{"id":9416,"date":"2025-12-08T07:30:45","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T21:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bardonnews.com.au\/index.php\/2025\/12\/08\/the-december-7-show\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T19:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T09:12:30","slug":"the-december-7-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bardonnews.com.au\/index.php\/2025\/12\/08\/the-december-7-show\/","title":{"rendered":"The December 7 Show"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Country Waking Up on a Sunday Morning
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A Sunday morning like this feels stitched together by movement. Trucks rolling through the dark with concert gear. Ports stirring before the city wakes. Families on long Christmas roads, chasing shade, rain and a little cooler air. A boy taking his first solo flight. A town preparing to farewell one of its quiet heroes. And, as always, the sense that Australia reveals itself best when people simply ring in and talk about where they are, what they\u2019re doing, and why it matters to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Forty Trucks, One Show, and the People Who Move the Music
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Chris rang in from the highway, south of Coffs Harbour, heading north with show freight. He\u2019d bumped out of Sydney overnight, Melbourne before that, and was due in Brisbane by morning. It wasn\u2019t the music that interested him \u2014 he freely admitted he didn\u2019t understand most of it \u2014 but the scale of what goes into it. Lady Gaga alone, he said, required around forty trucks of gear. Taylor Swift, even more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He talked about smoke on the road, single-lane traffic, drizzle just beginning to fall, and the constant awareness that with heat, wind and fuel on the ground, it doesn\u2019t take much for fire season to announce itself. It was the sort of call that quietly reminds you that every show, every spectacle, arrives on the back of people driving through the night, watching the weather, and hoping the road stays open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Six Degrees in Romsey and a Tug Called Eureka
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Paul rang from Romsey, Victoria, where it was six degrees and climbing slowly. He was on his way to work at the Port of Melbourne, where he works as a deckhand on a tug called Eureka. Christmas, he said, is always busy \u2014 more ships, more containers, more pressure to get goods in on time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest container ships now stretch eighteen containers across, stacked high on deck and packed deep below. Paul\u2019s job is simple and essential: tying on, letting go, pulling lines back aboard. The kind of work that keeps global trade moving, but rarely gets mentioned. The contrast lingered. Forty degrees in Sydney the day before. Single digits in Victoria that morning. Same country. Same day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weather Watching in Brisbane and Switching the Screens Off
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Brendan called from Brisbane with a precise weather update \u2014 the timing of the trough, the models, when the rain would clear. He mentioned a social electric scooter ride later in the day, then shifted to something weighing on his mind: under-16s being pushed off social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019d seen firsthand how productivity changed when workers were cut off from constant internet access. Jobs finished faster. Quality improved. Focus returned. He wasn\u2019t pretending the transition would be painless, especially for kids who\u2019d grown up online, but he believed the reset mattered. Macca listened, quietly sceptical and quietly supportive at the same time, circling back to the idea that thinking for yourself still counts \u2014 and that maybe we\u2019ve all forgotten how to sit with our own thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heat, Cattle Trucks and Christmas Roads to the Territory
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Carmel rang early from Camberwell, Queensland, before the heat had fully settled in. She and her partner were heading north to Katherine for Christmas, having left their van in Brisbane and continued in the LandCruiser. Outside Mount Isa the previous afternoon, the ground temperature had read 50.8 degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along the way they\u2019d counted cattle trucks \u2014 dozens one day, fewer the next \u2014 fat cattle moving south as feed dried out further west. A brief storm had washed the dust from the windscreen, then passed on. Camberwell was quiet, trucks rumbling through the main street, the country waking slowly. It sounded like a scene Australians know instinctively: move early, rest when it\u2019s too hot, keep going when you can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trading Sydney Heat for Tasmanian Space
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Brett called from Snug, south of Hobart, looking out over Opossum Bay toward Bruny Island. He\u2019d moved from Sydney a couple of years earlier, trading congestion and heat for acreage, views and cold winters. For the price of a two-bedroom unit near Cronulla, he\u2019d bought 35 acres and a home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He talked about electricity bills doubling after just a few weeks of heating, chopping wood instead of running air-conditioning, and still having snow dust Mount Wellington late into spring. That afternoon he\u2019d be heading to a Margate Hills community gathering \u2014 a plant and produce swap, a barbecue, neighbours trading seedlings and stories. It wasn\u2019t nostalgia he was selling. It was relief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three Hundred and Forty-Nine Nativities in Launceston
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Margaret rang from Launceston with an invitation. Inside Holy Trinity Church, she said, sat 349 nativity sets, donated by a local woman and displayed with care and light. Sets from around the world. Indigenous artwork. Snow globes collected over decades. All open to the public through Christmas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She spoke about visiting Bavaria, about Christmas markets that centred on story rather than spectacle, and about wanting to hold onto something deeper than tinsel. Whether people believed or not wasn\u2019t the point. Tradition mattered. Memory mattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Fifteen-Year-Old\u2019s First Solo Flight
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Andrew rang from Bundaberg with his son Clancy beside him. It was Clancy\u2019s fifteenth birthday, and in forty minutes he\u2019d be taking his first solo flight in a Cessna 172. When he started lessons, he\u2019d needed cushions to see over the panel and extensions to reach the pedals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clancy had paid for his flying by cutting wood and picking lychees. He didn\u2019t own a phone. Didn\u2019t use social media. He\u2019d watched his older siblings struggle with it and decided it wasn\u2019t for him. One circuit alone. Then back on the ground. A small moment \u2014 and a huge one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Remembering Ted Egan and a Life That Kept Moving
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Tony Foran rang from Brisbane to remember Ted Egan \u2014 songwriter, educator, advocate and tireless traveller. He spoke about Ted arriving at Kelvin Grove Teachers College in the early 1960s as a mature-age student, having already lived a full working life in the Northern Territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tony recalled Ted\u2019s insistence that Aboriginal children deserved better educational opportunities, and how that conviction shaped his teaching, his music and his public life. Even in later years, Ted kept moving \u2014 driving thousands of kilometres to reunions, festivals and community gatherings, still performing, still telling stories, still tapping rhythms out on beer cartons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others rang with similar memories: of a man who didn\u2019t slow down, didn\u2019t stop listening, and didn\u2019t stop believing that culture mattered. Like many of his generation, Ted left behind something more durable than recordings \u2014 a body of work that helped Australians hear themselves more clearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heavy Music, Mosh Pits and Why It Matters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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