New England, Australia - end month review August 2007

Looking back over August, one feature was the arrival of visitor 8,000. A second feature was the resumption of more normal posting -12 posts - after a collapse in July to just 4 posts.

Traffic on this blog is not high and is also very sensitive to drops in posting. So traffic in July was well down. Traffic in August, while still not high, was up with 361 visitors excluding me viewing 483 pages.

I continued my series on why I remain a New England New Stater with three posts during the month. I do not want to overload the blog with this material. However, my hope remains that, with time, this will build to a worthwhile series. Entry post here.

Looking at the visitor stats, I found a clear interest in the poetry of Judith Wright, New England's best known writer. For that reason, I established an entry page to make access easier to posts about her across my various blogs. Again, I expect this to grow with time.

Thanks to Rob Busby from the TASOBU, I learned that Emma Buzo was launching a new theatre company to feature the plays of her father, Alex, another writer with strong New England connections. This led me to write a feature about Alex and the new company.

The email exchanges with Rob Busby led me to establish another entry page, this one drawing together some of my collected posts about TAS, The Armidale School. Again, I hope that with time this will become another useful resource.

One frustration during the month lay in my continuing inability to get decent material on developments in Newcastle, the place remains an information black hole. However, the search did have one useful side effect because it led me to to the latest Carrick citations where New England's three major universities all did well.

This search also led me to find out that Browyn Clarke had won a Golden Heart award.

During the month I also managed to do something that I had intended to do for some time, write a story on the Koori Mail, New England's only national newspaper and a major voice for Australia's indigenous people.

There were two other stories during the month, one on cotton (a major New England industry), the second looking at Sydney's sluggish population growth.

I have been meaning for a little while to discuss the latest census data for New England. However, I wanted to do a stocktake post first, pulling together previous posts on New England demography. This is taking time.