thegoodwills.com

Digressions – The future for independent music

Nothing sums up the brutal futility of the Israel/Gaza war more succinctly than Two Brothers, a folk song by UK songwriter Pete Morton. The lyric imagines a mother, fed up with the squabbling siblings, Israel and Palestine: “I don’t care who started it, just try and get along.”

Morton’s song has been criticised as ‘condescending,’ that it trivialises a complex Middle East conflict. But the central message – a call for peace – can’t be dismissed.

The song was on the set list of Irish singer/songwriter Enda Kenny when he performed at the Maleny Music Festival on November 10-12.

Kenny was born in Dublin, but knows a bit about conflict, as he spent a year volunteering at the Glencree Reconciliation Centre in County Wicklow. There he worked with kids from Northern Ireland (Glencree was where the Good Friday Agreement was signed).

Maleny poet Irish Joe Lynch took up the theme at the festival’s Peace concert held on Remembrance Day. He pointed to the peace accord struck in Ireland in 1998 as a message to Israel and Gaza that enemies can lay down their guns and make peace.

The Goodwills (our band), also performed at the Maleny festival, our fifth appearance in a decade, which got me musing about work and music and how so many people can’t see it as the same thing.

Men my age often ruminate about relevancy once they have decided to give away working for a living. Some, particularly those whose work gave them a public profile, or who had Very Important Work, struggle with the ‘Bob Who? Syndrome. I’d have to say that leaving behind a job where my name was in the State’s newspaper every day didn’t bother me much at all. Given the decline in quality and relevance in mainstream media since I quit in 2005, I definitely do not regret leaving daily newspapers when I did. It also gave us an opportunity to tour New South Wales and Queensland with Macca and the Gumboot band.

After the tour in 2005, we set up a media consultancy business. Contacts I’d made in my professional life started steering work my way. Unlike my day job as a journalist/editor, it was anonymous work. But it paid the bills and until the Global Financial Crisis came along it served us well.

We operated our cottage music business in tandem and this too involved a degree of public exposure. If you are going to write songs, record them, tour, perform and sell CDs, you need to create a public profile – a persona if you will.

The 10^th Maleny Music Festival was our fourth major gig for 2023. Considering that some independent musicians play live at least twice a week, that’s not much to boast about. But I was reminded at the festival when in conversation with younger musicians, that not many of us persist with it into our mid-70s.

I could and will point you to legendary Australian folk jazz and blues singer Margret RoadKnight, who at 80 has just released a new CD of material recorded over the past 35 years. The splendid album, Long Time, is available online and on the ubiquitous download and streaming apps.

Roger Ilott and Penny Davies, who have been producing folk music albums from their Restless Music studio near Storm King Dam on the Granite Belt, are ‘contemporaries’ who are also still performing and recording. Roger has added his experience and polish to some of my later-life songs. Since I seem to be writing new material again, there is little reason not to continue recording and distributing heartfelt music.
Penny and Roger have produced 25 albums of mostly original material, some in collaboration with the late Bill Scott. As you will notice if you visit their website, they too have stopped producing new CDs, relying on the download model, although as Penny says, they will make one-off CDs ‘for luddites on request’.

These days you can order a physical CD or download the music from Bandcamp, currently the champion of independent musicians. If someone pays $10 to download an MP3 album, Bandcamp sends us $7, more or less. By contrast, Spotify and the like pay fractions of a cent per ‘stream.’

As a singer-songwriter duo of considerable vintage (45 years), it’s clear that people who like our music already have the albums. New punters, like our neighbours in the caravan park, point to their motor home and complain it does not have a CD player.

If I want to deliberately listen to music (as opposed to putting it on as background), I put five CDs in the refurbished Sony CD-changer I bought for $300 and crank up the volume. My new hearing aids have a ‘listen to music’ setting which enhances the experience.

After a long period in decline, CD sales are on the rise again, just as sales of vinyl albums had begun to outsell CDs. Tony Van Veen of discmakers.com wrote in a recent blog that physical music sales for the first half of 2022 were $781 million — up more than 10% from the prior year — and on track to be over $1.6 billion for the full year.

Self-funded independent musicians have no choice now but to produce music in a range of formats, including CDs. If you order a minimum of 500 copies (the industry yardstick), it’s an expensive business. A budget of between $5,000 and $10,000 is typical. Costs include time spent recording the tracks, paying musicians who contributed their talents, paying an artist to produce CD artwork and an engineer to mix and master the album. Then you have to order the CDs and pay for the replication of artwork and music.

