I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts the other day and heard a piece of wisdom good enough to share. The podcast is Dent, presented by wunderkind Glen Carlson and he was interviewing a staff member which is an interesting dynamic in itself. From the first question you could tell this was a mutual admiration society and both men are both very smart and incredibly charming.

The entire interview is worth taking in, regardless of your love or otherwise of business and marketing, but the answer to the last question was gold. Glen often finishes these business interviews asking the guest to provide some life advice to a young child. Topher responded in a way and in terms that set him apart from just about every person I have heard interviewed.

Topher said, ‘my advice would be, its OK to disagree with someone and still respect them, in fact we need to get to the point when we can do both constantly” or words to that effect. He is worried that Brexit and the US election result are so divisive that people are forgetting that just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean you should not respect them. He said also that it is really important that we don’t agree on things.

It sounds so simple, but I think that is such cracking advice to a young person. Respect should not be predicated on shared opinions.

I was walking to the Sydney Cricket Ground the other day on my way to watch the AFL draft and was almost there when a car pulled up on the side of the road and a little girl hopped out closely followed by a father (i’m guessing). The girl, about eight or nine years old stood there with her arms folded and then the dad grabbed her by the arm and gave her a good shake and yelled at her then pointed to the open car door telling her to get back in. She stormed off in tears.

The shocking bit, he then hopped in the car and drove off into the car park. Leaving her on the side of the road. I was heading in the same direction so I just kept a little eye on where she walked to. But her father was now in the car park and had no idea where she was really. I really worried that this little girl could have been followed by some nasty man, not just me.

I understand that I was not privy to what was said in the car before it stopped, but really? Who is the grown up in this situation? The little girl eventually turned around and made her way back to a seat near the car park and sat there crying. I was caught between hanging around any longer and looking creepy or leaving her to the whims of the world, both options I was uncomfortable with.

I drifted off to the bar I was heading to and managed to keep an eye on her until her father stormed out of the car park and yelled at her again before they headed away together. Parenting can be a very frustrating task, but that is what it is. Parents need to be the grown ups.

I have been trying to talk a friend of mine into recording his Life Log, for a few months now, perhaps as long as six months. He didn’t want to do it because he felt he didn’t have anything interesting to say, which is completely wrong by the way. In the last few weeks he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and now doesn’t want to do it because its maudlin, which is also completely wrong by the way.

The right time to record your life log is right now, regardless of your age or your health status. There is no other way to say this. Your story is such an important gift to those that follow you it cannot be overstated. Pretty much everyone I know would love to be able to sit down and revisit stories from their mother or father or their grandparents. That desire, that yearning increases with age and certainly with the passing of your elders.

The only alternative I can see is leaving it until you die and having your relatives visit someone with a crystal ball in a darkened room. Most people I know would think that is a bit too hit and miss though.

Do yourself a favour, but more importantly do your children and their children a huge favour and record your life log. Your story is important to them to help them understand not just you and your history but it helps them understand their own roots, their quirks and perhaps even provides answers to long forgotten questions.

Regardless of whether you choose to use my services or not, record your story, for the benefit of future generations. Talk about your loves and losses, your family, your work and home life, talk about the things that are important and the things that are not. Describe the world as it was and the way you see it now. I can absolutely promise you it is a gift beyond measure for those that follow you. There is comfort in simply hearing your voice, particularly when that is no longer possible.

A lot of people go through their lives failing to live up to their own lofty standards and punishing themselves for the failure. Many others I have met cannot get over the guilt or regret of a failing early in their lives. In both cases they often carry the guilt with them in such a way as it restricts their enjoyment of life, reduces their ability to share laugh and love and confuses and confounds the people around them. I have seen it so often now it is ridiculous.

I have spoken to women that have harboured guilt about their husbands behaviour. Women that have yet to give themselves permission to let go of making one bad decision in choosing a husband who turned out to be a drunkard or gambler or abusive or often as not all three. Men that were molested as teenagers or young boys who then go through life with a head full of apologies and regret not understanding it had little or nothing to do with them anyway.

I know in some cases, stuff happens to people that is just too huge to ever really get over, but then there is the rest of us. I’m not saying “get over it” I am saying give yourself permission to move on. None of us can wind back the clock, regardless of how much we would like to. Give yourself permission to say “that was really shitty, and I don’t want that to happen again” but don’t wear it like a dark cloak.

We are, of course, to some extent or another a product of our experiences but we are also capable of, or certainly should be capable of parking those experiences or dealing with those experiences in a way that doesn’t let them fester or build or rebuild into something bigger than the original incident, but some of us just can’t seem to do that. If that is you, please, get help. Lifeline or your local GP if you have one can steer you in the direction to get help. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness it is the reverse of that it is a sign of great strength.

