do anything in life. Health comes first, really, then you refine. That’s about it.**The Lismore class of Wu-Chi Kung-Fu school of arts #4, is currently run by Si-Di Dylan Clark at the Silver Cloud Studios on Thursday evenings from 6:00pm-7:30pm, where they’ll always welcome new students and give a free introductory lesson. I don't make it to classes too often myself now, maybe once every six weeks. I usually attend Shaomen (teacher training classes) once or twice during a six-week period.

Beth Trevan AM was named the Lismore electorate’s Woman of the Year this week for her work over decades as a health campaigner and community advocate. Over that time she’s achieved great things as far afield as Pakistan by fearlessly championing her causes and being unafraid to go straight to the top to get something done. But, importantly, she says she’s never fought alone.When Thomas George contacted me to tell me about the award, I felt humbled but not deserving.I've never planned anything - I've just managed to fall into it right across the board. Some issue would arise and I'd take a look and think, well, gee, that's not very fair or that needs fixing or whatever and I'd pick it up, and there were always people around me who, once they understood the situation, were really supportive and came with me. So nothing was ever done just on my own.It was always a group of people who could see that there was a problem and I guess I had the skills to maybe be the leader and that was how all the different issues went forward.I suppose you could say there were areas where there was bravery concerned because in nearly every issue it was stepping into an area that hadn't been done before. I don't know. I just fell into everything.I think one of the qualities that’s allowed me to get things done is probably a fearlessness - not being afraid of approaching the people at the very top. I always believe they're human beings, the same as all of us. Everybody's gotten to where they are often by very serendipitous means.I've always found that once I actually got to the person that was at the very top of the organization, you got a really good hearing. In fact, often they were in a situation where they hadn't heard directly from the community what the major problems were because all along the line there were other agendas that were being put into the information that was going forward.But also I think I’ve got an ability to work with people at all levels and bring them along with me. I'm a people person. I've always loved people more than anything else. And really the thing that's driven me is injustice. I cannot abide injustice.It’s hard to say what I’m most proud of doing, because everything I’ve done has been so different.In the ‘70s, it was about establishing play lady volunteers at the Lismore Base Hospital and then getting the policies changed on how children and families were dealt with. Then being coordinator of the the Lismore Base Hospital Children's Ward appeal that raised all that money.A story on the front page of the Northern Star about the childrens' ward fundraising campaign. PHOTO: Supplied.I think the thing that I loved most out of that was the community learned very much, very strongly - and it's really carried through for another generation - that if everyone worked together, driving towards one goal, then you could achieve what you wanted to achieve even though it appeared to be impossible at the beginning.An advertisement calling for donations to the childrens' ward. PHOTO: Supplied.The kids’ ward community campaign then led to being asked by the Cancer Council to work on a pilot program on the North Coast, because at that point in time, 1979 and the early ‘80s, it was the start of health promotion and there was no cancer education program outside Sydney.I was also involved with the P and C Association at the state level so I led a contingent to the Department of Education and - even though it took us 18 months to get an appointment - it only took me 10 minutes to convince them that every school needed to have a "no hat, play in the shade policy”. Otherwise they were going to be sued down the track by every adult that was diagnosed with skin cancer who had not been protected at school.The deputy director that we met with laughed and said: "My son wagged the swimming carnival last week because he wasn't prepared to sit there and get sunburned and my wife's a nurse and she's been telling me we need a policy like that me for years, it's ridiculous.”Within six weeks over the Christmas holidays, the teachers employed by the Cancer Council wrote the policy and it was in the schools the following February.From there working with Margie Young and Vivian Hoskins of the Health Department we went into women's health projects, developing posters and brochures, videos, things that no one else was doing anywhere in Australia. And all this material was used around Australia.Around 1991,  I saw an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald one Saturday calling for applications for breast screening programs. The next day I was running a battle station on the beach with Bill Buddee, the surgeon, with 300 people queued along the sand in their swimmers for him to check out for skin cancer.At the end of the day, I got Bill a beer and asked him if he’d seen the ad. He said, no and I showed it to him and together with colleagues he put in an application for a screening program for the Northern Rivers only.The application was successful and I became part of the steering committee and we were given the job for the whole North Coast, from Port Macquarie to the border, and because I'd been working with health promotion and women's groups in the same area and spoken with about 42,000 people over the previous six years, they asked me would I be the founding director of the establishment director, so I said yes.One of the first women’s health promotion stickers produced locally to alert women of the need to examine their breasts which saw the number of women having mammograms increase locally by over 400 per cent over four years. IMAGE: Supplied.Had I ever done anything like this before? No. But I started here at home at my dining room table with no money, a computer that was borrowed from the health department and worked out all the issues related to how we could get the service going and whatever. And by the end of the 10 years that I was director, we had a fixed site, three mobile units, and were screening 56,000 women every two years and had the highest recruitment rate in the state.It's all changed since then. Modern technologies have come in and everything's done very differently. But that was that.Again, it didn't matter what I looked at, there were always people who had an interest in the issue and I guess I ended up the one that was leading it, but you can never do it on your own. Never ever.In 1998, one of my sons was living in Italy and I went to see him and went to attend an international breast cancer conference in Florence at the same time. It had 3,200 registered participants and was being held in a castle.On the first morning it was going to start at 10am. I made sure I arrived at 8:30am to find myself a seat, and there were only about 200 people scattered throughout this entire auditorium.So I was just quietly sitting there reading through my papers with about 3000 empty seats around me and a woman walked through the whole of the auditorium and sat there in the seat right there next to me. We said hello and I could see she was dressed in a salwar kameez. She said she was from Pakistan and a surgeon.I asked her what she was hoping to get out of the conference, and she said: "Well, I'm really, wanting to set up a breast clinic and I know enough about all the clinical side of things, but I know absolutely nothing about administration. I'm desperately hoping to meet someone who knows something about administration”. And I just roared laughing.I told her I was the director of a breast cancer screening program and my background was in administration. "What can I do to help?” I said.So two years later, when I was turning 60, I decided I wanted to go trekking in Nepal and when I looked at the map, Pakistan was just there beside it.In that two year period, we had kept in contact and I'd been sending her lots of information. So I sent her an email saying  I was going to Nepal, but had some time to come to Pakistan if that'd be any help. Well, four days later, I got an email back to say she'd organized nine talks in seven cities.Beth Trevan conducted many women's health promotion events in villages in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.Beth Trevan also did workshops in private homes. PHOTO: Supplied.Beth Trevan with some of the doctors she worked with in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.That started me going to Pakistan. I went every year more or less, sometimes a couple of times a year, over the next 10 years.Every time I went, another group would come out and say, will you help us here? So by 2010, there were quite a large number of organizations that I was actually working with.Unfortunately by that time it was becoming more and more dangerous. I wasn't worried about myself, but I became a risk to the families that I was staying with. I was staying in people’s homes and going out into villages and giving talks to women who were absolutely poverty stricken and I became a risk to them.The last trip I did was for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission evaluating breast services in seven of their hospitals. I had to ride in a bulletproof car with two army officers inside the car with AK 47s and I had an armed military escort in front and back. When I went into the hospitals to evaluate the services, I walked around with an army colonel beside me with an AK 47.Beth Trevan poses with an army officer's AK 47 in front of a bullet proof vehicle while inspecting a hospital in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.I loved what I did over there and I'm still in touch with a lot of the people I met. I’ve brought a few of them over to Australia for training in Lismore and Sydney. A couple have come out and stayed here and we've gone traveling together and whatever, which is lovely.Then I had grandchildren and which meant I was very busy from 2010… well from 2006 really. I was doing a lot of tripping with them and a lot of travel.And then along came the flood.It was funny how the Lismore Citizens Flood Review came about. I organize school reunions for all the locals that are still here from Lismore High School class of 1953 to ‘57. We are still very, very close. Anytime anybody comes to town, we just use that as an excuse to get together and have lunch.So we had organised to have lunch at 11:30am on April 4 of 2017 at the Rous Hotel. Well, the flood came on the 31st March and I looked at what was happening at the Rous and water would have been over the bar counter and mud was everywhere. And I said, well, that's no good. We'll do it up the top at the Workers Club in Goonellabah.There were 14 of us, some of them hadn't seen one another for 50 years, which was just lovely. So we’re sitting there, and obviously the talk was about the flood. I was sitting next to Peter Thorpe, a retired engineer who was opposed to the Lismore CBD levee because he was concerned about the loss of flood memory, but ironically enough ended up helping build it.He was appalled by the flood response and said to me: "We've got to do something about this. We can't have this. Something's gotta be done.”And I went, oh, all right, and I came home and I thought, well, where will I start? So I got former mayor Ros Irwin on board and Keith Alcock, who I’d never met before but called me saying he’d heard we were getting something together. He was actually the SES region controller and held other posts from 1960s or something through till 1995. I asked many questions of former Lismore City SES Unit controller Lindsay Matterson, who provided  us with a lot of information.Tony Madden got involved as well and we felt we had enough history among and different areas of expertise among us to actually be able to put something together.We went to the public meeting that was held at the council where the council staff gave a report to the councillors and a slide went up to say there were 12 reviews being done and 11 of them were being done by government agencies and universities. There was nothing that was coming from the community. So we said, well, maybe we should put one together, which we did.I’m not sure that we've gotten anywhere but we haven't given up yet. We're still going. We’ve had had some terrific, fabulous support from both Thomas George and Kevin Hogan. Fabulous support. When we asked to have a meeting with them and gave them the presentation on all the issues that we really looked into and what we'd found, Kevin went away and insisted the national director of the Bureau of Meteorology come and meet with us and Thomas organized for us to meet with the commissioner of the SES.We had a four-hour meeting with the Bureau of Meteorology, the national director and the state director and the senior hydrologist, and they were shocked to see what how the community had interpreted what they were saying and what they were doing.Initially the SES had difficulty with us because they saw us as troublemakers whereas we've never ever tried to do anything other than make things better for the community, but that's gradually changed.Apart from Flood Mitigation, what we’re trying to do now is get the State Government to implement a statewide integrated emergency information portal that includes all the agencies, like they have in Victoria. So we're still monitoring that and we're keeping up the pressure. We can see we're going to really have to keep pushing. You know, the wheels of government move incredibly slowly but we'll get there in the end.

