Goulburn has been known as a hockey city for many years and produced Olympians and world-class practitioners of the sport.
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So to see the poor condition of one of the Hockey Centre fields this week was a bit of an eye-opener.
As pointed out by Cr Andrew Banfield, one of the fields is long disused because of significant damage to it. This field is owned by the Goulburn Workers Club.
A closed meeting held Wednesday night discussed the future of hockey in the region. It’s hoped the bodies that met this week, including Goulburn Mulwaree Council, the Goulburn Hockey Association and Crookwell Hockey, can work towards a new facility or fix up this damaged field.
Constant play on the remaining field is fast wearing out that field, too, so let’s hope a solution can be found, so Goulburn still has the means to make future champions.
You gotta have faith
We're hearing a bit of believe-it-when-I-see-it over the latest bid for funding for a tertiary campus in Goulburn, and fair enough, too. It's a long-held aspiration that's been short on action.
But you gotta have faith: it's Easter, after all, a time that signifies resurrection, and with more converts than ever before now proselytising higher education here, we'll move from dreaming to doing.
Back in 2009, the Australian Government set a target that by 2020, 20 per cent of students at university should originate from low socio-economic backgrounds.
One way to meet that target will be to take university to the community, instead of the present model whereby outlying cities, towns and suburbs are drained of their youth towards metropolitan campuses.
In setting the target, the government relied on data that showed an underlying disinterest by such students in higher education, and that they lacked access to information that could help them make decisions about life after high school. Critically, students said they relied on friends and family for this advice.
So we can’t just sit back and leave this one to the experts. If our kids need guidance on life choices, we need to be engaged and informed to be able to help. Who knows, we might even learn something in this, too, and so be able to help ourselves. And if we actively back this bid for a local uni campus, it won’t be our kids falling on the wrong side of such data.
