Problems in attracting professionals to Australia's regions - a note

In Bush lawyers Legal Eagle reports on the problems involved in attracting young lawyers to practice in regional Australia. This problem is not unique to law, nor just to the professions. There are trades shortages as well.

I have been writing about this issue for a number of years. The effects are quite profound. It's not just the lost services that these people could provide, but the flow-on economic effects. If we could fill available jobs, then the income from those people would flow on to other parts of the regional communities, creating further new jobs.

The causes of this people problem are complex, involving structural and cultural issues. So far, responses to it have been spasmodic and ad-hoc. I doubt that this will change.

The problem is not unique to Australia. We can see similar problems in Canada or China. A key here lies in the nature of economic, social and political competition between major cities and their surrounding areas. To those that have shall be given.

Perhaps it's time to revisit and update some of my earlier analysis.

Fashion and the first five fallacies in modern management - a note

My post Saturday Morning Musings - the first five fallacies in modern management drew a comment from Bob Embry who said in part:

Almost no institutions on the planet have practiced or are practicing Drucker's view of management. If they were it would be "positively" obvious in our day to day lives—as opposed to "negatively obvious."

In a broad sense, I think that Bob is right. I found Peter Drucker's writing enormously influential, still relevant today. The core problem I have is the way in which certain approaches have come to be applied in combination almost as holy writ.

Take planning as an example. At one level, the value of planning is self-evident - it sets out the how to do. However, the problem we now have lies in the blind application of planning techniques without proper understanding of either their role or limitations. I have discussed this at various times, most recently in Mechanistic Management - the sometimes fallacy of planning.

A particular difficulty lies in the role of fad and fashion in management thinking. Management is very prone to fashion. New ideas rise, become popular, then recede. Yet even in recession, they may still remain embedded in the organisational landscape like an ancient artifact
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To illustrate what I mean, take the concept of the business plan. Originally conceived in a start-up context, this had morphed by the mid-eighties into something that all businesses should have. The idea became specially popular with Australian governments - state and Federal Governments provided funds to help smaller businesses develop their own business plans.

Most if not all of this money was wasted because thinking was actually mis-directed. Good businesses already knew what they were doing - they had techniques in place. Other businesses lacked the capacity to really benefit.

In all this, there was a mismatch between the assumptions held by those espousing business planning approaches almost as holey writ and the actual mechanics involved in small to medium size business. The most successful small businesses were too busy responding to changing market need, too busy trying new things, too busy improving what they did, to set up plans that they knew would be quickly invalidated by changing business conditions.

It is now more than fifteen years since the business planning ideal peaked. However, the concept remains embedded in the Australian institutional landscape.

Government is a particular problem here in that Government agencies have, to my mind inappropriately, institutionalised internal business planning techniques without proper reference to their original purpose. They have become, to use modern jargon, commonly accepted "best practice". Worse, they sometimes attempt to impose the approach on others in the name of good public policy.

Don't get me wrong. I do support business planning approaches, but only in the right place.

In all this, as a reformer and business improver I am as prone to fashion as anybody else. I have been involved in one way or another with most of the popular management movements over recent decades. So I will and have pleaded mea culpa at times (here, for example) for my own enthusiastic errors.

Now as I argue the need for new approaches I am conscious at times of the danger that I may simply be participating in the latest fashion wave.

We live in age of shortening organisational life cycles, of business destruction. Here I am not talking about the latest financial crisis, but of a longer term trend. I attribute this in part to mechanistic management, arguing that we need improve organisational resilience. I thought that this was a new idea, but it is in fact very popular just at present. So it too is a fashion

I have also argued for evidence based approaches, centered especially on the concept of a discipline of practice. Now here I was seriously concerned to learn that Australian Prime Minister Rudd is an exponent of evidence based approaches.

Why concerned? If we formalise evidence based approaches within current policy and institutional structures, then it risks becomes just another device within what I have called the current fallacy of measurement for enforcing central control.