Goonellabah’s John Maloney received an Australia Day award for services to the community from Lismore City Council. The award was richly deserved and came none too soon for a man who, while best known for founding the hugely popular Lismore Good Old Days Facebook page, has been serving the community for decades as a community radio broadcaster, church bell ringer and elderly care support worker.My family's been living in the Richmond Valley since about 1849. Some of our ancestors were Irish convicts who were sentenced to the Moreton Bay settlement and later on got the contract to take the mail from Ipswich down to Lawrence on the Clarence by horseback. When they were coming through the Richmond Valley they thought it was a really nice area and they put in for a grant and were able to get some land released around Casino. Since then we've been living down in this area.Running the Good Old Days Facebook page, I’ve discovered a few interesting bits and pieces about my family. People who knew some of my relatives were able to fill me in on things about my grandparents and others.Doing my research for the page, I found some stuff about our great-grandfather Knoetzschs, who had a tiny pub built at Irvington, which was just this side of Casino about as far as the boats could come up the river towards Casino and unload everything. He used to give a free bottle of wine or spirits to anyone who could spell Knoetzchs. I don't know that he gave away many bottles of wine, but he was a very interesting character.He had been at the Royal Military College in Leipzig, in Germany for the Kaizer, in the 1840s and then came out on a training ship with the German Navy. They got to Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne just as everyone was racing out to the Ballarat to the goldfields, the gold rush, so he and most of the ship deserted and went looking for gold. He did pretty well out of that.Then the next gold rush was up at Drake so they all headed up to Drake and that's how he came to be on the Northern Rivers. He found there was more money serving the miners alcohol than actually digging the gold, so he opened a pub at Drake and then came down to Casino and lived there until he was about 90 years old.In high school I really liked local history and did fairly well in history at school. I had a really good history teacher, Nell Williams from Coraki, who had written some local history books too, so she was a good influence on me. I also had a friend called Sid Drew who used to do a lot of research when microfilms first came out. You could read all the newspapers by going up to the university and read through microfilms and we used to look at old articles and pictures and that together.After Facebook came out, I had a whole lot of local history pictures on one of my profiles and they were popular, just with my contacts and friends. I thought: "Gee, that’s all really popular. Maybe I could do something about it?” but I didn't do anything about it for about two years.One day I was really bored, and it had become much easier to set up Facebook groups, so I decided to have a go and make one. Over about 48 hours or so, I just sat up uploading and uploading and uploading historical material, to give it a lot of momentum and it just took off really fast. We had about 1000 people in about two days and then it just spread and spread. I thought: "Holy mackerel!”Within three days we were on the front page of the Echo and 2NR ABC interviewed me. It just went really viral. We had about 8,000 people I think in the first month. It was just amazing. Now we're up to about 15,000, something like that. We were covering all the whole Northern Rivers and so last year we decided to start one up for Casino, and it's up to about 6,000 or 7,000. So it's going really well too.It's really interesting that the most popular threads are the sort of more banal things. You'd think it would be something really exciting, like some some rescue in a flood or the opening of Lismore Square but a really, really popular thread was about people driving around the block on Saturday night. There were so many people that said: "Oh yeah, that's a good memory. Yeah. We used to drive around the block in our FJ Holden and look at people out the window.” That thread had about a thousand comments and then the old swings that were in Spinks Park, people were just talking about the swings in the playground - that was really popular. It went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.They're usually things people have had a good memory of, which is really, really great. People wanting to get the swimming pool reopened at the lake, that's been a really massive thing, and getting the railway back, a lot of people are for that and getting the fountain restored at the City Hall. There was a lot of talk about that and that happened. Heaps and heaps of people have been fascinated with fixing that clock that was hanging off the wall in Molesworth St.There's a lot of people that are really interested in local history and issues and the page has focused the attention onto some of these issues that might have slipped by, which is good. It's showing the council and the wider community there are a lot of people interested in seeing these things get done, preserving the history and that. A lot of our really good history in Lismore has been lost. A lot of great buildings have been demolished, taken away, you know, just for the sake of development. Which is a shame.One of the things that has come out of this is that we had the big reunion, Back to Lismore Day, which was really great. We had a couple of thousand people come down to the Workers Club. It was packed. We had a reunion of all the old bands and we raised a lot of money, which we gave to the Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter. I think we gave them a cheque for $15,000 or something like that.So after that, we had another one after the big flood, Lismore's Back From the Flood, and we raised a lot of money from that and gave a big cheque to the council for the flood appeal, which was really great. We had a third one which ended up raising money for the Black Dog Institute I think and we had another one which raised a lot of money for the drought appeal last year. So that's been another really good thing that's come out of it, allowing us to give back to the community and do a lot of really good work. There's so much goodwill in the group, it's great we can harness it to do even more good.I'd like to do another really big reunion with a lot of the old musicians that aren't getting any younger, from the '80s. A lot of the bands that haven't played together for years, get them all back together. There's a lot of bands that we couldn't fit on the other reunions and singers who said they would have loved to have been there. So harness that and raise some more money for something really good in Lismore, like the soup kitchen or something, which would be great. We'd like to do that.Next year will be 40 years since I did my first program on River FM. I started when I was in Year Seven in high school when we used to do drive time in the afternoon and each day of the week was a different high school. After that program finished I got my own program and I’ve been doing different shows on and off for River FM for 40 years now. I'm on the board of River FM and I've been helping on the committee for 20 years.One of the main things I'm trying to do with the community radio shows that I do, is on Sunday morning the show is specifically for seniors music for people over 80 or 90 because they're not sort of targeted anywhere else on radio now. So we're playing them all the music that they really love. Like Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, you know, all those classics. Dean Martin. It's about the only program that they have now just for that age group. And the other one is the country music show that I do on Thursday night is specifically targeted at helping lots of upcoming independent artists. We've got lots of local singer songwriters who are playing really good traditional music, taking the music back to its roots and they're doing it really successfully. So I'm trying to help them get a foothold and get them going.River FM is pretty good. It’s keeping the local voice of radio going which is really important, especially during the floods that we have here. We need people broadcasting what's happening overnight because a lot of the other radio stations, commercial or whatever, go to their networks. At 6pm they go off to Melbourne or Sydney or wherever. We might just get a brief mention at the end of the hour or during the weather or something.If we're there live like during the big flood in April 2017, we can just go on all night all day. Which is what we did, for three days, nonstop.River FM is above Hernes Transport in South Lismore, just near the river bank, so we were trapped in there. We had water all around so that we couldn't get out. We could just go to the window to check the water level. Which was really handy. I had just knocked off work and went to the station quickly before the water came up because otherwise I knew I’d get trapped. So I flew down there but I didn't think to take too much. I just took half a loaf of bread and a couple of eggs and some cheese. So for about four days, I lived on half a loaf of bread and not much else.I just had the manager of the station, who lives in Kyogle, with me. She was trapped as well and was there helping me. She'd run in with faxes and she'd bring me a glass of water and whatever and we kept going. I was just reading out river heights, giving people evacuation information. I had all the old farmers and people ringing and I’d pass all that information on.This one lady sent me the nicest letter. She couldn't find out who I was for a long time, but she just found out this year and sent a letter saying she was trapped in her car and then when they’d managed to get out, she drove up to the top of Goonellabah and sat there for two days and we just kept them sane listening to us, knowing what was happening.You're just sort of running on adrenaline. Every now and then maybe at 3am or 4am in the morning you might have 20 minute nap but then wake up because you've got to read the next river heights bulletin, which would come through at a quarter past the hour, every hour.It was something different but I don't think I'd like to do it again in a hurry.John Maloney broadcast live and non-stop for three-and-a-half days during the flood in 2017 when his radio station became an island. I got into belling ringing when I was in high school at Marist Brothers, which is now Trinity Catholic College. I started to learn to play the cathedral bells, which is a very historic 12 bell chime which was made in Dublin 100 years ago. They weren't being played at the time. Kevin Burns taught me to do that and I've been doing that since. That's at St Carthages. I still do that for all the services and weddings and Christmas and anytime that we need bells, which is really good. It's what we call heavenly metal music.The ABC heard about us and did a segment on the Countrywide program. It's been one of the most popular segments that they have shown. They've repeated it a couple times showing us playing the bells. We also made some YouTube videos of the bells about 15 years ago and they've been watched in something like 150 countries around the world and had thousands of views. Places like Uzbekistan and Paraguay and Nigeria. People watch it and comment on it. That was pretty amazing and blew me away.About 15 or 16 years ago, the bells started at St Andrew's Anglican Church, though that's a different type of bell ringing. We need a team of six or eight people to ring the bells there. So as soon as that started, I went over and saw them while they were just installing them and said I'd like to be part of it when it started. Which I did and I'm still doing that with our team of bell ringers there.We go every year to a campanology convention, which is either in Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide or Sydney or somewhere, which is really good. We've rung bells in nearly every city in Australia that's got bells, which is a good fun.It's a good team activity. It's really good exercise. Some people say, you can't do more than two things at once, but in bellringing you're doing four things at once: you're counting, listening to the tune, you're coordinating your hands to catch the rope at certain places and you're counting the numbers in the pattern that you've got to learn. It really tightens up your brain activity. It's good for the spirit. It's giving back to the community. It's a unique activity that hasn't changed much in a couple of hundred years, a good tradition. I really like it. It ticks all the boxes for me.John Maloney laying a wreath for his Great Uncle Tom Boyle at the Centenary of the Battle of Polygon Wood, Ypres, Belgium in October 2017. Photo: John James Maloney / FacebookThe main thing I look for in the things I do is a chance to be a servant for the community, to give back to the community, to give back to people, make a difference. That's the sort of guiding thing behind what I'm doing, that it's going to benefit someone or help someone. Like with the work that I do with St Carthages Community Care, for the past 25 years, working with community aged care and running groups for the senior citizens. We're working with lonely people were, brightening up their lives, with quizzes, music and entertainment. Taking them on outings. It's really good to boost them up and make a difference every day when you go to work, which is great.I think you live a much better, happier existence if you're giving back, if you're helping people. I know my parents have both been a very good example. They've won awards before from the premier for volunteering and helping out. Dad's been doing his amateur boxing training here in Lismore for 60 years or something like that, since the ‘50s. So he's helped a lot of people. Mum does a lot of work in aged care and volunteering with meals on wheels and lots of different groups. So they've been a good influence to me. I've always just thought it was the thing to do..Receiving the Australia Day award was a total shock. I thought I had no chance of winning. The council rang up to to make sure I was coming and I said I suppose so, because we usually go any way to watch. I was just sitting there and then as they were reading out the people and my family said: "Quick, go up. You won.” I didn't realise. I thought there's no chance in hell of me winning. It was really, really nice. I thought there must have been other people nominated who were more worthy, but there you go. It's nice. I really thank the council for doing it. I still haven't found out who nominated me. Whoever it was. It was nice of you to think of me. It's pretty humbling.

Simon Milenko, is one of Lismore’s most famous cricketers. He has been on the television a lot lately playing for Hobart Hurricanes in the Big Bash League, who just missed out on tonight’s final. He now lives in Hobart, five minutes from the city centre, which he says is a lot like Lismore, with its hills. He shares his story with Kristian Hatton.I was born in Wahroonga in Sydney's Upper North Shore, on November 24 in 1988. We moved up from Avalon on the northern beaches of Sydney, to the Byron Bay/Lismore area. This was early in my life when I was only one. My folks had a place built in Eureka/Federal, because they wanted the country life and to get out of the city. They wanted me and my sister Lara (who is two years older than me) to have that nice sort of country life growing up, and they also wanted to get away from it all.My parents (Susie and Alex) had a shop selling jewellery and giftware, and they transferred it up there (to the northern rivers area) pretty easily. I grew up in that farmhouse in Eureka and then later on in my childhood, we moved to another farmhouse that was in the same area too. Those were the only two houses growing up so it was pretty secure, I guess.My life was idyllic growing up, running around the farm with bare feet and stuff like that, going to Eureka Primary in the country, just being a kid. It was always about cricket from the very start for me, because of my dad. My father Alex (Milenko) was my inspiration. He played a lot of first grade cricket in the northern rivers area. Like me, he’s a total tragic for cricket, and I grew up watching his games from the sidelines every time he played. My whole reason for playing cricket in the first place was because of him, and I could easily say he is my biggest idol with cricket.I think I had a cricket bat in my hands when I was a toddler, however I played my first game of ‘kanga’ cricket when I was about nine years old. I didn't like it that much though and didn't play another game until hard ball cricket started in Under 12s. I’ve heard that Tom’s mum Berni (Cooper) has something to do with the younger ones (in the northern rivers), and I see Tom around a fair bit because he plays state cricket with Melbourne (Renegades). I hear the other Coopers are doing quite well with cricket and other things they do too. That doesn’t surprise me with their family.The Gilchrist's were obviously inspirational to all us kids playing cricket, and we all used to pretend to be like them and do their trademark sort of motions, like how they bowled and batted and what they’d do in their celebrations. It was crazy later to meet some of these guys I grew up mimicking, and it was Stan Gilchrist who helped pull some strings for me to help me play in England on my gap year. A couple of people who were influential on my game at that time were my junior coach for (Trinity) high school, Gerry Benfield, and there was also my Dad’s mate, Rob Parkes, who took me through a lot of the finer points of the game.Probably the hardest thing for me when I was a kid were those long bus-trips from home to school in Lismore and back. I remember going through my lunch a couple of time on the way to school. Lismore was the hub with sports for me growing up. Everything rolled out of Lismore, and there was more people and engagement with sports than anywhere in the area. I hear it still is like that.For high school, I went to Trinity Catholic College. Because I went there, I obviously spent a fair bit of time around Lismore, and I remember times when my mates and I went up to Lismore Shopping Square to get something to eat when we had time and so on. I also played soccer for Eureka, Goonellabah, and for the Lismore Workers Under 16’s.My favourite place to play cricket at that time was at Oakes Oval, which was a lovely pitch and when you played there, it really had that "big game” feel. The first senior team I played with was East Lismore or Eastern Division, I think they’re called. There was also the Marist Brothers Schools Tournament, where I had a fair bit of success as an up-and-comer.Simon Milenko only enjoyed cricket with a hard ball from Under 12 level. Photo: SuppliedPlaying in the UK, university and accounting workAfter high school, there was my gap year between high school and university in 2006. Like I was saying before, Stan (Gilchrist) gave me the offer to play for a cricketing club in the UK, and I jumped straight on that one. I played with the Hambledon Cricket Club, which is like South of London in Hampshire. It’s a county on the southern coast of the UK. It was amazing getting an opportunity to play in that traditional sort of climate, which is obviously a lot different to hot summer days playing cricket in Australia.When I got back to Australia, I went to Bond University at the Gold Coast, where I done my Bachelor of Commerce from 2008-2010. I just smashed through it the whole way and done three semesters a year. I got good and mostly average grades, but for me it was mostly about getting through it. It was kind of like learning to work.Then I sort of went on to working in 2011, because it was the obvious thing to do after the degree. I started working for KPMG, an accounting and auditing firm. I got so much out of the experience and learned a lot about how businesses operate, which helped me understand how things work generally with business in the world. That time of my life was less about cricket than any other point of my life, so my game might have slipped a bit, but I always kept my training and game up.Sometimes it was full-on with auditing, and some nights I’d catch myself working on client portfolios at 3am at night. However, that has its rewards because you get the feeling of accomplishment afterwards when you finish those big ones, and you get monetarily rewarded well for it too. I feel that should happen for everyone who works hard at what they do, in an ideal world.I am still thankful I was offered the opportunity with KPMG and I finished my work with them on good terms, and maybe when I get older I would think about getting into that kind of work again.In 2013 I worked for Walz Construction for a bit, with the northern Queensland finance team. They’re like construction for the energy and infrastructure sector. I was starting to feel pretty filled out as a person with having more than cricket in my life too. I met my current fiancé Kim (Hart) through some mutual (friends) in Brissie and we hit it off pretty much straight away, so everything was really coming together for me.Then the cricket sort of happened again, I got offered a state contract around the end of 2014. It was a no-brainer to sign the contract because my whole life and passion had been about cricket.Present DaySimon Milenko is an all-rounder: an aggressive middle order batsman and a medium pace bowler. Photo: Hobart HurricanesI had already played some pre-season with the Hurricanes whilst I was playing with Brissie, and then got offered a new contract with Hurricanes for 2016. Of course, I jumped on that. There’s no way I couldn’t because my whole life had been about cricket and this was my shot. So we packed our bags and headed down to Hobart. Just the feeling of heading off there was really exciting too.So now I’m here in Hobart, playing my passion as my professional career, and it’s especially great being able to play to all the younger fans and help inspire their game. When you’re a professional cricketer, there’s not really time for any