Local news for local people
Welcome to the Oberon Matters web site
No 120 - July 16, 2026
Mobile speed cameras disguised as cattle. Sneaky!
July is "Begging
for Money" month
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The Burraga Sheep Show is happening on August 29.
It is not to be missed.
 | Winter Seasonal Markets at Edith It was definitely wintery at Edith for the Winter Seasonal Markets but that didn't stop a good crowd turning up to sample some local products and produce. Oberon Matters put on the winter woolies and wandered around pointing the camera at things. |
Your Federal Member's Community Update Your community update from the Federal Member for Calare, Andrew Gee MP, can be seen here. |  |
 | How to stop fraudsters tricking disabled people out of their NDIS funding There is a temptation to blame welfare recipients for fraud and wastage in government programs. There are almost certainly people claiming benefits to which they are not entitled, but almost all the fraud in the NDIS is being conducted by those people pretending to be the ones doing the helping. This report from The Conversation provides some details of the fraud involved. |
Black Springs Community Association The Black Springs Community Association AGM results are in with the new elected committee being:
Congratulations to all new committee members. We would like to extend a big thank you to the outgoing committee members for all their work and effort put in over the past year. Here's to another great year. |
Book review: "The Fibre Factor" by Dr Joanna McMillan One of the most profitable niches in book publishing is the "Fad Diet", where someone writes at length about the dangers of a food component or the benefit of another. Into this milieu comes this book extolling the advantages of fibre in our diets, but the red flags start waving before you even open the book. |  |
 | Left Behind: Transitioning to Work Getting Tougher Research carried out for the Smith Family points to a disappointing employment future for students who leave high school before Year 12. This is possibly a bigger problem for students in regional areas who might have an even narrower range of job possibilities than students living in more highly populated cities. |
A little bit of sport goes a long way Weather cold enough to freeze the balls off a golf green but that didn't stop Oberon's sportspeople from getting out there and having a go. |  |
Oberon Men's Shed meets every Tuesday at the Showground
 | The Carers' Retreat is finally open It's taken two years from the idea to the reality, but the Carers' Retreat at the Oberon hospital is finally here, with the official opening happening on July 7. |
There was movement at the station ... The train station, that is. Work is proceeding nicely on the construction of the station at Hazlegrove on the Oberon Tarana Heritage Railway. Getting the line running again is a slow process but that's the sort of thing that happens when the workers on the ground are volunteers and the professionals are in the bureaucracy, shuffling paper from one in-tray to the next. And often back again for another round of rule checking and obfuscation. The railway will run again one day but people have given up on predicting when because predictions have a way of coming up against train loads of red tape. |  |
 | Could this be Australia's warmest winter ever? Hottest June day ever in the UK. Heat waves across Eastern Europe and the USA. Hottest ever start to winter across most of Australia. But don't mention climate change or someone will tell you that it was really cold in Oberon last Friday so global warming is a HOAX (the word is always capitalised). This article from The Conversation is written by a couple of academics who probably know what they are talking about. |
School's out! So sang Alice. The original song said "School's out for summer" but Oberon doesn't feel like summer right now, so we will have to make allowances. The last week of term was still filled with activities, with no winding down for the schools around the town. |  |
 | Sport. That's what the back page is for. People kicked things. People rode things. People chased little white balls around a paddock. People won things. Just another weekend of sport around Oberon. |
The Oberon Military Museum is open every Wednesday and Friday
from 12:30 to 4pm
and on Saturdays and public holidays from 10am to 4pm.
Finally, progress on the relocation of the Leagues Club The saga of the new sports complex in Oberon has been dragging on for far too long, especially about the relocation of the licensed Leagues Club. At last, Oberon Council and the Leagues Club have signed the papers and the club can start moving to its new home. |  |
 | Action this day! There has been some good news about Victoria Pass. A decision has been made about who will be fixing the broken Mitchells Causeway. The NSW government had this to say: Contract awarded to reopen Great Western Highway, with further relief for impacted businesses
The Government is also announcing an expanded package of support for local businesses affected by the closure. The NSW Government knows the uncertainty of the past few months has been incredibly difficult for local communities. While this process has taken time, there could be no shortcuts when it came to understanding the cause of the failure and determining the safest long-term solution. Following an accelerated procurement process, Seymour Whyte has been selected to construct a new crossing that will restore the connection between the Blue Mountains and Central West while improving its long-term resilience. Extensive geotechnical investigations carried out over the past few months were critical to the procurement process, providing the evidence needed to develop the proposal for the safest and fastest reopening. You can read the complete media release here. Completion by April 2027 is a rather optimistic schedule so cynics can expect that the final date for reopening Victoria Pass will be "adjusted" as time goes on. No estimate of the cost has been announced, but it can be guessed as being $Lots. |
The NSW Government is today providing certainty for communities impacted by the closure of the Great Western Highway at Victoria Pass announcing the successful contractor to deliver a new, more durable crossing at Mitchells Causeway, with major construction to begin in July, and the road expected to reopen in the second quarter of next year. | It's a new record!