Sunday Essay - the myths and realities of Northern Development

Neil's shared items drew me to a post by Bob Gosford on his the Northern Myth blog. This dealt with the prospects for development in tropical Australia based on water. Bob is something of a sceptic, quoting from Bruce Davidson’s 1965 book, The Northern Myth.

Bob was looking for comments from people who actually knew something about the topic from an on-ground perspective. I do not. However, I do remember clearly the earlier debates on Northern Development.

By way of background especially for international readers, there has been a long fascination with the prospects for development in Northern Australia. This interest was heightened by the Second World War, leading to strong pushes to subsidise or fund agricultural development in the North, including especially the Ord River Scheme in the Kimberley region of WA.

Preliminary work on the Ord River Irrigation Area (ORIA) Project had begun in 1941 when the WA Government established a small experimental farm. In 1945 the Kimberley Research Station was established on Ivanhoe Plain, as a joint Commonwealth/State venture.

By 1958 the WA Government was convinced of the viability of an irrigation scheme and the initial development was completed in 1963 at a cost of around $20 million, of which the Commonwealth contributed $12 million. By 1966, 31 farms irrigated from the Diversion Dam had been allocated.

Construction of the Ord River Dam followed to provide the major storage reservoir called Lake Argyle at a cost of $22 million. This was officially opened in June 1972.

Bruce Davidson wrote his book as a debunker in the middle of the Ord River debate. This was a hot political topic, with strong opposition to the scheme especially from the Commonwealth Treasury. This argued on cost/benefit grounds that the scheme could never be viable.

Interest then died down, but has recently re-surfaced in a large way because of the climate change debate. Proponents of Northern development argue, among other things, that agriculture must move north to take advantage of Northern Australia's water resources. This led to the establishment by the Howard Government of a Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce. The map below shows the area covered by the Task Force.

When I first looked at Northern Development all those years ago as part of the school geography course, there were clear problems in terms of seasonality of rainfall and of sometimes poor soil. But by far the most obvious problems were small local markets, lack of infrastructure and high transport costs.

Given the renewed interest in, even obsession with, Northern Development, I wondered just how much things had changed. The answer is I don't know. I am in fact frustrated by my own lack of knowledge. Here I found the Task Force web site itself frustrating - the submissions and so far released analysis is fragmented, lacking in the detail required to give me the information I need.

Given this, what can we say?

The first thing brought out clearly by the submissions, and this has always been a problem with discussions about Northern Development, is the variation across Tropical Australia. It's actually hard to generalise - analysis needs to be carried out at regional level. Mind you, this should come as no surprise, since the need for regional level analysis to properly inform public policy discussions is, after all, one of my constant themes.

The second thing is the bias in the submissions towards water as such. There appears to be very limited economic and geographical analysis so far, little about the changes that have taken place since the previous debate. These are substantial.

To begin with, there has been substantial economic and population growth in Tropical Australia, far more in fact than was predicted even forty years ago. Mining, tourism and Government (especially Defence related) have all grown substantially. As an example, the rise of tourism and mining has been transforming the Kimberley Region. Ignoring everything else, this should have encouraged horticultural production just to serve the local market.

Farming practices have changed as well, as have our consumption patterns. At the time that Bruce Davidson wrote, primary production in Northern Australia was essentially monoculture, beef and sugar in particular. The Australian diet was also far planer - very few tropical fruits or vegetables were eaten. As Australian tastes have changed, so has primary production.

Broad acre farming is still important, but the overall pattern is far more varied. Further, the huge rise in irrigation based production has changed industry knowledge as well as its dynamics.

I make these points because I think that there is now both more knowledge of irrigated and tropical agriculture and a better fit with Australian consumption patterns. So this should provide a better base for agricultural expansion than existed when Dr Davidson wrote his book.

There have been two further changes as well. The first, more immediate, change is the rise of Asia. I would have expected this to increase markets for Northern Australian products. The second, longer term development, is the rise in the importance of bio-fuels.

This is all working from first principles. However, if I am right then I think that the world is very different from that of 1965.

