ozEEnews: a fond farewell

By Annette and Noel Gough

We farewell ozEEnews with mixed feelings, because it was in many respects our brainchild, and like other times we have farewelled our children, it is accompanied both by hope and apprehension – hope that its successor, the EEstories blog – meets AAEE President Lisa Siegel’s aspirations for it to “support our members and reach out to new colleagues”, tempered by apprehension of the risks that inevitably attend attempts to innovate in social orgnisations. We drew attention to one such risk in ozEEnews #42, in which we had to apologise that the issue “was going to press a little later than we would have preferred because for the first time since assuming the editorship we had a shortage of copy. While we’d like to think that the membership of AAEE gives us a nationwide network of eager and efficient reporters, it doesn’t always seem to work that way.” We therefore urged readers to “remember that ozEEnews is intended to be a vehicle for all members’ views, not just the ones we can nag, bully or blackmail into writing for us!” The same sentiment applies to EEstories.

ozEEnews was created in the early days of personal computers and long before there was a global internet. It was the main means of communication with AAEE members and was printed and posted to them 4 times a year. It was the vehicle for communicating news about policies, books, events, opinions and for networking. The other AAEE vehicle, the Australian Journal of Environmental Education, communicated research, and there were the biennial conferences for communicating and networking in other ways.

Times have moved on and much of the role of ozEEnews was replaced in many ways by the online AAEE Bulletin long ago. Perhaps the name change should have happened then, but it didn’t, and the time is now.

A little personal history

In 1988, when we were elected as Editors of what was then known as the Australian Association for Environmental Education Inc Newsletter, we almost immediately decided to abbreviate its title. As the first paragraph of our first issue (see below) indicates, we might have been inspired by the late Ernie Carroll, the puppeteer behind (and inside) Ossie Ostrich, Daryl Somers’ sidekick on TV’s Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

Expectations for our editorship were in large part determined by precedent. The 36 issues of the Newsletter that preceded ozEEnews documented the serious business of AAEE Inc as a incorporatedorganisation by providing news about professional issues, innovations and developments, reviews of books and resources, notices and reports of conferences and meetings, and the like. However, having rebranded the Newsletter, we decided to adopt a less serious tone (and even inject a little humour where appropriate). Thus, in our first issue we introduced a Gossip column, which included news of some significant life events in the AAEE community, such as the recent births of children to current and former Executive members – including ourselves – that prevented them from attending the previous year’s conference in Alice Springs).

Feedback on our first issue was generally positive but we also received some (albeit anonymous) negative comments. Some readers didn’t like the idea of a gossip column (but because their comments were anonymous we were not sure whether they were aggrieved because they were mentioned or because they were ignored!) We explained our defence of the Gossip column in ozEEnews #38, and we reproduce it here because it encapsulates many aspects of our shared ecopolitical and ecofeminist commitments.

We hope that EEstories will provide a space for gossip to continue. As online communication has become the norm, many personal connections have been harder to sustain, but as we know, the personal is political and AAEE has long subsisted on the personal more than the professional connections between members. So we hope that members will get onto their computers and contribute to EEstories to sustain and build connections.

Notes on contributors
Annette Gough is professor emerita in the School of Education at RMIT University, Australia, and is a past President and honorary life member of AAEE. Noel Gough is professor emeritus in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Australia, where he was Foundation Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education (2006-2014).