I'm going to break one of my blogging rules and talk about my work. After all, it's my blog and I can do what I want, and besides it's not the first time . When I was a young housing activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a bit of time on the executive of National Shelter. This organisation was, and still is, Australia's peak non-profit housing advocacy organisation, and is basically a federation of State and Territory organisations. At this time, we had a small amount of funding from the Commonwealth Government so we had a couple of underpaid staff and were able to be active on the lobbying front in a low profile kind of way. However, the organisation as a whole was struggling. Very few of our State branches had any money, and most were like the Queensland branch I represented, a few people who would get together in whatever time we could make in our regular jobs. Representatives from the State and Territory branches used to meet once a quarter, over a Fri
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson