Local news for local people
Welcome to the Oberon Matters web site
No 127 - September 3, 2026
Second place in the Burraga Sheep Show
photography competition but nobody can tell me
which of my five
entries was the winning one. So they will appear randomly here.
I've used the same email client (Pegasus Mail) for more years (decades?) than I care to think about but the time has come for a change. As soon as this week's site update has been published I will be changing to something new (Thunderbird). As this means dealing with two web hosting organisations for four web sites and requires setting up multiple "identities" and filtering algorithms plus synchronising email on two computers I will be a bit distracted for a few days. Years of experience with IT projects tells me that nothing ever goes to plan and nothing is trivial, so I expect I will be hard to live with and will spend some time shouting at the computer (sometimes even using profanity), but it will all be worth it in the end. It had better be!
See you on the other side, but things might run a little late next week.
PB
 | Your Federal Member's Community Update Your community update from the Federal Member for Calare, Andrew Gee MP, can be seen here. |
 | Burraga Sheep Show and Country Fair The population of Burraga seems to be only about 66 people so it was appropriate that this year's Annual Sheep Show should be the 66th edition. Oberon Matters went along to take a lot of photos and to enter the photography competition (Spoiler: Second place.) |
Limoncello at the Rockley Pub Oberon Matters caught up with the musical duo Limoncello at the Rockley Pub on Saturday, August 29, and a delightful afternoon it was. The food was as good as usual for the pub (even if a bit more expensive than most pub menus), the beer was cold and the sunshine outside wouldn't have been out of place at a Mediterranean resort, so adding some fine music made it the place to be. |  |
 | Oberon Council Mayor's Column This fortnight's column from Oberon Mayor Andrew McKibbin can be seen here. |
The Oberon taxi has new owners.
Ring
to book your ride.
Visitor statistics
September 3, 2026
Here is what has happened around this site over the last three months
| Month | Unique visitors | Most read page in the month |
| June | 15,656 | Some good news for a change (2024!). This hit the top spot in the last two days of the month, edging out This week's Moron Alert which had been at the top since the day it was published. Strange days indeed. |
| July | 14,531 | New owners for Oberon's taxi |
| August | 10,907 | What's On In Oberon |
It might look like there has been a big drop off in site visitors but it's actually a move towards something realistic because the web hosting company and the statistics analysing place are trying to get a handle on visits by AI content thieves. These can be very hard both to identify (they change like chameleons from day to day) and they are quite prepared to ignore the usual conventions that restrict access to web pages. To ChatGPT's credit, they identify themselves and they crawl more pages here than either Google or Bing each month (GPTbot is the seventh most common crawler at this site).
One unexpected contributor to the increased traffic has been identified. For over 20 years I ran a successful online magazine called The Millenium Project. Other than search engines it is now the second highest referral site after Facebook. I can only assume that my old fans have asked themselves "What is he doing now?" and followed the link there that sends them here.
"Unique visitors" counts IP addresses that have connected to the site at least once during the month. It doesn't include search engines, but even if it did Google and Bing (who index the site at least once a week) would only be counted as one visitor each. Put another way, it is the lowest estimate of the number of visits to the site during the month.
Relevant to the above statistics:
AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI - and reliable information is getting harder to find If you've looked at a Google or Bing search lately you would have been presented with an "AI summary" before you got to the actual list of pages that contain what you are looking for. What isn't obvious is that these summaries reduce meaningful traffic to the sites that actually contain information (while spuriously inflating the visitor count). Not only that, AI is feeding on itself by crawling AI generated sites. There could come a day when it's virtually impossible to find reliable stuff without using another way to search for it. This article from The Conversation looks at the problem. (The good news is that the site search system here bypasses Google's AI BS and only provides links to pages on the site that contain what you are looking for. Google will probably eventually find a way to "fix" this, but until then ...) There is also an answer to the strange visitor statistics for this site (and any others, of course). |  |
 | Schools keep on schoolin' There's been so much happening at Oberon's schools that teachers' heads are spinning so fast that a hum can be heard all over the town. But that's a good thing, because school should never be boring. |
All the sport, all around The big news of the week is of course the Oberon Tigers senior men's team winning their second Grand Final on the trot. Lets go for the treble in 2027. Other sports happened of course, with the ladies who kick round balls going into the Grand Final and the men just one match away. |  |
 | Black Springs finally gets some mobile phone coverage It's finally happened. After years of waiting and a lot of work by the Black Springs community, there is finally reliable mobile phone coverage in Black Springs. It's limited right now to areas around the Community Hall and the tennis courts at the Recreation Ground, but it's a start. |
A look around the Tarana Markets When the weather's fine, it's the fourth Sunday of the month and you have some time to fill in before you need to be somewhere, there's nowhere much better to be than the Tarana Markets. It was Sunday, the weather was lovely and Oberon Matters was on the way to somewhere, so it was a good opportunity to wander around pointing the camera at things. |  |
Editorial: Be careful what you wish for
August 27, 2026 in Opinion
Someone has come up with a very silly idea about how to protest against wind towers. What is even sillier is thinking that it might work.
See the editorial here
The bistro has arrived
There's no need to quote Arnie in Terminator 2. You know how it goes. |  |
There's another place to eat in Oberon. Yes, the bistro at Club Oberon is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week at the new Sports Complex and it was worth the wait. Oberon Matters put on the restaurant reviewer hat and had lunch there. It was only the second day of trading but no allowances needed to be made. The chosen dish was the Hawaiian Chicken Burger with cheese, pineapple, bacon and aioli dressing and a piece of chicken that was so big that it overlapped the bun in two directions. And the chips were delicious. Add a nicely chilled beer from the bar next door, look out over one of the nicest views from a dining table anywhere in town and only someone impossible to please could have any complaint. | August 2026 Oberon Council Meeting August Oberon Council meeting. |
Don't be a dropout Very good advice there from the great James Brown, but nobody's dropping out of the schools around Oberon. There's too much to do and learn there. |  |
 | Winners and losers - that's the way sport goes You can't win every time. That's why they make silver medals. But that doesn't take away the fun and the reason for playing sport. |
The RFS in Oberon is looking for more people. Click for more information.
Science Week comes to Oberon In 2026 it touched down in Oberon with a display and talks at the Malachi Gilmore Hall organised by the Oberon Citizen Science Network (OCSN). |  |
 | Book review: "Enshittification" by Cory Doctorow Remember how good some things used to be and how they have decayed into sometimes unrecognisable piles of garbage? This book address the problem, identifies some culprits and suggests what we might do about it. If we can do anything al all. |
Older people's media literacy can be boosted in just 60 minutes - new study I know I keep harping on about the sewer pipe of mis- and disinformation that floods us every day from social media (and real media, too). Some new research published in The Conversation indicates that older people might be more susceptible to this while some (but not all or enough) young people are taught something about critical thinking at school. The research went on to look for ways to correct this deficiency, and the good news is that there is some evidence that the problem can be averted with a quite small amount of education and training, although this needs constant reinforcement. |  |
| Oberon Council Mayor's Column This fortnight's column from Oberon Mayor Andrew McKibbin can be seen here. |
Hey, teacher, teach those kids some more Despite what you might hear in some popular songs, the students at the schools around Oberon aren't just bricks in the wall. They are too busy learning things and doing educational activities. There's music, there's sport, there's zoos to visit. And more. |  |
 | There's sport, and then there's SPORT! Golfers golfing, netballers netballing, footballers chasing footballs (of various shapes), polocrossers doing whatever they do, school kids rushing around. A full week of activity across the sporting spectrum. |
Helping people cope with mental health issues.
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Site last updated on September 03, 2026