other kind of work or hobbies. There’s training, Pilates, meetings, coaching sessions, interviews, you don’t really have time for anything else, it’s all just cricket, cricket, cricket, and everything that’s in cricket. But obviously I love the game and wouldn’t have it any other way.On the off-season, my fiancé Kim (Hart) and I come up to the Northern Rivers area once a year if we can, so we can go visit my folks, who still live at the farm I grew up at in Eureka/Federal. We also go see my sister over in Byron Bay, where she works as a wedding photographer. She’s had a beautiful little daughter named Cleo around half a year ago, and it’ll be awesome to watch her grow up and play uncle. There’s also our friends in Brissie and Kim’s folks up on the Sunshine Coast. I’m not much of a gamer, but I love kicking back and relaxing with a book, but pretty much only on holiday when I have time. My favourite genres are crime, thrillers and biographies.Personal views on cricketThe newer T20 style of playing is awesome, I love it. Puritans may disagree with me here, and they have every right to as so far as their perspective is concerned. Don’t get me wrong – I love both styles of play and what they have to offer. Test cricket must stay around, not just because of its history but because it represents the ultimate sort of endurance test as a player.However, as a modern player, I think that in many respects (T20) is the future of the game. The younger fans love it because they can go catch it after school, parents can catch it after work and it’s engaging, and the games are robust and compact with heaps going on, and it’s always close and exciting. The T20 style of gameplay attracts heaps of new fans to the sport, which we always need to.Right, so then there’s how the Australian side are doing with cricket right now and that has a difficult effect on us all as professional cricketers. The national side is copping a bit of flack right now but let me tell you this: If you took the two best batsmen off each team internationally, I reckon it would be a different matter. Let me just leave it there … there’s not really a lot to say, things always change.The futureSimon with his fiance Kim Hart. the pair plan to marry on April 28. Photo: SuppliedI’m getting married to Kim up at the Sunshine Coast on April 28. If we had kids, I’d love to be able to play their sports with them, like my dad did with me. Obviously, I wouldn’t force them to do anything and make their own choices. I feel that it would be kind of natural with the life I’ve had if they took (cricket) up.When I finish my contract with the Hurricanes, we are heading back up north to live. Both my girlfriend and I have our roots in the south-east Queensland/Northern NSW area, and all our mates and relatives are still up there. We’re thinking maybe Brisbane, and maybe a bit more country after that. I don’t really know yet, it’s hard to say.I’m not quite sure about my working future outside of sport yet, but things are looking bright and I’m going to have more than enough opportunity. The good thing about sports is that you meet new people all the time, and as soon as you mention what you do, people are really interested in who you are. I’m kind of thinking that I’ll end up doing something within the sporting industry, but hopefully I can also use my experience in business to my advantage.Right now, I’m playing cricket and I’m not really thinking of retirement when I feel I’m at peak condition … I’m living the dream for as long as I can and I’m loving it.

Lismore’s Bette Guy is a prolific writer of short stories, plays and novels who also has experience on stage and in the director’s chair. With the Lismore Theatre Company gearing up to stage her play Soft Murder later this year and her newest book under consideration with a major publisher, Guy shared her own story with the Lismore App. My husband and I came to Australia from the UK in the late ‘60s, really just for an adventure. We had two small children and we planned to stay for two years but ended up never leaving. We settled in really well and loved it. It was something new and exciting and so different. Australians speak English but, my God, what a culture shock. Such a totally different attitude and mindset. There was so much new stuff to see and my imagination just went off.We lived in Melbourne for a short time, then East Gippsland, Brisbane, outside of Brisbane, near Coffs Harbour and then, Armidale, where I went to university.At school I was always good at what we used to call English composition and I realised at an early age that I loved telling stories. I was one of five children, so you learn to tell stories to your parents about what you kids are all doing - cover stories. I was always good at that and I was always imaginative. I could pick anything up and make a story out of it. So I guess I've always been a storyteller, but it was university that really got me into writing. When you're doing a degree of any kind, you have that space, you have the stimulation, you have the research, and the library is just there. I did my first degree at the University of New England in English, Drama, Theatre, French and Psychology. I was a mature age student. In ‘83, I think it was. I was working at the uni and at the same time doing bits of theatre. I was acting, directing, writing, getting bits and pieces I’d written on stage here and there - in Armidale,Tamworth, Brisbane, Sydney, down in Victoria and Tasmania. You don't make a living from writing though - not unless you’re Stephen King. I did other jobs or bits of tutoring. That's what I've always done. I should have been a high school teacher, but when I went into the system in the '80s, I decided it wasn’t for me. A friend of mine, she's self-published 12 books now, and sells a lot of ebooks in America, but she has to teach as well. She makes probably half the amount of the dole from her writing and then the rest she has to make up somehow.In Armidale in around 2000, I felt like I'd reached my limits. That's the problem when you're a writer and you have imagination, you need to be stretched and challenged all the time. I felt like I'd gone as far as I could with it and wanted to change. We looked everywhere for where to go next. We were going to Newcastle but they had just had that earthquake.We moved to Lismore because we wanted to live somewhere there was a university, because you have a broader cultural community, and this is a good area because you're not far from the bush, you've got small businesses, a few big businesses, you've got the hospital ... you've got everything here and it was near the coast so it was warm. It has quite a few things going for it.This area is great for creativity, and the people are open to everything, which is really great. The gallery here, every time you come there's something that sort of hits you in the face and you think, oh my god. And then there are other things that you might not like so much, or that you hate or that you love. So there's a whole range, which is great. You don't have that sort of one track mind type of a culture here. When the Queensland Theatre Company put on my play Well You Can’t Win ‘Em All I thought, ‘well, I'm off now’ with my career, but if you're living in a country town, whether it's Armidale or Lismore, Ballina or whatever, it's not the same as if you're in Sydney or Melbourne. You've got to be right by the theatre and working with the theatre company to really make a go of it. So that's when I started going into the short stories more and the books. After about four rejections I decided to publish myself, which is hard because you've got to sell them yourself then, which is really hard. Rejections really mean nothing. You keep reading about people who have had 30 or 40 rejections before they get picked up. But I don't have that much time left. I can’t wait around for another 20 years. I've self-published two books so far. One was a mystery set with the backdrop of the Aquarius Festival and a collection of short stories. Some of my short stories have been published in anthologies and various newspapers, magazines and things. I do like the mystery I wrote. It's called Day and Knight - The Case of Missing Things and is available on Amazon. It was set here and I've put a lot of myself into the lead character. It's humorous. It's a mystery. Because I could refer back to the Aquarius Festival, it involves criminals from then and right up to date when it was written, but there's always that humour and it's really my kind of humour, and I love the character.I've got a book now that Penguin are looking at but who knows. I’ll keep trying. I will try with this latest book, which is sort of part memoir, part creative fiction set in England and Australia. If Penguin reject it, I'll try somewhere else.The Lismore Theatre Company is currently auditioning for a production of my play Soft Murder. It was one I wrote as part of my Masters Thesis about a decade ago and got on to the long short list for the Queenland Premier's Drama Award.It’s about war propaganda. The main character is a woman who gets a new job working in a government office, which turns out to be the propaganda department. She enters this world of spin doctoring and learns of the terrible things, the dreadful lies that the public are being told, and she decides she wants to do something about it. I can't say too much. You don't want to give it all away.There's a lot of farce in it. There's a lot of innuendo. My thesis was about political satire and how Greek playwright Aristophanes comedic conventions are relevant today. I went through several centuries of plays including Shakespeare right up to contemporary playwright Dario Fo and pointed out that a lot of these comedic conventions were still used. I can look at sitcoms on television and see they're using farce here, they're using witty dialogue there. Whatever. So that's what Soft Murder was built upon, political satire, and it's about bringing the bad guys down, or at least exposing the truth. That's the centre of it. These days I've got no job, as such. I'm semi-retired, but I'm involved in the Labor Party, I'm involved with U3A and the theatre, I'm involved with some younger people who sometimes want a bit of mentoring. So my life is full. There are still days when I think 'oh, I'll get to stay home today. Wonderful'.You know, fame and fortune, it's not gonna happen. I realise that now, although that's what you hope for originally. What I would like is just recognition from the industry and my peers. I mean everyone who reads my books loves them, but that's not enough. I want a few thousand readers at least. A million would be nice. But we'll have to see. Every year I say, oh, I'm going to stop writing, but within seconds the ideas are always there and that's what you can't combat. Just seeing someone walking down the street in some sort of strange headgear or clothes, and you think what's their story? And I'm off. Where can I put them? What are they doing? It's crazy, but that's what writers have: imagination and they just go off. Whether you can make a good story, is another question, but that's the skill of it. The craft.

