Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Much excitement in town the other day. I popped in to see a friend and she asked excitedly if I’d been in to town yet, or heard the news on the radio. I hadn’t done either, so she told me that some protesters had stopped a logging truck in the middle of the main street and chained themselves to it.

To put that in to perspective, Bridgetown is cut in two by South West Highway which runs from Perth to Bunbury, then on down through Donnybrook, Bridgetown, Manjimup, etc. to Albany. Manjimup is the heart of timber country and over the years logging protesters have done some interesting stunts to prevent the logging of old growth forests. As a result, old growth logging has almost stopped, and most timber logged in the area is plantation timber. Manjimup was hit very hard economically with the closure of many of the timber-related industries and a massive loss of jobs, and is only now starting to get back on its feet (truffles at $3000 a kilo anyone?). Other towns in the region were also hit hard. Personally, I supported the move to stop logging old growth forests as many of these ancient trees only grow in this part of the world and their species and related ecosystems are under threat both from logging, agriculture, and development. I have no problem with growing and logging plantation timbers, especially on land previously cleared for farming.

Anyhow, back to the other day… It seems these protesters had dressed up as road workers, erected some bogus “Roadworks ahead—prepare to stop” signs, then someone with a ‘lollipop’ “Stop/Slow” sign stopped a truck outside the video store. (The double-bogey log trucks all go through the town’s main street, but that’s another issue…)

Once they stopped the truck (which appeared to me to be carrying pine logs, not jarrah, marri, or karri), they chained themselves to the axle or somewhere underneath the truck.

It seems this happened around 8:30am. By the time I was in town, it was 11:30am and the truck and the chained protesters were still there. Traffic was slowed to a crawl through town, some 15-18 police were in attendance from other towns in the region, an ambulance was in attendance, as were other emergency and shire workers. Oh, and the local media from Bunbury were there too.

I’m not sure when the protesters were cut from the truck, but the statewide regional TV News had footage that night (the butcher cynically said that the police wouldn’t cut them off until the media got there…). And when I drove past, some enterprising local had painted another sign—”Slow protesters—Stop the dole!” (or something like that).

So my question is “why?” What did these protesters hope to achieve? Fame? Notoriety? A spot on the TV News? People like me writing a blog post? Arrest? Well, they got most of that, but as a local I have NO idea what they were protesting about—the logging industry, the trucks going through town, or something else. They were arrested and charged with creating a public disturbance or somesuch. They got their pictures on TV, just reinforcing the ‘rent-a-feral’ image many people have of them. I still  don’t know what their cause was, so they didn’t achieve their aim of getting their message across.

More importantly, they tied up the emergency and security resources of people across the region, thus placing others at risk. The local police station would be lucky to have three officers, I’d suspect, so the other police had to come from somewhere—Manjimup, Donnybrook, Nannup?, Bunbury? The local ambulance was in attendance, so it and its volunteer staff were out of action for other work for those hours.

There’s talk of charging the idiots who set off flares up north last week for the $200K cost of sending out the search and rescue boats, helicopters etc. These protesters should also be responsible for the costs of wasting police, ambulance and other emergency services time and efforts.

There have to be other ways of protesting and getting your message out.

The other night we watched “Wordplay“, a documentary-style movie about the New York Times crossword, the people involved in creating it, and some of those who solve it every day. Even though I’ve never done the NY Times crossword, I do love word games and Sudoku, so I appreciated the passion these people have.

A good movie for a wintry weekend afternoon for anyone who enjoys word puzzles.

I’ve been a bit busy the past few weeks, so blogging got dropped. Here’s a catch up:

• We popped over to one of our favourite wineries two weeks ago to talk about me doing their website (http://www.scottsbrook.com.au – what you’ll see there now is the old ‘placeholder’ website, so this is NOT my work; Update 14 December 2007: All done now!). They were very happy with my initial design prototype, so I’ve now added the content and am awaiting their final review before it goes live. I’ll let you know when it’s up.
• I’ve been doing a lot of work with Author-it v5 for my main client—combining three separate libraries (not fun!), training a person in Brisbane to use Author-it (thank God for WebEx and Skype), and learning more about SQL than I wanted to know!
• My main client has had other work demands too, notably changing a recent acquisition’s existing company-focused website to a product-focused site. That’s in progress. Another acquisition happened a week ago and I’ve just been asked to be involved in that website too.
• I spent quite a bit of my spare time editing the Author-it v5 training exercises for a friend and colleague.
• I judged three entries—all in different categories—in the annual STC Australia Chapter competitions.
• We went to Perth for four days last weekend for ‘points and plugs’ checkups with doctors and dentists, catching up with friends, and attending the Crosby, Stills, & Nash concert… which was the impetus for going to Perth and the other activities. More on the concert in another post.

The weather in our corner of the world has been up and down—we had a run of really hot days late in November (35-36C), but the past week it’s been pretty cool (18-23C with one 4C night). Some days I’ve changed clothes three times to deal with the variable weather! Then the other day it just BUCKETED down for about 20 mins, but we only got 3mm of rain out of it.

Paula S alerted me to this amazing 2 year old! Her knowledge of world countries is pretty darned impressive—and even more impressive is the second video of the same child when she was only a one year old. The map she used then was of terrain, not colour-coded political regions.

Lily at two…

Lily at one…

I meant to post about this a few weeks back when I received the booklet about the local Show, but I forgot!

In amongst all the pages for the various exhibition sections and classes were four pages devoted to the 165 (!!) poultry classes. These are for people’s prized chooks (‘chickens’ for those outside Australia/NZ), and lots of them take it very seriously indeed. And on one of those pages was an advertisement for “Chooks”, the only BBQ and Fried Chicken joint in town…

I found it really funny, but I would guess that anyone exhibiting in any of those classes would have found the location of that ad in the 75 page booklet a little ‘off’. I mean, they had 75 pages to place that ad, but chose to place it in the middle of the poultry section! I suspect it was deliberate…