Indigo Interview: From rail to rural

PAT Giltrap was born in Melbourne, moved to England with his parents and siblings until eight years old when the family returned to Australia living in the North East. He left the area after finishing school and after 27-odd years he returned to the North East five years ago with his wife and young daughters to live in Stanley. What do you do workwise? I do a lot of work on the small farm we call home, but what I actually do for money? I work in the construction industry on major projects. I’m the environment, approvals and sustainability manager for the $400 odd million Canberra Light Rail Project. I point at things and write stuff. What brought you to your role/career? I got a degree in geology. I moved into construction because (a) I got a job and (b) it’s so holistic, varied and fast paced and I’m never bored. What do you love about your work? Many things. I feel great about building sensible, sustainable public transport systems. I love the breadth of the technical subject matter and solving technical issues. What do you do in the community? Vice-chair for the Stanley Landcare, secretary for the Stanly Collective and a member of the Indigo Environmental Advisory Committee (IEAC). Plus I am also on the Mitta Mitta Caravan Park committee and the Mitta Mitta Camp draft committee. Do I have the time to be a volunteer, probably not, and I’m pretty bad at it with my family, farm and work commitments. Until I moved back to the country from the various cities I lived in, I had no appreciation for how much reliance small towns have on volunteers and committees. Is there an important community issue that you think needs addressing? A key issue is the fate of the Stanley public school. The Stanley Collective currently has the lease for the school which we use to host the Stanley post office and the school as a site for community events, workshops and more. Ensuring that the primary school stays an active and accessible site for the community either as a school or as an asset is of paramount importance for the Stanley community. What would you do to solve change, improve that situation? I don’t actually have a solution as yet, however the Stanley Collective is continuing to explore the legal, financial and social issues and opportunities associated with the school to maintain it as an asset for the community. We welcome any input from the community. What do you see as one of the important current world issues? As a parent of young children, it’s a triple whammy of the ubiquity of screens, the use of these screens for (anti) social media and the reliability of information from these devices. If the person you would most like to meet came to Indigo Shire (past or present), or was already here, who would that be, what would you show them, and why? Probably not the person I most want to meet, but I would invite Robert Coates – a patient at the former Mayday Hills Hospital who also designed the gardens to come for a stroll around the gardens so that he can see what a sterling job he did so many years ago. What book are you reading? Travelling a lot, I have a number of books on the go. I am finishing off a re-read of ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller with the intent of starting ‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers imminently.

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