Plus pint-sized publican and a town stink. Welcome to Galah Weekly, our award-winning newsletter keeping you up to date with regional headlines that matter, plus other delightful things from life beyond the city. By Dean Southwell, who feels we’ve let artificial intelligence go too far already.
Queensland remains the state with the least affordable regional rents, draining more than 30% of the average income.
The SGS Economics snapshot of the national rental market shows even regional areas with strong employment growth such as Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Cairns and Townsville remain unaffordable for most renters.
The report shows rental affordability has declined again in the past year. Regional SA is one of the few states that offers what could be considered affordable rents.
It also shows parts of regional NSW, particularly on the coast, are comparable to Sydney for low affordability.
Meanwhile, home buyers are still feeling the pinch. Property research firm Cotality has found Australian households are spending twice as much of their income to service mortgages compared with five years ago.
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A non-drinking nurse who stands just 142cm tall and is supposed to be retired has become the face of a Queensland country pub.
Barb Parkinson has become known as the Granny at the Yannie since her daughter convinced her to retire from nursing two years ago and move 30 minutes north of Bundaberg to help run the Yandaran Hotel.
For someone who had to ask what colour drink her patrons wanted when she started in the bar, Parkinson has become a social media star with visitors taking images of her overshadowed by many of the pub’s much taller visitors. She’s even got her own life-sized cardboard cut-out.
Further north in Qld, the Walkabout Creek pub 200km north of Mount Isa, known as Crocodile Dundee’s watering hole, has sold after three years on the market. The iconic Australian movie celebrates its 40th anniversary next year.
Changes to two major projects in SA and WA have proved there’s still a place for community lobbying.
The company behind SA renewable energy connections is seeking alternative routes after community concern that a proposed transmission corridor to Adelaide would affect prime grain-growing areas in the state’s mid-north.
In WA, US miner Alcoa has abandoned plans to expand bauxite mining near Perth after council and community concerns about the potential impact on jarrah forests and water security.
Award-winning artist-grazier Lori Pensini is using her paintings to highlight the impact of two years of drought on her part of the WA south-west.
Her painting of a friend holding an orphaned lamb, Bare Earth, won the $50,000 Collie Art Prize earlier this year. This month Bare Earth 2, a variation on the theme, was a finalist in the $50,000 Richard Lester Prize for Portraiture, which was won by Victorian artist Jenny Rodgerson.
Pensini is based on a grazing property at Boyup Brook, 270km south-east of Perth, after moving from a Pilbara station. She said the Bare Earth series was part of her response as a farmer to the uncertainty and challenges posed by a changing climate.
She won the 2024 Portia Geach Memorial Award for a work with a similarly rural theme.
More than a year after the WA goldfields city of Kalgoorlie engaged an expert to find the source of a smell that invaded homes, residents are still living with the effects.
The stench has been nicknamed Mr Stinky and one resident, Jess Scafidi, has launched a petition to have the sewerage treatment plant responsible for the smell relocated. Scafidi is one of many residents who agree the stench alone is unbearable, and she also says it affects her health.
Odour specialist Philippe Nejean identified the sewerage plant as the culprit last year. The council has since been working on infrastructure upgrades.
A cemetery on the NSW mid-north coast is one of last refuges of a critically endangered native orchid.
The tiny pale yellow dovetail orchid, or Diuris flavescens, is found only in a local graveyard and a few other nearby sites and is apparent only when it’s flowering.
Senior ecologist Matt Bell said there were only a few hundred of the orchids and conservation efforts included a ban on spring mowing and restrictions on identifying its exact location.
Meanwhile, on private property in the Blue Mountains, conservationist Peter Pigott is continuing 50 years of work saving a rare wallaby once thought extinct.
There’s been such demand for Galah Issue 13 there are now just 230 copies available.
It’s going to be a collector’s edition. Act now to secure your copy or order a stack as gifts for those who love a deep dive into all things creative and inspiring in the country.