As you have already realised, this leaves no money at all to spend on promotion and this is where most independent CDs fail..

Meanwhile, 574 million people are listening to music on Spotify every month. It’s free (with ad breaks) or subscribers pay $180 a year. That is about the price of seven independent CDs. We’re on Spotify too. But maybe not for much longer, given Spotify’s intention to stop paying royalties to musicians who tally fewer than 1000 streams in a year.

Spotify is a listed company, with its founding shareholders owning 27.30% of the company, which last traded at $US180. According to Yahoo Finance, some 800+ institutions own the rest. This Swedish audio streaming service made $12.356B in first half revenue, an 8.02% increase from 2021.

Spotify has 226 million paying subscribers. In the most recent quarter, Spotify made a $65 million euro profit.

The average royalty payment from Spotify is $0.003 to $0.005 cents per stream. It can take 280,000 streams for a musician to earn $1000 in royalties, according to industry estimates. Rival platforms like Napster or Apple Music are more generous, but even on Napster you’d need 60,000 streams to make $1000. On the fast-emerging YouTube music streaming platform, a couple of videos we made to highlight our songs have had more than 1,000 views. That’s technically not ‘streams’ but accounts for the cents and parts of cents detailed on my most recent royalty statement.

(free to view)

Seventy percent of the royalties paid by Spotify go to the major labels which place their artists’ music on the platform. As usual, the songwriters and the musicians who created the works are at the bottom of the food chain. (It rather astounds me that musicians have agreed to this egregious arrangement. Musicians- just say ‘no’! Ed)

It’s no surprise to learn that the Musicians Union is on Spotify’s case.

PS: Check out Enda Kenny’s home page for an insight into life on the road. He’s not on Spotify so this is the place to download or buy a CD.

The Goodwills perform at Maleny Music Festival November 11, 2023

The Goodwills Trio (Bob and Laurel Wilson and Helen Rowe) are performing on Saturday November 11 at 10.15am at the Maleny Music Festival. We will be at the Obi Obi venue following Brisbane Irish band, The Jar. We will have to keep to time for this set as one minute of silence is scheduled site-wide for 11am to mark Remembrance Day. This Facebook link should take you to the festival programme to help plan your time there.

This is one of the original songs we will be performing – a reflection on the hard times of the Depression when some Australian families lived in shanties on the edge of towns. See you soon.

The Voice – dismissed but not silenced

Yes, I did say I’d write the occasional piece, but not always on a Friday. Just deal with it!

Before and after the Voice referendum, I was reading an Australian classic, Coonardoo, by Katharine Sussanah Prichard.

This dark novel resonated more as we left on the day of the referendum for a western Queensland caravan trip.. At that stage, we did not know that 60%+ of Australians would vote No to the Voice.

Our first stop was Girraween national park where mobile reception is hard to find. It took a day or two for news of the referendum result to filter through. In our oft-described naivety for having positive regard for disadvantaged minorities, we did perhaps fail to see how hard the wind was blowing the other way.

In our electorate, Maranoa, the No vote topped 82%. This overwhelming response was no doubt helped along by an official endorsement from the Federal member and National Party leader, David Littleproud.

Maranoa extends 729,897 square kilometres across the Southern Outback and is socially conservative. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation finished ahead of Labor on preference count at the 2016 and 2019 elections.

Not that I ever agreed with editorials in The Courier-Mail, still the only State newspaper, but the headline in the Friday before the referendum, “Voice Care Factor Nil”’ revealed a poll showing the Voice referendum was number 17 in a list of issues rated as important. The ‘exclusive’ poll revealed an apathetic mood and gave the newspaper an opportunity to headline its editorial ‘the vibe is not enough’.

This late summary which tested the mood of the people came hard up against the difficulties of passing referenda in Australia. Only eight of 44 referenda held since Federation have succeeded. The most recent one – to decide if or not we should become a republic – happened 24 years ago. Young people voting for the first time had no adult memories of the issue or why it failed.

As I overheard a bloke saying at the petrol bowser on the Tuesday after the referendum “Aussies just don’t like change, eh?”