Once you put your life back into perspective those around you benefit and good stuff starts to happen everywhere around you.

The worlds ugliest caravan just got power. Some might say that’s a little like polishing an old rock, but the van is my second home, be it ever so humble. Finally having power hooked up by way of a solar panel is pretty exciting stuff. I am trying now to work out the best bit. Being able to recharge my phone is high on the list. Being able to turn on a light when needed is also pretty good. The AFL Grand Final is this weekend and now I will be able to watch it live. Now that really excites me!
Spending the weekend in my van on the fringe of a rugby league town means that any chance to watch the AFL in a pub or club is slim at best and simply good luck. So now I will be able to flick a switch and watch what I want.
The chance to watch a bit of TV will be a welcome break from fencing. Oh my goodness fencing is hard work. Too hard for an old city boy like me. Too hard for a man that worries about keeping his hands ‘right’ for playing ukulele late into the night. Too hard for hands that would prefer to cup a glass of shiraz. Digging in chicken wire is back breaking and I know farmer Jeff will be inspecting my handiwork at some stage so I am making an extra effort to make it look neat and tidy. Chicken wire is brutish stuff. It takes a solid three to four days before my hands recover, before the scratches heal and the bruising subsides. Few things remind me of what a softy I am as quickly as fencing.
My usual break from fencing is firewood cutting and gathering. Firing up the chainsaw and cutting up windfall trees which then get neatly divided into wood for the Barjols cooking fire, and wood for home. I get a huge amount of satisfaction firing up the wood fired oven back in town using Barjols timber and cooking something interesting. The fire at Barjols uses only twigs, as its modelled on a rocket stove design to supply fast heat and then die out quickly. Being able to get so much utility from a single tree is great reward. Thank you to uncle google pants for showing me how to make all of that work.
My enthusiasm for life in the country will resume as soon as my back settles down. Any day now it should get back to the point that I can not only bend down but reliably return to standing again without it going into a ridiculous spasm.

When city boys get it into their head that a tree change is the next step, they need help. Some would say help of the psychiatric kind as nothing in their soft-hand city life can truly prepare them. I was lucky enough to find help in the form of Farmer Jeff.
We met in the local bar about a month after buying the property. He and his lovely bride were just sitting out on the verandah on a balmy summer night enjoying a drink after a hard day on his farm and we were fresh from tramping the land. Both Anna and I were full of emotion, delighted that we had made the purchase, stunned at the beautiful view and slightly dazed by the sheer size and scale of it all.

We got chatting with this other couple and they had recently purchased their second farm, about twenty minutes down the road. My answer to his first question pretty much set up the relationship. He asked “and what are you going to run on it, cattle?” and I replied “I don’t think so, moo-ers scare me.”
“What did you say? Moo-moos?
“Moo-ers” I replied, you know cattle, they moo!
Farmer Jeff just laughed and shook his head at me.
We’ve been solid friends ever since.

Every time I came to Dungog we would meet for a meal and pretty soon we learned enough about each other to talk about more than just my inability. Although that is still fertile ground for conversation. I ask him a lot of pretty dumb questions, and never makes me feel dumb for asking. That’s pretty special and the significance of that cannot be underestimated.

My lack of handyman skills has been documented at length in earlier posts, so to have someone happy to share some information without sneering or laughing is just such a find. Because they were relatively new to the area too, but this being their second farm, they had a bundle of relevant information just cherry ripe for a city boy to tap into to.

I had some questions about fencing, what sort to put up, where to buy the material, what should I look out for, all the beginner stuff. I needed to put up some fences to keep the roos out of my new garden (being slowly built up with each trip) and a fence to keep my dogs in when eventually they are ready to make the trip.

Farmer Jeff talked me through a few options and then kindly offered to come up and show me how to put it up. This was way beyond my expectations and an offer I was super keen to take up. We synchronised diaries and organised a day. Knowing absolutely nothing, I was all about how to get to the finished product as quickly as possibly. Farmer Jeff was all about establishing the infrastructure that the wire would rest on or be attached to. I “helped” as best I could, and he was very patient showing me how to tie wire knots and how strainers worked, how to hang a gate and so much more.

My hands have never been so sore as a result. Bashed and bruised by the punishing fencing wire which showed no mercy to my guitar player’s hands. My head was swimming from so much amazing first hand information and live experience that even though my body was tired, getting to sleep that night was a bit of a challenge.

I cannot even begin to imagine the sort of fence I would have constructed if I had been left to my own devices. Bless you farmer Jeff.

