Local news for local people
Articles published in November 2025
A perfect day for the Artisans' Market
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October was Pink Up Oberon Month
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Black Springs gets creepy for Halloween
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A cluster of cars
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How social media fuels payment app scams
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So much schooling mixed with fun
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The sports pages
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Wow! Make that WOW!! At the 2021 census there were 5,580 people of all ages in the Oberon Local Government Area (4,624 over the age of 15). The number now will almost certainly be bigger, but not by an enormous amount. The intended audience for Oberon Matters is the population of the Oberon LGA, plus maybe the diaspora of people who used to live here but have moved away and still like to keep in touch with what's going on in the town. In October, 3,760 people visited the Oberon Matters web site on at least one occasion. Many, of course, come more than once to read the weekly updates. It is over 80% of the adult population of the LGA, so it can probably be called a success. Thank you to everyone for supporting the site. Now I'm off to do a happy dance around the office. |
Oberon Council Mayor's Column
November 6, 2025 in Community
This fortnight's column from Oberon Mayor Andrew McKibbin can be seen here.
Oberon gets a good laugh
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Some well trained firefighters
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New interactive map shows how flammable your part of Australia is right now
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Media release: Local leader to champion community for The Pines Wind Farm
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Petition - Fair Funding for Councils Hosting State Forests A large proportion of the land in the Oberon Local Government Area is owned by the NSW Government. All of it is exempt from paying council rates. A reasonable argument can be made for the exemption in the case of national parks. These parks provide a wide range of valuable services to the community such as camping areas, tourist attractions, wildlife habitat protection, wilderness preservation and just being nice places to be. Some have a modest admission charge (45 out of the 895 parks in NSW) which is waived for seniors and pensioners but many are free. (Locally, Kanangra Boyd and Abercrombie National Parks are free and it would be impossible to charge for entry to Blue Mountains without putting toll gates on the Great Western Highway and Bells Line of Road.) There is a small charge for camping which goes towards maintaining the toilets and fireplaces. State forests are very different. These are commercial properties where timber is grown for a profit, and you don't have to go too far from the Oberon shops to find a stand of pine trees. A large proportion of the heavy road traffic in the area is the transport of logs out of the forests and the trucks do a lot of the damage that is visible to other motorists and has to be repaired at Council expense. Anyone owning a beef cattle farm also sends trucks across the roads, but the number of truck movements is very much less and the graziers have to pay rates on their land. It is hardly fair that one form of agriculture has to contribute to the costs of the community but another does not. The owners of private pine plantations pay rates, only the government owned ones are exempt. There is a petition being raised to have this changed. The petition will only be presented to Parliament if it attracts the minimum number of signatures, so get signing. You can sign by following the link below. |
Learning and remembering. And fun.
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The widish world of sports
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The youth hall is finally here
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A grant for the Military Museum
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Paul Toole MP has announced that the Oberon Military Museum run by the Oberon RSL Sub-Branch has received a Community Building Partnership grant of $10,000 to improve the facility. Parts of the museum building have experienced water damage and flooding from recent weather events. This grant funding will be used to improve water run-off around the museum and repair some water damaged areas.OCSN elects a new committee Oberon Citizen Science Network elected a new committee at the AGM on November 14. Members are:
Congratulations to the new committee. |
A bit of history A lot can happen in a year. The new sports complex will be opening later in November.
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New committee at OBTA A new committee was elected at the Oberon Business and Tourism Association AGM on November 12. Members are:
Congratulations to the new committee. |
Lean in to learning
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Play on!
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Oberon Council Mayor's Column
November 20, 2025 in Community
This fortnight's column from Oberon Mayor Andrew McKibbin can be seen here.
Checking the site with various browsers The statistics gathered by the web server have shown that for most of the life of this site visitors have used one of three web browsers - Google Chrome, Firefox or Microsoft Edge. Recently there has been a surge in visits using Apple Safari. Because I like to check what the site looks like to visitors I decided to add Safari to the mix. There appeared to be no way to download the program from Apple's web site so I went looking for other options. The first download site that looked reputable had a download for Windows 10 and 11. Within seconds of clicking on the link Norton flashed up a message saying the download had been blocked because the file contained a virus. The second download site is actually very reputable indeed and the download of Safari supposedly compatible with Windows 11 went well. The problem came after installation, because the program couldn't display any web pages and this could be considered a significant flaw in a web browser. Investigation continued and it was found that the reason there is no download of Safari from Apple directly is because it now only comes with a Mac, iPad or iPhone and the only downloads from Apple are updates which only work if the software is already installed. The reason the version I'd found didn't work is because Apple haven't updated the Windows version of Safari since 2010 and it doesn't support the ubiquitous HTTPS:// protocol which encrypts the traffic between server and browser. (Chrome, Firefox and Edge won't display pages that don't use this protocol, although they will sometimes allow the user to continue after receiving a warning that it might not be safe.) But here's the real mystery. Windows 11 was release in 2021, eleven years after the last Safari update, and Windows 10 came out in 2015, so why are download sites saying that the version of Safari they offer is compatible? Imagine not being able to trust something you see on the Internet. The short version of all this is that unless I buy a Mac to use only for web browsing I can't tell what this site looks like in Safari. If it's horrible (and I have no reason to think it would be much different to the other three browsers) it's not my fault. I've just got to assume that the Safari users coming here have a similar experience to everyone else. |
How do 'AI detection' tools actually work? And are they effective?
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Shakespeare is coming back to Oberon
For never was a story of more woe |
Book review: "Age of Doubt" by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang (Eds)
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A small change The category in the site history formerly called "Music" has been renamed to "Entertainment". It now includes comedy shows, plays, movies and other forms of entertainment as well as music. |
November 2025 Oberon Council Meeting
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A step closer for the Pony Club clubhouse
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A world of schooling
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The sporting life
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There were 5,138 unique visitors to the site during November, 2025. The most read page was Media release: Local leader to champion community for The Pines Wind Farm.
"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.