If you’ve not read Coonardoo, I should warn that it was shocking and controversial when first serialised in The Bulletin in 1928. It is no less disturbing a read in 2023; a work of fiction overlaying a factual environment. The story deals with a then-taboo love affair between a white station manager and an Aboriginal woman (or ‘gin’ as they are more commonly referred to in this work).

In a preface to the edition I read, Prichard defended the book as a work of fiction, but overlaid with historical and social accuracy.

“Life in the north-west of Western Australia,” she wrote, “is almost as little known in Australia as in England or America. It seems necessary to say, therefore, that the story was written in the country through which it moves. Facts, characters, incidents, have been collected, related and interwoven. That is all.”

Prichard first published the novel as a series in The Bulletin, using a male pseudonym. It caused a stir then and later, when ‘re-organised’ and published as a novel. It was the first book by a European author to portray Aboriginal people positively, at least in some ways, with insights into their language, culture, natural abilities working the land and loyalty to the station managers for whom most of them worked. As Hugh Watt, the central character explains to his new wife, Mollie, “the blacks are not servants, and we don’t pay them’’. (Which, to me, sounds tantamount to slavery. Ed) Watt is described in positive terms in relation to his treatment of blacks, doling out rations like meat, flour, salt, sugar and tobacco. He doesn’t work the ‘gins’ after noon, in recognition of the fact they have their own family and cultural obligations.

Coonardoo is an ugly read, introducing me to a term I had never heard – ‘gin shepherder’ to describe Hugh’s amoral neighbour Sam Geary. He collects ‘gins’ as mistresses and is fond of quoting the Old Testament (Solomon) to justify his exploitative behaviour.

It was well known in the period of colonisation that white station managers and workers used Aboriginal women as a sexual convenience. What was shocking about Coonardoo was the intimate portrayal of a love affair between a white man and an Aboriginal woman.

Post-referendum, as we spent a week travelling short distances between Girraween, Tenterfield Texas, Yelarbon, Goondiwindi, Millmerran and Crows Nest, I found myself seeing these towns through a different lens.

Walking around the old Council boardroom at Goondiwindi (now a museum), I could not help but dwell on Wikipedia’s sobering report of frontier conflict with the Bigambul Aboriginal people. Resistance was finally quelled in 1849 by pastoralists aided by the newly formed mounted Native Police, with up to a hundred Aboriginals killed in a “skirmish”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goondiwindi

After a night at the Millmerran showgrounds, we set off as tourists, checking out the town’s murals, which depict early colonial days on the farm. The museum was only open by appointment, so we took a walk through the library grounds which includes a walk past plaques commemorating early settlers. We asked an older woman walking the same path why there was no mention of the original inhabitants.

“Too long ago and it’s too divisive” was the answer.
Some 5.60 million people in Australia voted Yes. The majority of us rent or own properties on land which as they say, ‘always was and always will be’ Aboriginal land.

Conservative people who grew up on the land were encouraged to be believe the Voice was a ‘land grab’. Just as the conservative parties of the time whipped up similar fears about Mabo and the Apology, this is now and always was a furphy.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is credited (or discredited) with spinning the much-repeated false hood that the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) spends $30 billion a year on programmes for indigenous peoples.

A spokesman for the NIAA told the RMIT’s fact checking department that the agency administers programs through the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) and had “provided grant funding from the IAS of $1.6 billion in the 2022-23 financial year”.

https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/factlab-meta/niaa-does-not-spend-$30b-on-indigenous-programs-annually

The Voice proposal was simply a change to the Constitution to give an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander committee a say in laws that affect them.

Proportionately small as it was, the Yes vote was broadly represented across Australia, as opposed to the notion that only ‘inner city elites’ supported the proposal. As one example, the deeply conservative New South Wales electorate of New England returned a 75% No vote, as claimed in a headline in the New England Times. Another way of looking at it is that 28,565 people in Barnaby Joyce’s electorate voted Yes.

In Maranoa, David Littleproud’s vast electorate, the No vote was declared ‘decisive’, as opposed to divisive.

While Maranoa itself returned a Yes vote of just 15.8%, the Yes vote was proportionately higher in the towns of Stanthorpe and Warwick.

One of the positives for us during the Yes campaign was that we formed a collective of like-minded people who distributed pamphlets, put signs up in their front yards, volunteered at polling booths and dared to wear a Yes badge when out shopping.