I have not had time to validate my conclusions beyond a quick, superficial, scan. This is broadly supportive - a quick scan of the relevant section of the NT Department of Primary Industry, Fisheries and Mines web site shows at least some of the features that I am talking about.

None of this means that Bob Gosford is wrong to be sceptical. Quite the contrary. It is one thing to suggest that things may be better than they were, quite another to suggest that the type of quantum leap implied by the new Northern Development proponents is either desirable or possible.

The short answer on the second is that I just do not know. However, I am sceptical.

In all this, though, there was one thing during the week that pulled me up. Looking at the ABS population projections, I was astonished by the low projections for the future NT population - from memory it was about 460,000.

These projections are based on a series of current assumptions. I don't believe them. There comes a point in change processes where previous developments force a quantum shift. While I am sceptical about the current Northern Development hype, I think that we are at this shift point. But that's a story for another post.

Postscript

Since I prepared this post, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has released new agricultural state profile for the Northern Territory.

At 30 June 2007, there were an estimated 640 agricultural businesses in the Northern Territory. This is not a large number.

In 2006-07, the gross value of agricultural production for the Northern Territory was $343.0 million, an increase of 12% on 2005-06. Crop production contributed $99.4 million or 29% of the total value of agricultural production, while livestock slaughterings and disposals were valued at $242.7 million (71%).

While livestock still dominates, crop production - especially mangoes - has grown quite strongly.

In a recent post, Bob Gosford has returned to the Northern Myth theme in the first of a series of irregular posts. The link is here.

Saturday Morning Musings - the first five fallacies in modern management

I started my last post, Child abuse in Australia - a case of misused numbers?, as my usual Saturday Morning Musings, then decided that it would be better as a stand-alone post. I decided instead, still scratching at current pre-occupations, to provide a list of what I saw as the main fallacies in modern management.

Most have some good points. The problem lies in the way that we have come to interpret and apply them.

To avoid making this post too long, I have listed the first five fallacies. I will give the second five next week,

The Fallacy of Measurement

We live in a measurement age in which everything must be measured, quantified and in which only those things that can be measured attract real attention. Aided by the computer, the quantification movement that emerged in management has spread to every aspect of life. The problem is that many of the most important things are not easily measurable.

The Fallacy of Standards

The standards movement grew rapidly in parallel with the quantification movement, reaching its private sector peak in the 1980s or early 1990s. While its influence has declined somewhat in the private sector, its influence within public sector thinking is still pervasive.

The problem with standards lies in the way in which the term's different meanings have become confused. The establishment of standards, common specifications that would allow things to fit together, was important to industrial expansion. From this, the meaning was extended to cover fitness for purpose, so that a piece of equipment did what it was intended to do, and then to management systems.

In management, the combination of standards with measurement gave us concepts such as benchmarking and key performance indicators. This marked an implicit shift, in fact a confusion, between standards as fitness for purpose and standards as a device for performance improvement.

The standards movement retreated in the private sector as it became clear that some standards based approaches imposed costs without real gains. They have continued in the public sector in large part because those imposing the standards generally do not bear the costs.

The Fallacies of Uniformity and Consistency

The popular idea that uniformity and consistency are of themselves good things is a direct outcome of the standards movement. We can see this in the common assumption in Australian public policy that single national approaches are always better.

This is actually confused rubbish. Uniform national approaches may or may not be better. It depends upon the circumstances,

There is an odd tension between our belief for uniformity on one side, our support for the concept of the market with its core ideas of competition, choice and diversity on the other.

The Fallacy of Planning

The concept of planning within the private sector was popularised by Peter Drucker in particular. By the late 1960s there was a common belief that effective corporate planning created an environment that would allow sustained long term growth.

Within the public sector in the same period, we saw the growth of the idea of central planning - exemplified not just in the centrally planned economies, but in the global popularity of five year plans -as a way of achieving faster growth.

Longer term planning in the Drucker sense, unfairly I think, went into decline within the private sector as it became clear that that planning was not a panacea. However, with the evolution of a computer, planning morphed into a device for exercising central corporate control within big organisations.

