I had no sooner finished writing about floods in Warwick when it started raining again. I’d written the lead article for our local U3A newsletter last week, recounting the times since 2000 the Condamine River had closed the main bridge into town. The answer (so far) is four – October 2010, January 2011, January 2013 and May 2022, when the river rose above 6.5m. Closing the bridge effectively cleaves the town in two,as alternative routes…
As you’d know, we have been in the Tasmanian wilderness. Here’s something I prepared earlier (and posted on Thursday night!). I’d no sooner starting thinking ‘Where do gluten-free products come from?’ when I found the answer right under my nose, a kilometre from home. The Warwick Mill, which incidentally has been trading for almost 150 years, processes maize into maize flour and other products which manufacturers use to meet market demand for gluten free breakfast…
One of the positives in retirement is that it allows one to volunteer with valuable community organisations like U3A. It’s not that uncommon to meet people who have never heard of the University of the Third Age (U3A), an international organisation with broad aims of helping educate and entertain its 450,000 members, who are now in their ‘Third Age’ of life. U3A originated in France in 1973 as an extramural university activity. This was significantly…
As communities across drought-paralysed Australia patiently wait for rain, reports of water theft, ranging from relatively trivial incidents to a 25,000-litre heist, are troubling. Can we be far from outright anarchy when dishonest (and sometimes honest but desperate), people help themselves to other people’s water? There are precedents for this – just think back to Cape Town‘s ‘Day Zero’ crisis in 2018 when a city of 3.74 million was set to run out of reticulated…