They say Australia rode in on the sheep’s back.

But if you’d been standing in the cane fields of north Queensland, sweat in your eyes and the hum of harvesters in your ears, you might’ve thought otherwise. While the outback echoed with the bleat of woolly sheep and the click of shears, another Australia was rising... sweet, smoky, and sharp-edged.

This one rode not on the back of a sheep, but on the swing of a machete.

The machete: tool of the land - now the weapon of headlines and a handy distraction from what’s really going on.

Our country, which owes so much to the machete, is now very worried about them. And rightfully so.

So it got me thinking about sugar... its history and its contribution, good and bad, to our great nation of Australia.

It all began on a quiet afternoon in our neighbourhood park.

Cricket season had ended, leaving a vast, grassy oval entirely to ourselves.

My big brother picked up a sheet of writing paper, folded it with care, and launched it into the breeze.

That simple paper glider soared for a few glorious seconds before landing softly -  and just like that, I was hooked.

The paper glider quickly evolved.

I have a relative heading off from sunny central Queensland to further a career in the southern depths of Australian Tassie winter wonderland. I am assured that she has a great puffer coat and ugg boots and a good attitude. 

Good luck with that. It set me thinking about a time when I did the unthinkable and headed across the ditch to teach ....  

Back in the 1990’s I was asked to “ help out “ at an educational facility in the " balmy " southern city of Invercargill in New Zealand. Just a few months, over winter, to be a relief teacher for someone who was “ sick. “ I obliged.

When I fronted up, I discovered that my predecessor was on sick leave because of a nervous breakdown from teaching the classes I was taking over. Strange how that wee fact was left out. As the cool April weather closed in, the days shortened and the southerlies blew in from Antarctica, I began one of the most memorable attacks of frostbite I have ever had.

OK, chillblains, but you get my drift.

Dusty Gulch Gazette

Special Dusty Gulch Day Edition

“Blackout Special: Lights Out in the Gulch!”

By Roderick ( Whiskers)  McNibble, Chief Mud-Slinger & Power Failure Correspondent

While the nation was still reeling from the latest Prentis Penjani “liar liar pants on fire” special (charred to a crisp, as usual), and the Honklander brides saga had gone full media blackout, something much louder went BOOM in the valley.

Those two mighty Gulch Valley chimneys -  170 metres of old-school coal muscle -  came crashing down in a controlled demolition that shook the dust right off our swags.

And in true Dusty Gulch fashion, the locals have turned catastrophe into a sing-along.

In a quiet Australian town, long ago, stood a modest weatherboard house. It had three ordinary steps at the front, but the four wooden backsteps leading down from the kitchen verandah opened onto a boy’s entire universe.

Fifteen paces ahead -  thirty with seven-year-old legs -  stood the dunny, its tippy tin tucked beneath a leafy vine. Once a week came the Night Soil Man, brave, dependable, and somehow larger than life. He would swap the full tin for a clean one without fuss, as if performing a sacred duty for civilisation itself.

Beyond the gate sat a green Morris Minor sleeping in a garage crowded with ladders, tools, bits of timber, old paint tins, and mysteries only fathers understood. In the far corner of the yard, chooks scratched and clucked around the veggie patch, occasionally escaping into forbidden territory whenever the gate was left swinging open.

Those backsteps were this boy’s favourite place in the world.

We recently had a situation where an article was submitted to our blog, and I gave it ' an edit. " 

Firstly, let me be clear: I am not a journalist and I have no formal education in writing, save for 8 years of learning the hard way in the school of hard knocks. I look back on some of my earlier posts and shudder - as Dad would have said " What was she thinking? " 

Sure, I have done on line courses in writing, and I have tried to hone my craft. But it was experience and comment feedback that was my greatest teacher. 

The first thing I learned was that there is a difference between writing historical pieces, current affairs and nostalgia. 

Nostalgia is the hardest, yet strangely enough, the easiest if you just let it flow. Maybe that is true in all writing, but in nostalgia, it is much more important in my opinion. 

There is an old saying among writers that readers can smell dishonesty long before they can explain it. Not sure who said it but it was not me. Or Maybe it was. 

I think the same is true of nostalgia.....