There is no evidence that I know of to show that differences in planning techniques have any measurable impact on corporate performance. All large companies tend to apply the same type of planning approaches.

Within the public sector, failures within centrally planned economies effectively discredited the idea of central planning. At the same time, the evolving types of private sector planning joined with changes in public administration such as program budgeting (itself a child of the quantification movement) to morph into new and increasingly rigid public sector planning (control) techniques at agency levels.

There is a dreadful irony here. New concepts in public administration such as the New Zealand model intended to impose the equivalent of market disciplines and to improve effectiveness and responsiveness have in fact had the opposite effects.

The Fallacy of Control

Unlike past generations who knew that the world was an uncertain place, current Australians actually believe that Governments can (and should) control outcomes. See problem, fix problem.

The difficulty we face is that there is a very substantial difference between controlling change as compared to controlling our response to change. This is another area where a private sector management concept has been adopted in the public sector, in so doing turning into a strange new beast.

Risk management is quite a different concept from risk avoidance. In the first, we do something while trying to identify and manage risks. In the second, we don't do something because of the risks.

Risk management has a very long history. I am not quite sure without research as to when it emerged as a formal discipline. However, I do know that by at least the early 1990s it was sufficiently popular to become an identified consulting area.

As so often happens with management ideas, it was then taken up by the public sector.

I need to be very precise here. The concept of risk management had always been known within the public sector. It was just one of those things that you did as an automatic part of your work. What was new, was the adoption of the idea of risk management as a new focus area. All of a sudden, Australian Governments began talking about risk management as something new.

This had two effects. The first was the imposition by Government of new risk management requirements on the private sector, the second the desire to apply specific and mandated risk management techniques to internal Government activities. As a consequence, risk management moved from something that was done as part of something else to an identified and dominant activity in its own right.

This may sound like a semantic change, even a good thing. However, what it has meant in practice is that the risk focus has shifted from management to avoidance.

Child abuse in Australia - a case of misused numbers?

In Personal Reflections - modern management and Shanghai's Yu Gardens I concluded:

Modern public administration, and I think that this is true of modern management in general, has become as formalised as Shanghai's Yu gardens, but without the same beauty. To use modern jargon, we are no longer either efficient or effective.

This theme, problems in modern management including the application to public policy, has been a recurring theme in recent writing. I keep wanting to put the matter aside, but then something happens that makes me want to scratch at it again.

Soon after I finished the post, there was extensive radio reporting (for example, here and here)of a report by the Australian Law Reform Commission on child protection.

According to reporting, the report said that there had been a three-fold rise in the number of children needing protection from violent and sexual abuse over the last decade, reaching 300,000. Report author James McDougall also said that few sexual predators were convicted and the lack of early intervention policies had failed many children.

To overcome this, the report apparently calls for the appointment of a Federal children's commissioner to complement positions already in existence at a state level. Federal Minister for Community Services Jenny Macklin says the figures show the need for action.

"There's no question that these are just shocking figures," she said

It all sounds quite dreadful and certainly the associated interest groups have leapt to the cause. But let's just stand back for a moment.

While the commentary has generally focused on sexual abuse, the numbers cover reporting on all forms of child protection notifications. Further, they cover both substantiated and unsubstantiated abuse.

If we look at the number of substantiated notifications of all types, this has increased from 29,833 to 58,563. So total reports - the headline number - have gone up by c200,000, while the number of substantiated reports has risen by 28,730. A significant increase, but not a headline number.

The story does not end here.

There is already a commission of inquiry into the operations of the NSW child welfare system. One of the issues that it is addressing is the way in which NSW's rigid system of manadatory reporting has imposed processing and assessment loads beyond the capacity of the system to handle, to the detriment of real needs.

Now if we look at the reported numbers, the biggest increase in the number of national notifications (substantiated and unsubstantiated) was in New South Wales, where the figure in 1995-96 was 28,930 and the corresponding figure in 2006-07 was 189,928. So around 161,000 of the c200,000 increase in the reported numbers comes from NSW with its increasingly tight and now arguably overloaded reporting requirements.

