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Give me some. Please. You have no idea how I need it.
Sure, making a newspaper is no Ironman feat. I’m not Mark Waller. But at this point, mere hours away from the printer roaring to life with Gippslandia #26, I’m spent.
Put a fork in me, I’m cooked.
I’ll tell you who has seemingly boundless energy – toddlers. Those mini-humans can charge on for hours. Until they can’t. They seem to be able to drop down and sleep from wherever they were playing. Just, plonk, curl up and zzz. Sort of like tiny soldiers who steal sleep on the battlefield still in the entirety of their kit. Wrangling toddlers, like love, is a battlefield. We are young...
How much energy do we need to change the Gippsland we currently live in to the Gippsland we aspire to live in?
This is the point in the creation process where I dissect and examine the formation of the edition. There are two central arcs that lead us to Gippslandia #26, kicked off by two events: our very first edition, launched after the announcement of the Hazlewood mine closure, where we wanted to explore what was meant by a ‘just transition’; and the initial Gippsland New Energy Conference that went down in Sale during August of last year, where we didn’t hear the phrase nearly as frequently.
See, we’re interested in the power of words – even the absence of words – and it was a topic that arose in our conversation with documentary filmmakers Josie Hess and Stephanie Sabrinskas. One element associated with language that stood out to them was the term ‘slippage’, which sounds like a child’s boo-boo, until you understand that it’s the word describing a mine wall collapse. Not so cutesy now.
So, this is our ‘energy’ issue. Where Gippslandia touches base on a few of the current conversations occurring in the energy generation industry, reimagines the future vision for the Latrobe Valley’s coal mine thanks to landscape architecture students from RMIT, experiences all sorts of energy transfers with the Gippsland Roller Derby, learns how we can enhance our communities’ agency during this transition with Bodye Darvill, proposes the best Gippsland Power team of all time and takes a ride on some old school technology with the Snow Train.
Throughout all these stories (as with all our editions), the golden thread is the energy of the people – fellow Gippslandians.
When looking at the angle I could approach this topic from, I dived into our modern lexicon – there were plenty of options! But it wasn’t the chemistry associated with energy, big #%^$ energy or realigning my chakras for more cosmic energy that interested me the most, but the idea of changing state.
For instance, the energy required to change ice to water and then water to steam.
How much energy do we need to change the Gippsland we currently live in to the Gippsland we aspire to live in?
In Gippslandia #26, you’ll meet more people who are devoting their energy to improving the region in the best way that they can. Many of them openly expressed that we have more influence in improving our patch, and Gippsland more generally, than we’ve ever had before. That could be placing solar panels on the equestrian club roof to offset the energy bill and be able to spend more resources on training equipment, or Venus Bay and Heyfield creating microgrids to strengthen their resiliency or Gippsland Roller Derby’s Pride initiatives driven by listening to the community around them.
In just typing this I feel buoyed, and Gippslandia is in the privileged position to hear these stories every day and share them with you.
Announcing $40 billion in planned energy projects is one thing. A passionate community seizing that opportunity and taking ownership of it is another dynamic all together.
Damn.
Is that an inebriated middle-aged man coming into my room, or our toddler stumbling in?
Time to find the energy to keep forging ahead.