We, the people who voted Yes for a positive change, can keep the momentum rolling. We can do it in small ways. Laurel wrote a letter of support to Cr Wayne Butcher, Mayor of Lockhart River Aboriginal Council in FNQ. He was commenting on the Queensland Opposition leader David Crisafulli’s announcement that he would not support Treaty if his party won the next election.

She received a positive reply the same day – building bridges across physical and metaphysical distances. For my part, I spotted a copy of Sally Morgan’s classic ‘My Place’ at the pop-up library in Millmerran. As you can see (above), a surge of empathy motivated me to give the book a more prominent display.

https://johnmenadue.com/australia-has-shown-itself-to-be-a-selfish-nation-that-lacks-empathy/

(a broader explanation of the $30b citation, which proves, I believe, how the No vote made mischief with this data)

https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-is-30-billion-spent-every-year-on-500-000-indigenous-people-in-australia-64658

Should we say Yes – a song for Yes23

We launched this song on September 30 and Bob made a slideshow at the weekend. We think it’s an important issue so please, have a listen and a look and share. Bob and Laurel

Should we say Yes

I decided to write a song about the referendum and had the idea of asking the question: what if we’d had citizens’ referenda about really controversial issues like Iraq and Vietnam? Did we get asked? Eventually the song gets round to talking about Yes23, which ought to be a fait accompli but probably not. The link will take you to Should we say Yes, which is published on our Bandcamp page. You can listen to it a few times before it will ask you for money!

Bob Wilson

Haere Ra from Friday on My Mind

fomm-farewell-bobwords — The author, teasing out the next song while She Who Cooks does just that (Ed: Oink!) Photo by LW.

The last episode of this weekly essay was published on September 1, 2023. After nine years and three months of posting a 1200-word essay on random topics every Friday, we are taking a sabbatical. When I say ‘we’ I mean me and my trusty editor, Laurel Wilson. Many thanks to the very many academics and researchers who helped me out, whether they knew it or not! The database will be available here for the foreseeable future. From time to time, you may hear from me as the muse dictates.

I leave you with an important link which will explain much of the misinformation being disseminated about the Voice to Parliament. First you need to disregard the pamphlet sent to you by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). While the pamphlet sets out the Yes and No cases in equal proportions, none of it has been fact-checked. Legislation forbids the AEC from doing so.

Instead, the AEC maintains a ‘disinformation register’ but you must go to the website to peruse this. Fascinating reading.

https://www.aec.gov.au/media/disinformation-register.htm

Haere Ra from Bob and Laurel (which in Te Reo Māori simply means goodbye).

Bob Wilson 8/9/23

A chatbot farewell

chatbot-goodbye-FOMM — Saying goodbye (to my horse). Image by RoyBuri, www.pixabay.com. Thanks to free image websites and friends who helped out with photos over the years.

Since this is now the way of the world, I decided to Google myself and ask ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of bobwords.com.au. The topic – ‘saying goodbye’. The following (in italics) was generated in 11 seconds.

Hey there, lovely readers of BobWords.com.au! Today, we’re delving into a topic that resonates with all of us at some point in our lives: saying goodbye. Life is an ever-changing journey filled with moments of joy, growth, and, of course, farewells. As we navigate these bittersweet moments, let’s explore how we can make goodbyes meaningful and even transformative.(Ed: making vomiting noises)

Life is like a river, constantly flowing and evolving. Just as we welcome new beginnings, we must also bid adieu to chapters that have run their course. Goodbyes mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, bringing change and growth into our lives. Embracing this natural cycle can help us move forward with grace and an open heart.

Goodbyes give us the opportunity to reflect on the beautiful moments and experiences that we’ve shared. As we bid farewell, we can take a moment to savor (sic) the memories we’ve created. These cherished moments become the threads that weave the tapestry of our lives, reminding us of the laughter, love, and connections that have enriched our journey.

Saying goodbye isn’t just about closing a chapter; it’s also about finding closure within ourselves. Every goodbye opens the door to a world of new opportunities… (I cut it off here, because I was beginning to yawn. Ed)

Now I’m starting to worry about the 7 million blogs which are published every week. I wonder how many of those writers will succumb to this techno-rubbish because it is fast, free and easy? Well, so far it is free.

As The Guardian recently discovered, Rupert Murdoch’s news empire has been publishing up to 1200 stories a week confected by ChatGPT.

A Nick Cave fan asked ChatGPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave which he then sent to Nick who responded in his inimitable way.