Child abuse notification requirements were introduced because of a perception that child abuse was being under-reported. I do not know what proportion of the 28,730 increase in the annual number of substantiated cases across the nation is due to tighter reporting, what proportion (if any) is due to an actual increase in child abuse.

I do know that there are problems in the child welfare system such as overload on front-line case workers, along with a decline in the availability of foster carers. The creation of yet another official overlay will do little if anything to address the real problems, if indeed they can be addressed within our increasingly creaky and cumbersome official system.

I have suggested before that the Rudd Government was in danger of being New South Walesed. I wonder if this is not another case?

Beijing smog

In Beijing, while there was a constant haze that stretched all the way to the Great Wall of China, the atmosphere was not too bad.

On our last day, the first day that the Olympic restrictions on traffic and industry were lifted, the smog as we drove to the airport was clearly worse. Buildings vanished into the haze.

Now according to Al Jazeera, the Chinese Government has decided to reinstate some of the Olympic controls to try to reduce the returned smog.

Jim Belshaw says no more social networking sites, no more groups!

Look, I am all networked out! I have got to the stage that I do not think that I can manage any more.

Invitations to join this group or that, this new site or that. It's all become too hard.

I already have a far larger internet presence that I can manage.

I had no idea when I began that a simple google search on "Jim Belshaw" would grow from less than thirty entries to, at last count, 12,800. Now managing my on-line presence is close to a full time job!

Enough is enough.

Personal Reflections - modern management and Shanghai's Yu Gardens

Yu Gardens, Shanghai.

When you think about it, finding personal space has always been an issue in a crowded society. If you look at the traditional Chinese garden, they are designed to achieve variety as well as quiet in a small area.

Chinese gardens are also very stylised, marked by a particular aesthetic.

I make these points to illustrate a central fact, that we see the world in terms of patterns. Sometimes these are explicit. Often, they are implicit, simply assumed.

On 17 September in Architecture and beauty: some thoughts Nicholas Gruen mused about what he saw as the ugliness of modern architecture. He asked:

Why is it that virtually every building - well so many buildings anyway - built before 1940 is beautiful and virtually every building built after - say - 1950 is ugly?

At one level, this is a sweeping statement. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There have been beautiful buildings since 1950. Further, some buildings or structures that were opposed at the time on enironmental or aesthetic grounds have later become familiar and much-loved. Despite this, my instinctive reaction was to agree with Nicholas.

In an apparently unlinked story, Fred Argy wondered Why is Australia so opposed to debt?. Here Fred, who was a senior officer in the Commonwealth Treasury while I was there, was referring not Australia's love of credit, but to our obsession with avoidance of Government debt.

In a further apparently unlinked story last December, Saturday Morning Musings - endings, beginning and the role of the tribal elder, I discussed ageism. The genesis of the story lay in what I saw as an apparently growing gap between my language and attitudes and those to be found in the "modern" organisation, at my difficulty in disentangling my own history and experience from my day-to-day work. To fit in, if you like.

I have sometimes describe myself as old-fashioned. This implies that I hark back to some past point or pattern. My interest in history, my reference to past examples, all make it possible for me to be typed as old-fashioned. In turn, this has affected my own perceptions of myself.

I do not know just how much I have written over the last two years, perhaps a million words.

This includes my blog posts, as well as my professional and official writing. That writing has taken many different forms from blog posts to Cabinet Minutes to power point presentations and has been written for many purposes: to provide information or briefing; training courses and management how-to-do stuff; explorations of management and public policy theory or history; explorations of my own past.

In writing, I have slowly come to the view that my problem, and that faced by many other commentators, is that we know that the things that many of us have supported in the past no longer work.

Some of us, the purists, re-state their past positions. The problem lies not in our mental constucts, but in the doing. The answer is to re-state past views, to hew closer to the true faith.

