The year begins in Australia's New England

This morning I went into a bookshop at Sydney's Bondi Junction to use a book voucher I had been given for Christmas. As I always do, I was looking for books with a New England connection, something that I could use to explain elements of our life and history.

Harry Hartog's is a good bookshop. I worked my way along the various sections. History? nah. Poetry? nah! And so it went on. There were plenty of books by people like Richard Glover and Peter Fitzsimons, well known Sydney figures who seem to manage a new book a year. Finally, I found a book by someone who had moved to Byron Bay for alternative life styles. That was it. Sparse pickings all round.

I know that many books connected with New England or by New England writers have been published but they are generally only available locally.

I'm not making any firm promises for this blog, I continue to struggle with priorities, but I do hope to do a little better.

There will be more history, of course, both here and on the New England history blog. My first history column for the year in the Armidale Express, History Matters: Reflections of Christmas past, is in fact already on line

Apart from making real progress on some of my main writing projects, I would like to deepen and consolidate some of my writing and reporting. Returning to my complaint about the books at Harry Hartog's, remarkably little is written about the broader New England that shows our history as a whole, the linkages and differences, that reflects upon and makes accessible that broader past.

I do hope to do more reporting on current events, today's life, bringing out the depth and texture. Sadly, the firewalls went up last year across most of the Fairfax press within the broader New England, limiting free access to five stories a month. And if you bookmark and come back, that's two stories!

It's a real pain. I can no longer go to a paper, do a check back over a month's stories, select two that I think are good and then give you a line or two with the link so that you can follow up if interested. More importantly, the arrangement continues the fragmentation of the North that I have so often complained about. Fairfax assumes that people are all localised, only interested in their own little area, not recognising that many of us like to skim broadly. It puts another barrier in the way of promotion of the broader New England as an entity, something worthy of interest in its own right. It also cuts the papers of from the broader New England diaspora even from their own local area.

I haven't worked out how to handle all this. It adds to the importance of broader New England reporting or commentary but makes it harder to do.

As always,  the stories will reflect my varying interests. I will also try to pull together some of my past writing to make it more accessible to those interested.

Finally, may we all have a successful and happy new year. That's not always possible of course, so where troubles strike may we manage them as best we can.