For my money, nothing will ever beat Cave’s imagery: ‘my piano crouched in the corner of my room. With all its teeth bared.’ proof that technology cannot better creative genius.

I started Friday on My Mind to address what I saw at the time as one of the shortcomings of traditional media. It was more about what they were not reporting rather than the slant put on things they dId report. Unlike most bloggers, I started with an email list which grew and grew and spent little time fine-tuning the website so I’d be ‘discovered’. It was quite some time before I even realised I should be attending to SEO (search engine optimisation), shorthand for writing in such a way that Mr Google’s bots can find (and rank) your blog. Consequently, you will find that blogs written with SEO in mind will be peppered with ‘keywords,’ cynically deployed to help lift your offerings higher in the google rankings.

Social media and the 24/7 news cycle has changed the relevancy of blogs like mine. What might have been a breaking story on Tuesday (when I sometimes come up with an idea), is old hat by Friday. Much of the time I have picked random topics which may or may not be in the news cycle. Probably because I have been writing since the early 1980s, my ‘news sense’ is still intact and the random offering at times becomes accidently relevant.

There has also been an emerging coterie of media commentators who like the luxury of expanding online on a topic. As they do it for a living, you can find their utterances on most social media platforms. I noticed about a year ago the redoubtable Hugh Lunn started publishing highlights of his journalism career on Substack.

Last week I said Sayonara to Twitter/X after first downloading my data. I only opened a Twitter account because people assured me that is how people would find my blog (1200 words? TMTR (to much to read, for those born last century and/or who may not be familiar with this acronym. Ed)).

The most exciting things that happened to me on Twitter was a veteran songwriter proclaimed to his followers: “Hey people, bobwords48 is Bob Wilson, who wrote Underneath the Story Bridge.” Unlike my approach to shutting down this weekly offering, I left no trail on X (depicted on social media as a burning cross), for anyone to find me. The digital spring clean is ongoing.

My sister explained to me at our last meeting that as we age our world becomes smaller, and in many ways that is a desirable thing. Why have four email accounts when you only need one? Why have an Ebay account when you haven’t bought anything for two years?

I can hear John from Melbourne in my ear – ‘Bob, you’re waffling’.

As this is my fond farewell from this particular platform, may I thank you all for the many kind words arriving by email. I will answer them all over time. I was happily surprised to find messages from readers who have not once responded to any one column but claim to have read it every week ‘with dedication’.

As for the writing – I was helped from time to time by contributions from guests including Laurel Wilson, Norm Boniface, Phil Dickie and Lyn NuttalI. Sometimes FOMM even unearthed a real news story. In July 2017 while on a caravan trip out west, I discovered the re-emergence of prickly pear. I wrote about this infamous imported noxious weed, which we all assumed had been eradicated. Not so, and after posting this, mainstream outlets (Landline, Queensland Country Life) started picking up the story.

I was reminded about this recently when writing about the wind farm being built outside Warwick. Among the many tasks facing Acciona, the wind farm developer, 37,600 prickly pears were ‘successfully treated” as part of a weed removal project on 33,000 hectare sheep station it has leased for its 187-turbine wind farm.

“Oh yeh, it’s coming back,” my brother-in-law confirmed, on discovering several bushes/trees on his acre of land at Yangan outside Warwick.

There are some amusing pieces of writing in the FOMM archive and also a few serious ones that reflect on depression and suicide, homelessness, refugees and the climate crisis.

For those of you who received this in an email delivered by Mail Chimp, don’t forget you can revisit past FOMMs by going to the website www.bobwords.com.au and searching through nine years’ worth of archives. I have been re-reading a few, especially from our around-Australia jaunt in 2014.

I have readers in the UK, Canada, the US, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong (expat journos missing home). Among the most popular columns was an obit I wrote for Gough Whitlam and a rant about shutting down my private post box. If you are feeling bereft next Friday, go and choose one at random. The index app is very good – try the keywords Anzac, PO Box, Whitlam, Nullarbor, Killjoy and King for a Day to get started. Just a few I was pleased with for their wit and wisdom, even if WordPress kept nagging me to ‘improve your readability score’.

In closing, Narelle Chatbot would like to add:

So, dear readers, here’s to embracing life’s bittersweet moments, to cherishing the memories we’ve made, and to welcoming the unknown with open arms. Until next time, take care and keep embracing the journey! (Ed:…

LOL

In a week or two we expect to emerge from the studio with a timely song which I would like to share with FOMM readers.

And it’s ‘good night’ from him, and it’s ‘good night’ from her…

Bob and Laurel

Tired blogger in search for salty licorice

Sometimes when researching some arcane topic for this nine-year-old series of weekly essays, I get tired. No, not ‘tired of,’ as predictive text tried to anticipate. Just tired, much as political commentator Ronni Salt says in the ironic intro to her Twitter/X page – ‘I used to investigate stuff but got tired of it.’

While Ronni Salt continues (see The Shot), today I’m declaring this the penultimate (second-last) weekly FOMM. Don’t all go ‘Nooo’ at once. Nine years is a good innings and it is starting to feel like a chore. I am also finding myself repeating topics I have already vented about. The last weekly FOMM will be posted on September 1, which nicely coincides with a week away in Sydney without having to think ‘What will I write about this week and should I take my laptop?’)

The website www.bobwords.com.au will remain in place until the next web host subscription is due (November 2024).

It’s unlikely this is a complete end to my following current affairs and fulminating about this or that. A rogue column or two may sporadically emerge. You may find new songs emerging on our sister website – thegoodwills.com or on Bandcamp, as one sign of new-found liberation.

I decided to refresh my research into what I have been competing with for people’s attention. Not that Friday in My Mind counts as a blog – it’s too long, earns no money, is posted only once a week, has no ‘target audience’ as such and my attention to SEO (search engine maximisation) is fairly scant.

People find it by accident and while there are a few hundred who never miss it, there are those who have only read 6% to 10% of regular posts.

Nevertheless, I apparently have hundreds of followers on various social media portals. Given the sheer weight of blogs/rants which abound on social media, though, I suspect FOMM will, like the little list song from The Mikado, never will be missed.

Statistics on blogging make my head spin. Let me run a few of these by you (stats can be found on most online marketing company websites).

The global number of blogs is over 600 million (more or less where it was when I started in 2014), according to Firstsite.com. There are 32.7 million bloggers in the US alone and every day 7 million blogs are posted on the Internet.

There’s work in that ‘space’ for all those former newspaper reporters, that’s for sure. Most corporate, small business and startup websites maintain a blog and I assume they pay people to write them. Here’s one example, a website called Clever Girl Finance (Our mission is to empower women to achieve financial success). I started to browse through this website and realised it is based in the US. But it’s a good example of a professional website where articles are not only written but edited and fact-checked! (Who has the time for that, eh!)

I did also find this list of 10 Australian personal finance/financial planning blogs, few of which I have ever consulted, but it’s an interesting ‘space’ to investigate.

WordPress remains supreme among blogging platforms, controlling 43% of the world’s online blogs. But it’s a clunky app/programme. If your WordPress website is truly ‘broken’ you will have to pay an expert to fix it. Every time you update to the latest version, you should always do a backup, as WordPress itself advises. Updates have been known to ‘break’ websites.

OptinMonster, an online marketing company, is another source, among many, that periodically reminds readers of the powerful statistics behind blogging. For example, about 70 million posts are published each month by WordPress users (four or even five of which were mine).

Reader like commenting on blogs – 77 million opinions every month. (My experience in the first year was that 95% of comments were spam. After I found out how to block Olga from Sweden and Svetna from Slovakia, legitimate website comments were few and far between).

The average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write, ‘they’ say. You could safely double that for FOMM, much of the effort going into fact checking and proof reading. (Yay me. ED) Even when this happens, occasional hiccups occur. Last week, I referred to a 23m wind turbine tower, the zero at the end having been whisked away by an errant August westerly. Thanks Randall for pointing that out. (Ed was asleep at the wheel?)

This statistic I knew about – bloggers who write articles of 2,000+ words are far more likely to have strong results. (I started with 1200 words and on occasions drift out to 1400 or 1500. Nobody notices.)

For a while I subscribed to platforms which encourage fulsome writing – Long Reads, Medium, The Big Round Table, The Atlantic etc. Without exception, I fell away from following them as my inbox became cluttered.

I should warn that some of these essays run to 15,000 words, so are best read on a tablet with an e-book reader.

The experts reveal that while 77% of people say they read blogs on a regular basis, 43% admit to skimming blog posts. The nature of online posts, many of which use bullet points, lists, videos and photos to convey their message, encourages this skim-reading.