For others of us, the reformers, the problem is more complex because we have concluded that the system is broken. In my own case, I have come to feel that modern management and public policy is fundamentally flawed, that the constructs we now use do not work.

While I use examples from the past to illustrate my points, this is not in fact an old fashioned view. I do not hark back to some golden age. Rather, I am trying to look forward to some new approaches. I am a radical, not a conservative.

This position creates a number of difficulties.

At a personal level, I have had to accept that things that I once supported as a reformer, things that are now the management or public policy status-quo, have become pernicious. This does not mean that all elements should be rejected, rather that we should select and modify as required. This is quite hard to do. It is far easier to adopt a purist position.

Still at a personal level, those like me who are active in professional life can suffer from acute schizophrenia. We know that the system is broke and requires change. However, to achieve specific things we have to put our arguments and recommendations in language that people will understand and accept, and this means using constructs and associated jargon that we no longer accept as valid outside clearly defined fields.

For most of us for most of the time, we try to work on a case by case basis.

Fred argues, as I have down, for re-instatement of the importance of fiscal policy, for spending on infrastructure as part of this. Given this, I obviously welcome the decision by the Australian Heads of Government meeting to try to bring infrastructure spending forward. Yet that decision also illustrates just how hard the problem created by current modes of thought has become.

Project lead times can be long. In the past, Australian Governments at all levels had capital woks pipelines, things that authorities wanted to do and that were at various stages of development. This appears to be no longer true.

Take public housing in NSW.

NSW is suffering from the worst housing downturn in many decades so we have lots of spare capacity in the building sector. We also have a public housing sector where past Government policies have created a major maintenance backlog. Given all this, let's take advantage of the current situation to get rid of the maintenance backlog - a win-win situation.

It all sounds so easy. Yet, and I stand to be corrected, I doubt that the current system would allow maintenance spend to be significantly increased without a substantial lead time.

Modern public administration, and I think that this is true of modern management in general, has become as formalised as Shanghai's Yu gardens, but without the same beauty. To use modern jargon, we are no longer either efficient or effective.

This is NOT a post

This is not a post, just a short note to record my pleasure that, with two exceptions, I am now up to date on my blogs. For the first time for a while I have no scheduled posts remaining for today, just a few posts to do tomorrow. Now if I can only keep it up!

The world that wool built

In Blog Performance - September 2008 I mentioned that I was experimenting with Belshaw sans words. Neil kindly encouraged me, so I have continued.

If you look at my wool series I hope that, even at this stage, you will get a feel for what I am trying to do. Simply tell a story.

In doing so I am experimenting with different forms in the blog format. In this case, I am back filling posts so that a search brings the posts up in order.

As part of my search, I found some rather wonderful photos from the Power Museum. This one from 1900 is simply called in the Australian Bush. If I have the overall link right, I will check later, you should be able to search from here.

I think that this will be my only post today. I had not intended to spend the time on sans words, and have other things to do.

Why the US financial package should be rejected

In a post on my Management Perspectives blog, Why the US financial package should be rejected - and why Australia will ride out the storm, I have tried to extend my analysis of the current financial crisis.

I suppose the key point that has been evolving in my mind is that the crisis provides Australia an opportunity to do new things. I would be interested in your comments.

Postscript

I wrote this post last night for publication this morning. Listening to all this morning's coverage, there is a strong smell of continuing panic. The Sydney Morning Herald's headline Fortress Australia describes local reactions.

I am grateful to Bruce MacEwen for his post How Big & Bad Is It?

To begin with the following graphic from Bruce. Over the last thirty two years, the finance sector's share of total US wages and salaries has risen from just over 5 per cent to 9.8 per cent. During that same period, its share of US corporate profits has risen from around 17 per cent to 27.4 per cent.

These numbers indicate the direct size of the US finance sector relative to the rest of the economy. It's big.

Turning now to the relative size of the proposed rescue package, I am again grateful to Bruce for the following information from the New York Times.

