As you can tell, my name is Geoff Walden and my wife Lorraine and I live in Gympie, Queensland, Australia. There is not a lot unique about that. We have lived here for thirty years, which almost makes us a local. We chose to move here because we thought it would be a great place for our children to grow up and not too bad for the parents as well. It worked out well for our family.
I have been a music educator for much of my life, almost forty years in fact. I officially retired from teaching for Education Queensland at the end of 2006 but much of my time is now taken up with work at the Australian Institute of Country Music (AICM) where not a lot of money changes hands in the form of wages, but where there is a lot going on, especially from volunteers, in the form of trying to promote Gympie as a centre for the creative industries with country music at the focus.
Unfortunately for me, not a whole lot of my time goes towards music making. Most of it seems to go towards satisfying the needs of the bureaucracy, which in spite of constant messages to save the trees by not printing an email, almost always requires that something be printed. I have just been through the processes of submitting end of year requirements to satisfy the needs of our local TAFE, with whom we deal to deliver our Certificate III and IV courses in music and technical studies. While the people we have to deal with are very agreeable, the amount of paper work required is less so.
I have thought long and hard about the level of paperwork required today and wondered why, in this day and age of digital technology there has been such a growth in bureaucracy. I have come to the conclusion that it is precisely because of digital technology that we have to do such large amounts of paperwork. The simple fact is that without digital technology such as the internet, word processors, spread sheets, data bases etc, we simply would not be able to satisfy the needs of our modern and ever expanding bureaucracy. And I am sure the concept of legal responsibility and the threat of court action if something was to go wrong doesn’t help much.
I do not enjoy this aspect of the work. In fact I see it as a means to an end and for me that end is drawing attention to the possibility of Gympie growing to be Australia’s Nashville.
Amongst the most useless subjects I studied while a grade 11 and 12 student at Bundaberg State High School was mathematics. I didn’t have much choice as to what subjects I took. In those days, it was “here are your six subjects, do them”. Needless to say I was basically a failure in all of them. However, I do remember something from the mathematics book that looked like this:
2:3::4:6
I hope I have put that correctly because I would like to expand it to the following:
Gympie : AUS :: Nashville : USA
If my memory serves me correctly, that statement should read something like: Gympie is to Australia as Nashville is to the United States. And it is that statement that guides my work at the AICM.