OptinMonster came up with this reassuring statistic; that while 46% of bloggers edit their own work, 54% have editors or have at least shown their work to someone else to review.

Elsewhere, you will find statistics that suggest the average blogger will last two years before deciding they are scattering pebbles into the ocean and barely causing a ripple. They either tire of the work involved, become discouraged by the paltry income or (more commonly), move on to other things.

I have a couple of bloggers on my list of recommended reads who have been writing longer than I have and show no signs of giving it away. Unlike me, they have books to sell and reputations to uphold.

At this point, I have no thoughts at all on how to end this long-running column/blog other than to say the final episode will be posted next Friday. Suggestions welcome!

In the interim, you might like to delve into the FOMM archives, or better still amuse yourselves with this account of an overseas junket by a New York Times writer.

Here, to prove you can actually be assigned to travel to Finland to write about such things, is Mark Binelli’s lengthy investigation into the origins of salty licorice and why some people cannot be without it.

We grew up living down the road from a Dutch family who received regular care packages from home, including that peculiar sweet (I wouldn’t call it sweet. Ed) treat. It is definitely an acquired taste. The upside is you don’t have to share with others! (True love is also buying one’s spouse salted licorice when one indulges in their love of Rocky Road…Ed.)

(PS: the local sweet shop stocks mild, double and triple strength, and no, they are not paying me to write that).

The Goodwills at Maleny Music Festival

The Goodwills Newsletter

August 2023

We’re delighted to announce that the Goodwills Trio will be performing at this year’s Maleny Music Festival, which is on from Friday November 10 to Sunday Nov 12, 2023. Fiddler and singer Helen Rowe joins veteran duo Bob and Laurel Wilson to present what is becoming known as ‘harmonic folk’. – mainly originals with our special 3 voice blend.

This is the 10^th anniversary of the Maleny festival, which was re-invented by Noel Gardner and friends. As we all know, the original Maleny Folk Festival, which started in 1987, morphed into the Woodford Festival, which has become one of the biggest music festivals in Australia. There was always a hankering to return to the small-scale, good vibes feel of a smaller festival. Apart from the Covid-19 interruptions, it has all gone well.

The programme looks good and we will be camping there for the duration. As to when we are performing, you’ll need to check the programme later in the year.

The festival programme is being progressively released on the Facebook page – sign up here and stay in the picture. https://www.facebook.com/MalenyMusicFestival

Our public appearances this year have included Folk Redlands, Sunday Folk at Nambour (supporting Fred Smith) and a spot at The Bug in July.

Check out our music on this website or at https://thegoodwills.bandcamp.com/music

Wind power – the state of play

wind-power-state-of-play — Image: www,pexels.com

I thought it high time I wrote about wind power generation, given this region’s burgeoning reputation as Queensland’s Green Energy Hub. The Southern Downs already earned this cachet by building a 64 megawatt solar farm near Warwick. As power-generating capacity goes, this was by far upstaged by the MacIntyre Wind Farm, tipped to become the world’s largest onshore wind project.

More about Acciona’s 1.025MW wind farm later, but first, a history lesson. Just about any company with an interest in wind power generation has latched on to the quote from former US President Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe was a bit of a closet scientist, known for being the first US president to have an invention patented in his own name. Of wind power, President Lincoln said (in 1860): “As yet, the wind is an untamed and unharnessed force; and quite possibly the greatest discovery hereafter to be made, will be the taming, and harnessing of it.”

Not just Abe, though. As a blog by UK energy firm NES Fircroft explains, the idea of using wind power occurred to humans as early as 5000 BC, when wind was used to push boats along the Nile.

In the Middle East and Persia (now Iran), windmills were used to grind grain. In China around 200 B.C., they were used to pump water.

During the 9th century Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, wind-powered machines were developed to mill cereals and pump water. This technology progressively made its way to Europe. Windmills have been used since the 14^th century by China, Italy and the Netherlands. It may also occur to readers that Australian farmers sought to harness the wind to pump water on remote properties.

Professor James Blyth of Anderson’s College, Glasgow, Scotland is credited with creating the first wind turbine in July 1887. He used to power to light his holiday cottage, but his offer to share the excess electricity with the nearby village was knocked back as his creation was deemed to be ‘work o’ the de’el’ as my Da would have said).