Yes, it’s getting busy out there. But Galah is here to help.
We mined our archive of menus by Galah food columnist @belindajefferyfood and pulled out a collection of recipes that might just save your skin in the festive weeks to come. Among these is a most delicious slow-roasted beef recipe.
You can check them all out here.
Artist Lae Oldmeadow presents a contemplative and tactile installation in which nature and culture intertwine in totems and wall sculptures crafted from palm fibre, organic cotton and ultramarine paint. At NERAM, Armidale, NSW, until 1 February. Read more
This exhibition explores the creative responses of Australian women artists to the cultural and socio-political shifts that affected their lives in the second half of the 20th century. At Geelong Gallery, Vic, until 22 February. Read more
Based on the NSW far south coast, Natasha Dusenjko works with photography, sound and language. This exhibition of photographs made in 2021 highlights her work with plants and explores how “medicine transmits through frequency, silence and shadow”. At Manes & Tales Studio, Bermagui, NSW, until 17 January. Read more
Former Sydneysider Laura McCusker has been designing and making award-winning furniture in Tasmania for the past 25 years. She works from a former apple shed in the Hobart suburbs although, as @theladyinthewhiteute, she also travels to deliver and install her pieces. McCusker designs her creations to last generations and believes they should gather the marks that come with prolonged use. She sometimes revisits and adapts old favourite designs, a method she followed when commissioned for Heartwood, an exhibition of works by Tasmanian women in timber design.
How did you move into timber design? I was good at art and loved it, but at the time it felt frivolous somehow. I was brought up in a family where we were taught we had to be useful and contribute. Working with timber somehow ticked all the boxes.
Do you see your work as craft or art? In my mind there’s a Venn diagram made up of craft-trade, art and design. I work in all three aspects, but I think it’s perfect when I can put myself in the middle of that diagram.
What should people know about the pieces you make? I tell people they need to understand that the pieces I deliver for them will look different after three months, and after three years. If the timber I use took 80 years to grow, I want to know the pieces I make are going to last two or three times longer. I want them to be used and they will eventually look worn, used and loved. The inevitable scratches are part of their story.
Tell us about living and working in Tasmania. When I moved here my only demands were good coffee, good music and an airport so I could travel interstate. I had all that. I usually work with ethically sourced Tasmanian oak, which is just an umbrella term for gum species such as stringybark, mountain ash and peppermint gum. Sometimes I’ll use specialty timbers such as blackwood but it depends on availability and whether I know it’s been ethically sourced. If I was in WA, for example, I’d probably work in jarrah but making something out of Tasmanian timber locates it here.
Tell us about Forest Stand, the work you made for the Heartwood exhibition. I had a design, Stand and Deliver, that I did as a beautiful clothes stand 10 years ago for a client who wanted to get his partner’s clothes off the floor. This design is adapted from that, although much bigger, and I was also able to use specialty timbers such as Huon pine, sassafras and myrtle that I had sitting on the racks from other jobs.
Do we still need to single out women in particular fields? It’s not normally something I make a big deal about. But there’s also that view that young women need to see others succeeding when they aspire to a particular career. A friend once told me “until it’s normal, it needs to be special”, so at times it does need to be celebrated.
Heartwood: Tasmanian Women In Timber features at Design Tasmania, Launceston, until 8 February.
Only humans have been allowed to enter Tamworth’s Golden Guitar Awards next year – but the era of artificial intelligence in the awards might be on its way.
Five AI-generated songs were entered for the 2026 awards, forcing the Country Music Association of Australia to quickly ban entries generated without human involvement.
However, association chair Dobe Newton said awards organisers were now trying to work out how much AI involvement will be allowed in the future.
We’d love to hear about the news, events and people that should be making the headlines in the Galah Weekly newsletter. Share what’s new(s) in your neck of the woods with us at newsie@galahpress.com
