Doubtless tomorrow when I pick up my delivered Bega District News I shall read the full story of Margaret’s award.

I presume the story was online on Saturday, but in this instance, knowing of the Australia Day honours a couple of days later doesn’t worry me. What does perturb me is your increasing use of online only stories. 

I do not subscribe to your online service because I faithfully buy the Tuesday and Friday papers and, Luddite that I am, I still believe that a paper is something you hold in your hand and read.

I have no problem with there being an online service that people subscribe to, but I do have a problem with you having some stories purely online so those that read the paper are missing out.

I strongly support the Wandella and Yowrie communities in their demand for Telstra to address the issues with the unreliable mobile service through the Peak Alone tower. Living in Dignams Creek and also serviced by Peak Alone tower, I know the problems first-hand.

In my correspondence, discussions and meeting with Telstra, I emphasised that this is not a new problem; the outages have been occurring for several years and both the outages and their response were unacceptable. I have ensured Telstra are fully aware of the associated safety issues;  impact on business; lack of practicability in reporting issue; frustration with no service and the response when you call to report an outage; and inappropriateness of paying for a service that is unreliable or not there.

When I met with Telstra this week (January 22), they advised that the December-January outage was caused by a weather related problem with the antenna. This has been fixed and should not occur again.

But they aren't able to guarantee the outages will not reoccur. If it does, they have assured me that it will be addressed with priority.

I will continue to pursue this; the ongoing outages are not acceptable.

Scott Morrison plans to spend almost $50million on a Captain Cook commemoration, including a "re-enactment" circumnavigation of  Australia – later corrected after it was pointed out to him that it was Matthew Flinders, not Cook.

But  we cannot expect our PM, just like Tony Abbott, to be "the suppository of all wisdom" and we can forgive these little lapses  because he is a dinkum Aussie who likes to wear baseball caps, eat meat pies and fish and chips and drink beer by the beach. What could be fairer than that?

And his Coalition partners have their own version of history with Senator Bridget McKenzie supporting keeping January 26 as Australia Day because it was that day in 1788 that Captain Cook first set foot on land at Sydney Cove, not knowing apparently that Cook had been killed in Hawaii nine years before, in 1779.

They hardly need Barnaby Joyce's contribution to the history wars when historians of such calibre are running the country.

And of course those  pesky Indigenous people complaining about Australia Day are being influenced by lefty academics and commos who know nothing about our glorious and peaceful colonisation of "terra nullius" They just don't know how well off they are, ungrateful wretches.

Somebody by the name of Henry Parkes pointed out, in 1888 at the centenary, that celebrating taking the land from the Aboriginal people on that date would not be well accepted by them. But what would he know.