Her technology is all about old fashioned grey matter and a great attitude: change what you can and don’t worry about the rest.

At 83, Mrs Lawler thinks she is privileged to live in an exciting, lovely part of the natural world and to have a landline.

The Cadgee bridge washed away in recent flooding?

Pffft!

“There was an old log across the (Tuross) river and we used that to walk across,” was Mrs Lawler’s reaction to the new-fangled bridge’s fate.

Anything better than a log was a step up and the bridge being washed away is a temporary inconvenience.

A longer trip to town is also merely a temporary inconvenience to someone who used to ride her horse on the 12-mile – yes, that’s mile, not kilometre – round trip to school.

There’s a country song in Cool-cat Cath of Cadgee.

A great candidate to write it is Jeff Aschmann, of the Deua Valley, who has had the almighty honour of being nominated for a Tamworth Country Music Award, even if he is sure to offend the purists.

“Asch the Mann” has executed a neat segue from a country classic with the following immortal words: “Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus, riding on the dashboard of my car, I don’t mind if it rains or freezes, so long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus ...” 

He has countered with a country tune about the ubiquitous GPS – for all those who have devolved out of picking up a Gregory’s.

Here’s hoping the Tamworth establishment overcomes its sometimes reflex rigidity and gives Jeff the prize.

The thrilling sight of rare beaked whales in Eurobodalla waters has been much more welcome to many readers than this week’s sighting of the factory trawler, the Geelong Star.

Recreational fishers have been vocal in their criticism of the Star, but as recent breaches of the law show, some small time anglers could also lift their game.

An endangered grey nurse shark filmed swimming with hooked-up fishing tackle in the southern Eurobodalla shows the unintended cost of a fishing trip.

The 20 or so people nabbed by fisheries officers in grey nurse habitat for just such an offence shows how widespread the habit is.

One reader has a suggestion: low-grade steel hooks that rust away more quickly.