The key components of the $US3.13-trillion 2009 US federal budget are:

• National security: $738 billion
• Social Security: $651 billion
• Medicare/medicaid: $632 billion
• Everything else: $1,112 trillion
• Treasury rescue plan (estim.): $700 billion

You can see just how big the package is relative to the overall size of spending.

Blog Performance - September 2008

Photo: former Dangar family property near Armidale.

Usual end month navel gazing.

Visitor numbers on my various blogs to end September follow.

The Statistics

• Personal Reflections - 38,654, end August 36,472
• Managing the Professional Services Firm - 17,942, end August 17,353
• New England, Australia - 16,115, end August 15,236
• Regional Living Australia - 10,519, end August 10,043
• Management Perspectives - 6,063, end August 5,846
• New England's History - 2,487, end August 2,125
• History of Australian and New Zealand Thought (joint), 1,236, end August 1,171
• Belshaw sans words - 279, end August 188
• Total - 93,295, end August 88,438, up 4,857.

Looking at patterns, total visitor numbers of 4,857 compared to 3,991 in August, an average of 3,962 per month over June and July, 4,296 in May, 4, 536 in April, 4,294 in March, 3,710 in February, 3,656 in January, 2,844 in December, 3,612 in November.

Total page views follow. These are not directly comparable with visitor numbers because they come from a different system. However, they do indicate trends.

Total page views in September (provisional) were 11,925 as compared to 9,859 in August, 9,292 in July, 10,635 June, 10,846 May, 11,058 in April, 10,969 in March, 9,456 in February, 9,485 in January, 7,447 in December, November 9,239.

Comment

The previous decline caused by irregular posting has reversed itself, although I still have a little way to get all blogs up to date. September visitor numbers were in fact a new record. In the absence of an unusual surge, I won't hit the 100,000 visitor mark in October, but will certainly pass that number in November.

100,000 potential visitors. Mildly remarkable.

As part of my updating, I have been looking again at the role of each blog. Each blog serves a different purpose and should have its own distinct character. However, eight blogs are a lot to maintain.

Over September I wrote 77 posts across my blogs. That's a lot. Once behind in posting, I struggle to catch up. Further, I do struggle to find the time to review and consolidate material, as well as the original research that formed one of my original blogging objectives. Here I saw the blogs as an outlet for self-publication.

To ease the posting load, I have been experimenting with shared content, taking a common topic that I can then variously tailor to the needs of individual blogs. Tourism and China is an example just at present.

Sometimes this works, sometimes not.

Take, as an example, the New England Australia - the world wool built series that I began sometime ago. I knew what I wanted to achieve here, using photographs to bring alive a now vanishing world. I also felt that the series would generate material that I could use on two other blogs. Well, I have struggled.

The three houses shown to this point are all White family properties, designed by two different architects, Pender from Maitland plus Horbury Hunt. The Penders were a regional firm, while Horbury Hunt is recognised as one of Australia's leading architects. Both left an indelible mark on the New England built landscape.

The White family itself is one of New England's leading pastoral dynasties. The writer Patrick White is from the Hunter Valley part of this family. Patrick White wrote full time on wealth from wool. To really tell the story of the houses and the life that centered round them, I needed to investigate the architects on one side, the family on the other. In doing so, I found (among other things) that Cranbrook at Rose Bay was also a White family home.

The Whites are just one family. The Dangars are another. Like the Whites, the Dangars spread north from the Hunter Valley. Like the Whites, the Dangar family homes form part of New England's built landscape. Again like the Whites, this was a seriously wealthy family. Again, I need to say something about the family to set a context.

The message in all this is that what seemed such a simple idea at the time proved largely uncontrollable. I am still working out how best to manage the problem!

For October, I have set myself two key blogging priorities beyond the normal posting round.

The first is to update and consolidate some of my professional writing. This is important from a purely professional perspective, but is also helpful in a broader sense because my professional knowledge is one of the things that informs my overall writing.

The second is to make some further progress on the New England history side and, as part of this, see if I can make Belshaw sans words work. Can I actually do what I want to do in photo-journalism terms, or is it just too hard to do properly within available time?

We shall see.