Also in 1887-88, American Charles F. Brush created the world’s first automatically operated wind turbine generator mounted on an 18-metre-high tower. The machine was slow and its 144 blades produced only 12 kW. It was used between 1888 and 1900 but subsequently fell into disrepair. That seemed the fate of a lot of early wind projects, most of which were experimental and none were able to attain a commercial rate of power generation.

It wasn’t until 1941 that a wind turbine was developed that could generate more than 1 MW of electricity.

Fast forward to 2023 and Acciona Energía’s 1,026-MW MacIntyre project is the company’s biggest renewable energy facility and one of the largest onshore wind farms in the world.

Developed in partnership with CleanCo, the Queensland Government’s newest renewable energy generator, the $1.96 billion wind farm is expected to be operational in 2024-2025.

Acciona’s wind farm when completed will have 180 5.7-MW turbines, each standing up to 230 metres in height.

The economies of Goondiwindi, Toowoomba and the Southern Downs are direct beneficiaries of an estimated $500 million spend during the construction phase. As work continues on the leased 36,000 hectare property 50kms south-west of Warwick, Acciano is increasing the number of on-site accommodation units to 550, to take pressure off the rental property markets in nearby towns. The end game is to generate enough power for 700,000 homes.

While all this large-scale construction and planning is going on less than 50 kms from town, I was intrigued to hear a local chap tell me he is looking at installing a domestic wind turbine on his property. What? I had no idea.

Yes, it appears that competition, improved technology and economies of scale are opening up a new green industry to help home owners who are aiming for self-sufficiency. A home wind turbine system can cost between $10,000 and $20,000. There are technical issues and obstacles in terms of local government by-laws and whether it is a suitably windy location. They pay-back period is lengthy.

If you were an early adopter of solar energy, you may well remember that in the beginning, the entry price was prohibitive. The upside only became apparent when governments agreed to provide incentives. There does not appear to be a lot of research done in Australia into small-scale wind turbines or much enthusiasm. Not so in the US, where climate writer Michael J Coren, writing in the Washington Post, found there was a 30% tax credit for home wind turbines.

The official advice from the Australian government website YourHome is that wind generators are not suitable for most homes.

“Household wind systems are much more expensive than solar PV systems, and wind turbines must be situated where they can catch smooth, strong, consistent winds. Few homes in Australia have such locations.”

In 2020, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) announced funding to install small wind turbines at 10 remote Australian communication sites as part of a new project to boost the uptake of the technology.

Newcastle University startup Diffuse Energy has invented a blade-less turbine which doubles the capacity of wind power generators. Their Hyland 920 turbine is capable of producing 500W of electricity.

ARENA said at the time it was funding the project on the basis it would provide a renewable alternative to diesel generators, reducing energy costs and improving resilience against bushfires and other natural disasters.

While implementation of this project ran into the usual setbacks caused by Covid-19, Diffuse Energy’s founders have their eye on the global telecommunications market. They predict it will spend more than US$3.4bn on distributed energy generation by 2024.

At the end of 2018, ARENA said there were 94 wind farms in Australia, delivering nearly 16 GW of wind generation capacity. The cost of utility-scale wind energy in Australia is expected to continue falling, with new wind farms delivering electricity at around $50-65/MWh in 2020 and below $50/MWh in 2030.

Scrolling through the highly technical Australian Energy Statistics for 2022, I discovered these references.

Renewable generation increased 18% in 2020–21, contributing 27% of total generation. Solar and wind contributed 10% and 9% per cent of total generation respectively. About 17% of Australia’s electricity was generated outside the electricity sector (by industry and households), including 7% small-scale solar PV.

It’s a long way from the 1970s (when Telstra first used solar panels to power infrastructure). Few private homes had solar then and if so, they were usually in remote locations far from power lines. According to US group Dash Energy, solar technology cost around $20 per watt in the 1970s with around 14% efficiency. Today’s solar panels average between 15-18% efficiency. Costs can be as low as $0.20 per watt. On this basis you’d expect domestic wind turbine systems to become comparably more affordable (and more efficient).

Meanwhile, work carries on at Acciona’s wind farm site where 41 turbines have been fully installed, according to its July update. And 34% of a planned 70km network of paths connecting the turbines has also been completed. Acciona will be taking (free) community bus tours out to the MacIntyre site on several dates in September, November and December. The first one is already booked out.