Fintan Magee, who this week painted a 10m high portrait of a local Bundjalung elder and her grandson on the Lismore City Library, is an internationally recognised mural artist who was been commissioned to paint buildings everywhere from Jordan to Norway and El Paso, Texas. In an artist's talk on Wednesday at the Lismore Regional Gallery he used a series of images to talk about his influences, his work and the story of Lismore's newest large-scale mural.My father was born in a small town called Derry in Northern Ireland. This is the first, probably the first bit of graffiti I interacted with or saw when I was very small. This is, I don't know if you could call it a mural, but it's one of the signs that basically mark the neighborhoods in Northern Ireland in Derry.The neighborhood is called Bogside and this is what it looked like when I first visited in the early '90s when I was probably about five years old. At the time, it was an area of civil conflict. Everyone probably knows the history of Northern Ireland, so I won't go too deeply into it.That's my father at 16.That's my mom. My father moved from Northern Ireland when he was 17 to the UK and my parents met at art school. So I grew up in a very creative family. They moved to Australia and had me.This is me in Lismore in 1985. When my parents moved from the UK to Australia, they bought a church for about $8,000 - Baby Boomers right. I just wanted to show some embarrassing baby photos basically.Here's some of my early work. Pretty sure this was Michelangelo because he's got nunchucks.That's me on my first trip back to Derry, in Ireland, which is when I had my my first interactions with mural art and public art at five years old in 1990. There was very little graffiti or and no murals in Brisbane where we were living at the time, so it was the first time I'd ever kind of interacted with mural work.As you can see, the neighborhood, from 1975 to about 1995 became filled with murals and the murals became a big part of the landscape during the conflict.A lot of the murals, were used to mark territory. Certain paramilitary groups let people know where they were not allowed to go.Some of the murals were about the civil rights movement and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in particular.Some were memorials to paramilitary members that had been killed.Some dealt with other kinds of political issues.So I first saw the murals when I was five. I went back when I was 10 and then again when I was 12 and I would go out and photograph the work and just developed a fascination with mural arts from a young age. I was particularly interested in the idea of the public wall as a kind of a community message board, a way for people to communicate ideas outside of the media or the mainstream channels. From a young age, I was kind of obsessed with the power of that.I came back to Brisbane at 13 years old and kind of got absorbed in Brisbane's graffiti scene, this is probably 1998 by the time I started writing graffiti. At that time we couldn't really get commissioned to paint walls so we would just go out at night and kind of make do with what we could.This is a on a train in Brisbane in 2011, so I was a little bit older by the time I got around to this one.This is another wall in an abandoned building that I painted in sometime in the 2000s, maybe 2006.So at this time I became very absorbed in traditional graffiti and letter forms. I always had a fascination with art, but I guess I didn't really have the money or the resources to create murals yet, so this was kind of the best I could do with what I had.I was probably in my early twenties when I painted this, and it was kind of a jump. Around this time I had enrolled in art school in Brisbane at the Queensland College of Art and that basically ruined my graffiti, to put it simply. I went from doing these letter forms and decided I wanted to experiment more. I kind of got bored with the traditional letter structure and also I started doing oil paintings at art school. I wanted to see if I could combine my oil paintings with my graffiti, still painting in abandoned buildings without permission or funding. I don't know what I was thinking with this one. I think there was this kind of perception that graffiti was rubbish, so I thought it would be hilarious if I just painted rubbish on the wall. We've all got to start somewhere. It was a bit more difficult because the good thing about graffiti is you can always just start with your first letter. Once I kind of started to change out of that structure it was all very confusing. So there was a period of experimentation.So this is a little more fun. This is on an abandoned train line, in Byron Bay actually. It's the old train that used to run through Lismore. There is a massive section, it's probably 20 kilometers of abandoned track and we used to go down there during the day because there was no one there to really disturb you so you could paint all day.This is a work I painted in Melbourne in 2011. So this is when I started to develop a little more and branch out into more figurative works and started to find my voice a little bit more. This actually was also done illegally. It was painted on paper and then stuck to the wall using glue. So it only lasted about two weeks before people tore it down, but at that stage we couldn't really get permission to paint anything yet, so we were still very DIY. This is another work in an abandoned building in Sydney, which is more of an installation. It was at the beginning of the Syria crisis and it was a newspaper clipping I found of refugee kids collecting water or lining up to get water at one of the camps. I painted the wall and then installed two mirrors on either side of the wall so that when you walk into the space, the image reflects it. It kind of becomes like an infinite painting. It was was kind of my comment on the scale of the crisis, I guess.This is probably the next period of my work. Basically what was happening with these works that we were doing in abandoned buildings, was me and Guido van and a couple other Brisbane artists at the time, we were doing these works with very little budget and very little resources, but we were putting them online and started to kind of get recognition through a number of the street art blogs and through our social media presence. The Internet really gave us an opportunity because in Brisbane there wasn't much of a street art scene happening at this stage - this is 2011, 2012. Because we were putting our work online, we started to get recognition from curators overseas and I started to get booked to paint walls legally. Which was nice because then I finally had a little bit of money. So this is a work I did for a street art festival in Puerto Rico in 2016, about three years after that last work with the mirrors. This one was a kind of a comment on climate change. Puerto Rico's a small island in the Caribbean and those islands are very susceptible to climate change, because they're so low lying. A lot of their land mass is going to go underwater potentially in the next 50 years. I painted the silo structure as a glass of water, which is kind of symbolic of an island having limited space and you can see the small boy is carrying an iceberg and it's slowly melting and his little island world is filling up with water. So it's somewhat whimsical, but I guess there was a serious concept behind it. This is another work I painted in Portugal in 2016. As I developed more and more and got booked for more gigs, the work started to get bigger and bigger.This is a work up in Kiev, in Ukraine in 2015. A lot of my work's kind of dealt with the 2011 Brisbane floods and climate change at this part of my career. My mother's home went under in 2011 in the Brisbane floods, so I kind of got obsessed with using some of those issues to talk about climate change and stuff like that.This is a work I painted in the south of Italy and was kind of my little homage to the mothers in the neighborhood. A lot of women around there grow aloe vera and that was a nice piece for me personally because my mom used to grow aloe vera and give me aloe vera when I was injured or cut.This is a work I did in El Paso in Texas, which is right on the border of Mexico. You can actually see there's that kind of line in the background - that's the border wall. I painted an image of a local woman who actually lives across the border in Juarez, which is the Mexican town, and she crosses over for work every day, and I painted the mountains upside down in the painting. That was just kind of about living between two worlds and her story of carving out a life for herself in that part of the world.This is a work I painted in Amman which is the capital city of Jordan. The girl is a Syrian refugee but the neighborhood the painting was in was actually a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood. It was an incredibly interesting neighborhood to work in because it started out as a refugee camp for Palestinians who had been forced out of Israel and basically I think in the '60s it became pretty evident that they weren't going to be able to go back. By that stage they had been there for about 20 years. So the Jordanian government actually build public housing for them and settled them permanently. So it's very much a neighborhood that has a story of migration and a strong refugee background. To be able to paint a Syrian there was pretty special and everyone was really amazing. So that was a great project.This is a project I did in Stavanger, in Norway, for a new art festival. I painted on two silos. When I arrived in Norway in 2016 there had been massive job cuts because there was a drop in oil prices and it wasn't profitable to extract the oil anymore. Norway is a major oil exporter and a lot of the operations were shutting down and a lot of workers were being laid off. Stavanger is kind of the home of the oil industry, so there was a lot of change and it was kind of a weird vibe when I got there, a lot of businesses closing down and stuff like that.So I painted a friend of mine who had been working on the rigs and you can see how it's kind of painted like a Rorschach effect. So he's kind of like breaking up and disappearing. For me the work was kind of about, not just about Stavanger, but about working class anxiety in general, and in particular in the era of Donald Trump. I think this was during the Donald Trump campaign, so he hadn't been elected yet, but everyone was kind of freaking out a little bit about that.Ironically, considering this was kind of about the disappearance of the working class, they pulled the structure down and built apartment blocks there later. So it became kind of a double metaphor for gentrification in the end. This is an image of the building being pulled down literally two years later. It was kind of sad to see it come down but also kind of gave the work extra meaning for me. That's part of the game when you make work on the street. Everything is very ephemeral and things come and go. This another work I painted in Finland, in Helsinki, about fatherhood.This one is of workers in Istanbul, in Turkey. It's kind of comment on the drought in Istanbul. We had a really bad drought in Queensland, before the floods, and 2010 was kind of the peak of it. The water restrictions were so bad