I have written about my beautiful little piece of country Australia on the outskirts of Dungog before, so I won’t go into all of that again, you can read earlier blogs about it if you want more information. I wanted to talk today about feeling at home. A feeling that just fills you with a sense of calm and joy, almost relief. Having searched the country high and low for more than four years, for the right piece of land, I was pretty certain about buying Barjol Sth.
Imagine my surprise when I found out, through a series of flukes, that my relatives had lived and died nearby. My grandfather’s parents and extended family had lived in Dungog for many years and many of them are buried at the local cemetery. Some people may find that unnerving but I think it is extremely cool. I have visited the cemetery and there must be a bit of a story about them because while the gravestones are substantial, they are also a little removed from the rest of the towns folk.
The telling of that story may have to wait for me to do a little more research. Though if I can’t find any real facts I may just have to make something up that sounds plausible. I have yet to find anyone in town that I am related to, but that is probably just a matter of time. That too, is cool as it just adds to the mystery.

None of this takes away from the fact that I feel completely at home there. In the hills outside of this beautiful little town I feel completely and utterly at peace with the world. Most days when I’m up there I work hard from sun up to sun down doing stuff that needs doing. My friend Adam reminded me the other day to make sure I set aside time for just doing nothing. So I am now being a little more sensible about my visits and ensuring that I go for a pleasurable walk bird spotting or wildlife spotting.

The views are sublime and the country is pretty hilly which adds to my enjoyment. Even my friend Farmer Jeff that thinks I’m a city lunatic appreciates the place for its beauty. Though my body aches for a few days as a result of the hard physical work I am doing, when I return, I ache to return as quickly as I can.

I was thinking about the whole post Olympics review process where reporters with little interest in sports write columns analysing the performance of the national team and then break that down using dollars as the metric. They then pose the question regarding value for money.
Most of the Australian art world shrug their shoulders at the spending on sport and it has long been a source of great emotion that sport gets money where art does not. That was where my thinking got started. I then mused about art being one corner of a triangle with sport on another and then entertainment on the other, with a grey area of convergence in the middle somewhere.
Certainly aspects of art have become entertainment and aspects of sport certainly have too. Is this a recent phenomenon or has it always been that way? Are we now connecting with art and sport through the eye of entertainment? How many of the successful sports eschew the entertainment angle? Or is it seen as axiomatic? And the same line of thought with art.
Is the measure of success at the Olympics just in rare metals or is there some other measure? Equally what is the measure for art? Is it attendances, or column inches or cocktail party buzz? From there I started to think that maybe the measure of success starts to look like; to what extent either of those pursuits crosses over into the entertainment sphere and becomes day-to-day consumption for whoever is the average Australian. That’s where it started to get fuzzy for me.

It got fuzzy because it started to sound truer than true. Opera only works if people, and lots of people go to see it. Great films are only great if people watch them and sport is only able to grow if it is either watched or played by a growing number of people. In order to make those things happen marketers need to be able to reach into the entertainment sphere and attract more people somehow. These pursuits then, are looked upon as part of that sphere more so than for their pure artistry or team pursuit or whatever the original paradigm.

So the success of the Olympics may well be rare metals but it is more likely to be measured in spectators on TVs around the world. I’m not saying its right. But it does start to resonate doesn’t it? So what does that mean for the future of art and sport for the common man. Is art for art’s sake or sport for sport’s sake doomed or does it mean that it will never grow much larger than as a pursuit for purists. Hmmm I need to think about that for a little while longer.

Though none of the components of the new solar array are hooked up to each other yet, they are all in place. I’m pretty proud of the whole thing. I dug the hole, the pole is exactly vertical, I measured and cut the rebate at the top, drilled the hole, attached the hinged timber to the panel and the whole thing went up pretty much the way I had planned.

An electrician friend is going up there next weekend with my son, and he is very keen to do something useful while he is there, so, linking the panel to the charge controller, then to the battery then the inventor seems like a job ridiculously suited to him. It also means that task, which I would find daunting and time-consuming will be done by someone with real skills, will be done well and in a tenth of the time it would have taken me. So it’s not like I’m cheating or avoiding a difficult task, its more like I am being sensible with my resource allocation. Does that sound right?

So the next time I get to the property there will be power in the van. Wow how exciting is that. I thought I would be able to tough it out but I missed electricity the most In the middle of winter. There is every chance I will be up there for the AFL grand final so I need to be able to watch that.

This weekend I also finished the wood fired oven in the backyard here in Sydney. It has taken almost two months from start to finish. It’s a cracker. We fired it up on Sunday afternoon soon after getting back from Dungog and cooked some lamb, just to get the feeling of using it. It is going to take a while to fully understand the cooking process and the options, but for a first meal it was a raging success. Sitting around the oven, with a glass of wine in hand, bathing in the warmth of the fire was just a perfect end to a busy and productive weekend.