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Oberon Council Mayor's Column This fortnight's column from Oberon Mayor Andrew McKibbin can be seen here. |  |
 | Emma takes on the world The people at Fire and Rescue NSW Station 411 Oberon have a bit to say about an employee: Emma has been with us less than six months and already making a huge impact on our station with her boundless energy and youthful enthusiasm! We’re very very proud to announce that Emma will be representing Fire and Rescue NSW FRNSW Sports Association when they take on NSW Corrections in July and rumour has it will be further representing the firies more this year. Emma is no stranger to the sport previously playing Union for Penrith Emus Rugby Club, League for Panorama Platypi Women's Rugby League and currently plays soccer for Abercrombie FC. We wish Emma and our league teams all the best! |
Let's help someone who needs it Sharelle lives in Rockley. She is a single parent with two daughters. She also has cancer and has had to deal with a couple of shonky NDIS providers. (No, it doesn't cost $700 a week to mow a small lawn. No, a small bathroom update doesn't have to cost as much as a luxury car.) She thought it would be nice to have a patio out the back of her house where she could sit in the sun (and the quote for the bathroom suggested that getting a quote for a patio would be a stressful experience). She put out an appeal on social media and some kind person donated a heap of pavers. The problem was that the pavers were in Raglan and her house is in Rockley and she had no way to get the stones home. Another social media appeal and an answer was found. Instead of the usual monthly barbecue in Oberon Common, Lincoln Briffa shanghaied the regulars at the men's mental health group Mr Perfect and with the help of Sharelle's family moved the pavers to where they are needed. The sausages intended for Mr Perfect provided the lunch for everyone. And that's what helping people is all about. There should be more of it. Keep an eye on What's On for the times and locations of the Mr Perfect events. |  |
 | Chalkdust Torture Well, the title of that song is a bit out of date these days because teachers no longer use chalk on smartboards and don't torture pupils with canes and straps. Life is sometimes better than it was "in the good old days", and this week at Oberon's schools was no exception. |
If sport's your thing Specially for people who read the paper from the back page forward, here is this week's Oberon sports news. |  |
Visitor statistics
July 2, 2026
Here is what has happened around this site over the last three months
| Month | Unique visitors | Most read page in the month |
| April | 8,533 | The craft shop moves and having moved, sells on |
| May | 10,231 | Review: "AI Snake Oil" by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor |
| 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. |
The number of unique visitors during June reported by the server log analysis software was 22,692. This was adjusted downwards by the 7,036 attempts to access the Wordpress administrator login page. Just as well I don't use Wordpress, isn't it?
I have access to three ways of counting visitors:
- AWstats is a program accessed through the cPanel site management system at the web hosting site. It seems to be highly regarded.
- Weblog Expert runs on my computer using data from visitor logs downloaded from the web server. It has a bug which causes it to give absurd results for certain counts. I have been using it for years but it's no longer supported by the developer, and as it seems unreliable anyway I won't be using it in the future.
- A system with the rather generic name of Analog Stats, also accessed through cPanel. The results are a bit of a dog's breakfast, but as the developer's web site isn't secure (HTTP instead of HTTPS) and also causes Norton 360 to throw a fit about the danger of going there because of a possible virus it looks like another one to be avoided.
What all three have in common is that they all show traffic increasing month by month. The numbers aren't all the same because they all use slightly different ways of gathering and processing the data but they roughly agree. A big number of visitors come here each month.
"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.
Stories and articles for the most recent three weeks appear on the front page.
For earlier stories
see the Site History page.
We would like to acknowledge the Wiradjuri, Gundungurra and Dharug nations as the traditional custodians of the land on which we live and work and we pay our respect to Elders past, present and future
Site last updated on July 15, 2026