that everyone was showering with buckets then using the extra water to water their gardens. That was a crazy time. I think the dam levels were about 10 per cent. So when I got to Istanbul in 2017, there were water restrictions there and people were doing the same thing. I thought that was kind of interesting so I painted a bunch of local guys kind of holding the buckets and the piece is called Pray for Rain and it's about the sacrifices we're all making in the era of climate change.This is another work I did in France, near Paris.This one's in Belarus.This is a work I painted in Goa, in India. This is my last work actually, in December last year. I was over there for a big mural festival that was happening, called Start India. This is kind of a kind of a social realist piece. I painted four guys who were local workers that were helping out with the festival but I wanted to paint a Roman column, they they're bracing or holding up. For me. the column kind of symbolized opulence and wealth and those men are the unseen workers holding everything up underneath. It's kind of a throwback to Diego Rivera and those old masters that were doing social realism and portrayals of the working class.This work has a pretty similar theme. This was a recent collaboration I did with another artist, Guido van Helten, who also has some work in Lismore in the Back Alley Gallery. This was a similar thing. Guido's very journalistic in his approach, and he's also interested in telling stories of everyday working class people. I guess there's like a tradition in public art to honour the grandiose, whether that's a king or a great poet or a big sculpture of an explorer or something like that. What me and Guido are interested in is subverting that tradition a little bit and just kind of painting the everyday. That was particularly important in Iran because Iran has a massive mural scene but there's a huge amount of murals of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The murals there are quite propagandistic. So for us it was more about just showing the everyday worker. And this was based on photos we took in the grand bizarre in the center of Tehran. It's just two guys repairing carpets. With the economic restrictions and sanctions that are on Iran, they can't import goods in the same way that we can in the Western world. So you see this big emphasis on repair and reuse and recycling actually. These guys would just literally sit there and spend hours and hours of the day just rethreading old carpet and repairing them and reselling them. It quite a beautiful process to watch.I arrived in Lismore about 10 days ago but this project's been in the works for probably six months now. After Lismore Quad placemaking officer Marisa Snow originally reached out to me, I asked her if she knew anyone that would make an interesting subject or an angle for the mural. She introduced me to Auntie Irene Harrington who's one of the Bundjalung elders. She's a fascinating woman. She studied here when these buildings over here were still a school. She was the second indigenous child to be allowed to study there.I thought she would be a fascinating subject for the mural. She's also been very much involved language preservation and was involved in the passing of the NSW indigenous languages bill. We actually sat down with her on the first day that I got here, to consult with her about our ideas for the mural and I told her I wanted to paint her portrait on the wall and she just shot me down straight away. She was like, "no way am I going up on that wall. You don't want my face up there. Nobody wants my face up there". So yeah, that threw a spanner in the works pretty early in the game. Luckily she was there with her grandson Sheldon and I pitched her the idea of representing her in the mural as more of an abstract shape or a silhouette and to paint her grandson instead, and she agreed and that worked really nicely. She's obviously worked very hard to preserve the Bundjalung language, and her grandson now speaks the language pretty much fluently and is involved in building an app and a bunch of other preservation projects. So the fact that she's passed the language onto her grandkids, for me it was very beautiful. I thought actually having her grandson in the mural was actually nicer in a way and it gave extra meaning. That's Sheldon again. This was the next day. His shirt was was a bit weird, so I decided to reshoot it. There was was just a bit too much going on there. So I was able to kind of represent Aunty Irene through text in a series of words in the Bundjalung language that she gave me. Sheldon is holding a message stick which is important at elder's meetings, because you're not allowed to talk unless you're holding the stick and they kind of pass it around. So it's about her passing it to him really and passing the language onto him. And the painting is on the library, which is obviously about transferal of knowledge as well, so I think it all fits quite quite well. 

Lindsay Matterson, a larger than life figure who was synonymous in the Lismore community with the SES, was remembered and honoured at a memorial service on Wednesday at St Andrew’s Anglican Church. The following is a lightly edited version of Lismore City SES unit chaplain Paul von Bratt’s moving eulogy.Lindsay was not a man of any professed faith. However, he lived his life in a way that many faiths promote and aspire to. He was a great man. I'd like to especially welcome and thank Ruth, Lindsay's wife, for sharing her husband with us in so many ways. I'd also like to welcome their children Robin, Cheryl, Wendy, and Paul and their families, spouses, partners, grandchildren, great grandchildren and Lindsay's brother Colin and his wife as together we celebrate a great life, well lived. Lindsay's funeral was a private family service held on Thursday the 3rd of January where he was remembered first and foremost as a husband, dad, brother, grandad, papa and outlaw. Lindsay's family have invited us to join them this afternoon to celebrate his life as family and as a loved and valued emergency service and community member and when I look out, we are a diverse gathering. Beyond family, we represent government, emergency services, business and community, all arenas where Lindsay was well known and well respected and your presence here today is a living testimony to the significance that a single life can make in the lives of many people and in the lives of community.Lismore City SES Unit chaplain Paul von Bratt gave a moving eulogy for Mr Matterson. PHOTO: Will Jackson.How can one possibly cram 84 years of living, loving and serving into a couple of minutes? I guess that's why they call it a life sketch, and you'll notice there's probably a few gaps, maybe a few repeats, but by the end of our sharing time together, you will have a more complete picture of Lindsay, this lovable Larrikin.Lindsay William Matterson was born in Casino on the 22nd of June, 1934. He passed away on the 27th of December, 2018, from mesothelioma, a unique cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. He's sadly missed.Lindsay met Ruth in 1952 at Armidale's teachers college. Unfortunately, Lindsay died two days short of their 62nd wedding anniversary. Four beautiful children, Robyn, Cheryl, Wendy and Paul, 10 grandchildren and three great grandchildren, most of whom are here today. After teaching in various locations, the family returned to the Northern Rivers in 1970 and Lindsay became a lecturer at what is now known as Southern Cross University, retiring as a senior lecturer there in 1990. In 1979, during the International Year of the Child, Lindsey had the opportunity of teaching for a year in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He taught country teachers mainly crafts and how to make teaching aids. Ruth, Wendy and Paul joined him for the last eight months of that year and the family then returned to Australia. Lindsay loved his family, no question about that. He loved his camping trips, as many of you would attest. He loved his woodwork and his shed. He was also a big part of the Lismore Hockey Club and there are lots of memories around that part of his life. But Lindsay also loved his community, commencing first as a member of the then Civil Defense and joining the SES in February of 1972. He served us and our community for just shy of 47 years. Thank you, Lindsay.Lindsay Matterson photographed at last year's Anzac Day march. PHOTO: Will Jackson.Lindsay served in various positions locally: he was local controller, unit controller, deputy unit controller and, most recently, at Lismore as Lismore City intelligence officer. In the old days, of course the unit was in the rowing club, which meant that the unit regularly had to evacuate itself in flood before helping the community, and of course when the levy was finally built, the unit was still on the river side. So Lindsay lobbied all levels of government local businesses and the community, and he did that tirelessly over many years to establish the first class facility that we have at Lismore in its current location. That project cost well over a $1 million. Again thank you, Lindsay. He never missed an opportunity to use operations, things that were happening around the place, to acquire grants or donations, or equipment. At times he engaged in heated debates, always striving to ensure the Lismore unit provided the best possible service to our community. And his arguments were always backed up with facts and figures. He could tell you exactly what date, what height, what damage, what storm, what event. And if he couldn't do that off the top of his head, he would consult is extensive notes and get back to you with the correct information. At a particular media conference, I'm told, involving the then prime minister Kevin Rudd, Lindsay had no problem keeping everyone in line and entertained the prime minister, media and everyone else present using his teacher's bellow. In fact, you often heard Lindsay before you could see him and we miss that. There are definitely lots of moments of silence. Lindsay Matterson will be remembered for his dedication to his family and the wider community. PHOTO: Will Jackson. Lindsay built the Lismore City unit from six members to its current 96 and it was his leadership determination, organizational skills and careful mentoring that made this possible. He was a practical joker with a wicked sense of humor and caught many of us out over the years. One of his favorite things, SES-wise, was to present awards to members at the annual Christmas party, usually for stupid things that we had done or costly mistakes that we had made. All in good humor, of course. There were a couple of occasions where he actually received some awards as well from other members of the unit who, appreciated his mistakes and folly.He was like a father figure to many in the unit and encouraged everyone to be the best that they could be. Sadly, after the 2017 Cyclone Debbie, Lindsay felt he had failed the community. Whilst he was not personally responsible for any of the negative outcomes, he carried the burden of people loss in our community. That was just who he was. He took it personally when anger was focused on the local Lismore City unit. His unit. His community.Lindsay, we miss you, we thank you and we honor you.

Bronte Jordan always stands out in the picture of winners at Lismore Speedway. But Miss Speedway, or the Trophy Girl as she is known, is far more than an attractive young woman. In her day job, she is a mechanic with big plans, she tells CHRIS SPEED.I dropped out of Year 12 after two weeks. I was at Casino High School and I got a two-day trial with Poletto's Mechanical Repairs in McLennan Lane, Lismore. Then a week later I began working here.I wanted to get out of school because I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to go do something involving cars. At first I wanted to be a welder, I did my welding course and everything, and that just turned into cars. I’d be fiddling with the race cars and helping pop (speedway driver Pat Newstead] with his cars.From about the age of seven my sister and I used to ride motorbikes on my dad’s property (mainly cattle and horses) at Ellengowan, which is 20 minutes drive south of Casino. I spent a lot of time with my pop. He was a mechanic, as was an uncle (speedway driver Shane Newstead), and he would always be out in his shed working on something. So I would be out there working with him. I had my own special little tools I used to work with.The way an engine works sparked my attention – there’s so many different parts and components that come together.It just amazes me how versatile they can be, how much you can do with them. If you’ve got the mindset, you can do it.After having the whole engine pulled apart, putting it back together and seeing it all run at the end. Especially little things like sensors that can make an engine not run, this tiniest little thing. It’s satisfying.CV grease! I hate grease! Probably the worst things are grease and fingernails. My work clothes stink of gear oil. But there’s nothing I don’t like about it, every day is something different, you’re always learning something everyday. Diagnosing different things.Bronte Jordan is about to finish her apprenticeship as a mechanic at Poletto's Mechanical Repairs. Photo: Chris SpeedSpeedway’s always been a huge part of my life, ever since I can remember. Every Saturday night was spent at the racetrack. My uncle Shane and my grandfather Pat raced so that was a big part of it, it’s just always growing up around that. My grandparents used to babysit me while mum worked, so instead of going shopping with my grandmother I’d be in the shed with my pop. So it was just normal for me growing up to have cars around and be interested in cars. For me, being a female and being interested in cars isn’t abnormal.If an opportunity to drive came up, I’d be in for sure. Sitting on the infield and watching them race and seeing how much my uncle enjoys it, and hearing stories from my Pop, makes me want to. I’ve got the motivation behind it. I’ve just got the thrill for going fast. I reckon I’d give them a run for their money, definitely! Most of them just get in the car and drive it, they don’t have that much to do with the engine. I’m still trying to convince my uncle to give me a run, use the AMCA, but he won’t!AMCA Nationals are purpose-built modified race cars based on American Dirt Modifieds. All chassis feature a HQ-WB Holden front clip and drivers have the choice of running either a Holden V8 253ci engine, which produces around 340 horsepower, or a Chevrolet V8 350ci crate engine, which produces around 350 horsepower.Being Miss Speedway is definitely not what I thought I’d see myself doing - at all! I was always the type of girl who thought of being a car girl as being a double standard, a chick who’s just doing it for attention. That’s what people think when they see me there [at the speedway] but then they get an insight into what I do for a living and they’re like ‘oh, okay, she’s kind of got the best of both worlds’. She dresses up as a female [at speedway] and sees behind the scenes and she comes here [to work] and looks completely different. All my customers that come here, most of them go to speedway and they don’t recognise me. When I’m here at work I’m hair up, grubby, boots and work clothes, and at Lismore Speedway I’m looking like a female.They wanted someone there [for promotional purposes]. They always knew me around there and they asked my auntie if she knew of anyone, and she’s like ask Bronte to do it, she’s always here anyway.Bronte Jordan, as the Trophy Girl, with Mr Modified opening round winner Jai Stephenson (centre) with runner-up Mitch Randall (left) and third-placed Mark Robinson. Photo: Tony PowellTo me it’s good that I can go from here, being a little grub, to out there, still being able to be a female but still being part of the car scene. I like dressing up but I still like having something to do with cars. The boys will see me at the racetrack and if my uncle needs a hand working on his car I’ll be there with my [Miss Speedway uniform] under the car.Now if it was another girl who wasn’t used to working in a male-dominated area then yeah, I could see an issue. But all the blokes there know me well enough. I get respect. People know my family, they know what I do for a living but if it was a random female I’d say it would be a different story. The boys will stand there and talk to me how their car was running after they get off the track.The top drivers are all good role models for younger kids and I’ve known them since I was young. My grandmother used to change (former Australian V8 Dirt Modified champion) Andrew Pezzutti’s nappy when he was little!Being Miss Speedway is more just a bit of fun for me. I get to go to something I love watching and be on the infield, the best seat in the house. I don’t see it as a job, or work, it’s just fun. If they stopped Miss Speedway, I’d still go there and watch it.More women should be in trades like mine. Females should be able to do anything, whatever they want to do, they shouldn’t be afraid that a male is going to be like ‘you can’t do that, you’re a female.’ Even here (Poletto's Mechanical Repairs) when I first started working here, I doubted myself so much. I was like, I’m not going to be able to do it, I don’t have the muscle. When I first started here, there was so much I couldn’t do but I’ve learnt so much, If something’s seized, hit it with a bigger hammer! My boss said to me the other day, after three years you can finally lift a 37 inch tyre! There’s definitely no reason a female can’t do it.It’s great to see Natasha Hearne racing. And all the young girls in juniors, it’s so good to see.I had a bloke come in here, he said ‘You’re the reason my daughter’s now getting into cars and going to TAFE as a mechanic'. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard! For my niece, she’s only one or so, for her to grow up in an environment where working on cars as a female is normal, and doing anything as a female is normal, not having the whole male-dominated trade anymore, it makes me happy for her to see that.The whole sexism thing is just dying down, which is good.Fausto Poletto told the Lismore App that Bronte was recommended by her TAFE teachers.Fausto Poletto says Bronte Jordan has always been willing to learn, willing to listen. Photo: Chris Speed"When I rang them up they said ‘Oh you’ve gotta get this girl, she’s really really good’, and that’s when it all started to roll into place. She knew what she was on about, she knew what she was talking about. Nowadays it’s very difficult, you might get somebody in that you think knows a lot and they know very little. She didn’t pretend she knew everything but she knew a fair bit about what she’s doing. From day dot she was willing to learn, willing to listen."The reaction to Bronte did surprise me. I was a bit concerned to start with about the older gentlemen, we service their cars, how they felt about a woman working on their cars, but a lot of them just love her. They’ve come to realise she knows what she’s talking about and she’s not just here for decoration."I know she copped a lot of flak from her tech mates for being the trophy girl (Miss Speedway). I’ve got no problem with what she does. As long as she comes to work, does her work well. She’s got her head screwed on, she’s got her life together. She was saying she wants to own a workshop full of women."David Lander, owner/operator of Lismore Speedway, said Bronte was in her second season as Miss Speedway.Lismore Speedway owner/operator David Lander said the paying punters would be shocked to know Bronte's a mechanic. Photo: Tony Powell"She’s our trophy girl, we run a program competition and she helps people fill out the forms. She’s a regular helper for the patrons."The competitors all like her and I think the public do too."She’s got an uncle that races, she has that mechanical experience which is unusual – I think she’s an asset."I think the public would probably be surprised about Bronte. I think if she told them she was a motor mechanic they’d be shocked. But she’s not the first female motor mechanic I’ve encountered. She’s done it and she’s done it well. I had my last [car] dealership in Sydney and we had a girl we took on as an apprenticeship, she completed it, and then went on the service counter and was very good at it."Bronte does it well, she’s an attraction, she’s a good looking girl. While she’s popular we’ll keep her. If she chucked it in tomorrow, I’d get another girl, I wouldn’t get a bloke."I had a dealership that employed 88 people in Sydney, 34 of them were female because to be honest with you, they are better employees. They’re there to prove that they can do it and they’ve proven to me for years that they’re better employees. They come to work on time, they don’t take sickies when it’s not needed."I had a female mechanic, spare parts drivers, spare parts pickers, sales girls, every thing. Over the years, and I’m 72, they’ve proven that they’re better employees. No sexism there!”Bronte finishes her apprenticeship shortly.Bronte Jordan has plans for her future but is happy to work as a mechanic in Lismore for the time being. Photo: Chris SpeedI’ll definitely stay here for a few more years, but eventually I’d like to venture out to the mines, go into heavy diesel and machine operating. They’re requesting females out there too because they’re just so much easier on the equipment. I’ve had a few job offers recently but I’ve got it too good here.

A Lismore Citizen of the Year and OAM recipient, Ken Jolley, is an institution around Lismore. A long-time stalwart of the Lismore RSL and the Vietnam Tunnel Rats Association, he is most often seen with a book of raffle tickets in hand collecting money for the Westpac Life Saver Rescue Helicopter.  I was born here in Lismore, out at Rock Valley. Dad had a dairy farm out there. I had to leave school to go to work on the farm because he wasn't making any money and he had to come to town to work. In 1961 I joined the military, joined the army. I was in Malaya and that for two years, attached to the British Army, and then when I went to Vietnam for ‘66 and ‘67. I was a tunnel rat over there - we used to go down into the tunnels - and I had a couple of pretty scary calls. Ken with a mate in 1966 and 2018. PHOTO: Supplied.When I came back I married a local girl and had kids and that's where I am. I got a home living here in Goonellabah and worked all my life here. A jack of all trades, master of none. So that's what I did. Two kids. Five grandkids. Fantastic. I love ‘em. Just had them all home for Christmas.When I was in Vietnam, the dustoff pilots, if you got wounded or hit you were about 50 minutes away from hospital. Those pilots would come under gun fire, pick you up and take you out. One of the first pilots flying for the Westpac Rescue Helicopter was a dustoff pilot and he was the one that got me involved raising money just selling raffle tickets.I started off selling tickets in a fat bullock competition, three for $2 over at the Lismore Showground. The weight of the fat bullock. Used to do that every show. And that's when it first started 37 years ago. I've done that, selling raffle tickets doing whatever I can to help for all that time. I still do and I still love it. They’ll probably bury me with a ticket book.The main thing I enjoy about it is the people. The people you meet. Everyone who comes to you is positive, good people, and I think I'm a people person. I just love doing it. I do the markets, Lismore Carboot, Bangalow. Any events, I go. I'm going down to Evans Head for Australia Day. So that's what I do mate, and I love doing it. Ken doing what he does best - raise money for the chopper. PHOTO: Supplied.I also do the Driver Reviver station down at New Italy. I've been involved in that for about ten years, down there every school holidays mainly around Christmas. Just giving people a cup of coffee. The people you meet there are just unbelievable, from all over the world. A lot of backpackers, a lot of people on holidays. And they just love a chat, and I love a chat. That's how it is.I get a lot of stories from down there. Everyone reckons Australia is the greatest country in the world, which I agree with. Last time I was down there I met these two Danes, one was 80 and the other was 79 and they were travelling around Australia in a Kombi Van and I thought what a great couple. That's what they do and they love it. Of course, there's an ulterior motive there because we get a donation from them for the helicopter. There's a donation box there and it's split up between us, the RFS and the SES and we get a portion of that.It's like I've got "please tell me" written on my forehead. I've heard so many stories. Good stories too. Three or four months ago this woman came up and said her relation was one of the first to be picked up by the helicopter way back in 1984. Things like that. You try to document these things that people say because it's history and we've got to keep that history.I’ve never thought about how much I've raised. I wouldn’t know. I just do it. Whatever I end up with in the afternoon, I didn't have that morning. That's the way to look at it.Everyone knows me, of course. As I said, I love people. I just love interacting with people and I think that's part of the strategy. You can't just sit at a table with a raffle book reading a newspaper or doing a crossword, you can't do it. You've got to engage people as they're walking past, and that's what I do.Our biggest problem raising money for the helicopter is getting younger people to volunteer. Everyone wants to say I'm working for the rescue helicopter, but you've got to put that into practice too.The thing is, experience in life doesn't come at a desk, experience in life comes with engaging people. Volunteering with whichever organisation, engaging with people for that organisation is one of the greatest rewards you can get, that's what I think. Ken the helicopter man. PHOTO: Supplied.I used to be involved more in the RSL. I've been president and all that but I've sort of backed off a bit because of the helicopter. But I'm still involved in the RSL and with the association of the Tunnel Rats. We've got a big association in Australia. One of the main things I’ve been working on recently is the memorial over at North Lismore, which has taken about two years. I was one of the main instigators of that there, I was sort of project manager of that and I've got it all up and running.Where the memorial is now is the original site where the troops left for World War I because there was a railway station there. They camped on the showground, boarded the trains there at North Lismore to go to Brisbane and then to the battlefields all over the world. In 1926 they put a monument there with 145 names of those who didn't come home, but later on we moved it from there to the RSL Hall over at South Lismore so we could look after it, keep it in good repair and everything. After we sold the hall, we moved it to the railway station at South Lismore so anyone coming through could see all the names on the monument. But two days after we moved it there the trains stopped and no one will ever go again.Anyhow, two years ago the sub branch got together and said we've got to do something, because it was in disrepair. So I went around to a lot of the business houses here in Lismore and got a lot of help from some great people to help me shift it. The Lismore City Council were great. So we shifted it over there, and Keith Smith over at Beckinsales Monumental Masons, he grouted it all and fixed it all up and I decided I had to do all the names again, I put a fence around it, I got all the materials from local people. Richmond Sand and Gravel were fantastic. Unbelievable. The turf that's on we got it from up near Caboolture. Everyone pitched in. I'm personally so grateful for what they did, because we couldn't have done it otherwise.We decided we had to get a special plaque. Down in Victor Harbour in South Australia I saw a plaque and took a photo of it, took it home and took it over to Keith and said to him: "What are we going to do?”. He said he'd get it made. I went around to a few of the business houses and I got $1200 cash. The state government came through with another $1200, it cost $2400 and we got it all. Got the minister to come up again and unveiled the plaque. We had the school kids all there. A lot of school kids. Richmond River, Kadina, Lismore High, Blue Hills. We just made a special day of it to unveil it. Ken Jolley with Lismore State MP Thomas George, NSW Minister for Veterans Affairs David Elliott and Lismore High School student Freya Thompson. PHOTO: Supplied.We can't let that memory die. We can't let those names on that obelisk go into oblivion. We can't. We've got to honour them because they gave us Australia. That's my thoughts on it. They gave their lives for us and that's the way I look at it and that's why I've done it.I've been in touch with Kevin Hogan about getting 145 poppies, that's all the names on the obelisk, and on Anzac Day I'm putting them from the obelisk up the hill to where the railway station was. That's what I'm going to do.Australia's given me everything I've got. Everything. And I just seem to think that I want to give back something to Australia. That's how I feel about it.