Many people are familiar with this approach to time and project management - figuring out your big goals and breaking them down into smaller steps. But sorting out what you need to do is one thing, while actually following through is quite another!

This can be especially difficult if you operate in a more solitary environment, as do many writers, artists, researchers, and people involved in projects outside of their paid job or formal study. Without the everyday structure of collaboration deadlines, team meetings, and so on it’s pretty easy to let the weeks slip by, to transfer an item from one to-do list to the next, to de-prioritise your own goals in favour of things that other people want from you. It can be hard to hold yourself accountable.

I started The Monthly Weeklies online goal-setting group with this in mind. My aim was to create a structure that would help me think seriously about short and medium term goals, a place to record those goals and my progress, and a team of people who could help keep each other focussed and celebrate each other’s successes.

The group started in September 2016 and, as the name suggests, it runs in monthly cycles with weekly check-ins. Members come and go, finding the structure useful in different ways. Benefits might include:

• devoting time to thinking about and setting their goals, even if it’s just 5-10 minutes each week;
• stating explicitly what they have done and what they aim to do;
• directing time and energy into the things they want to prioritise;
• breaking down big ideas into actionable, measurable tasks;
• keeping focused;
• getting a nudge to return each week instead of letting things slide;
• having a record of what they are capable of achieving on a weekly/monthly basis;
• the social contact element, which helps with accountability and enjoyability.

It can work for all kinds of people – we’ve had writers, researchers, librarians, bloggers, makers, teachers, artists, freelancers, and folks who simply wanted to get things done.

The fairly simple format of our group should be easy for others to replicate. If you're interested in setting up a group like this, or in learning about ours, please do pop over to The Research Whisperer to read more. . .

Dalgety Bridge over the Snowy River, first erected in 1888 to replace the previous punt that crossed a little upstream. Most people who see the Snowy as it travels through the Monaro see it at Dalgety.

We loved seeing these emus - including some young birds and a completely white adult - near Beloka, west of Dalgety. We wondered if the white feathers are leucism (which I learnt about after seeing white-winged crows in East Sussex) or albinism, but we weren't close enough to see if it had pink eyes. The first emu photo above contains a lot of clues to the use and mis-use of the Monaro - non-native hawthorn trees and weeds all over, signs of bad erosion, and yet these emus thrive on land that seems barely able to sustain farm stock.

This would once have been underwater. Around here, the Snowy of old was a natural stock boundary for nearby stations. When the river was dammed, farmers were informed they might need to extend their fences, but the local belief was that the scheme would only ‘skim the snowmelt’ from the river, keeping anything over flood level. In reality, Jindabyne Dam stopped the river almost entirely. Photos of the river at 1% flow show that it could hardly prevent a determined sheep from straying to greener grass. The difference between the Snowy of old and the river in its dammed state was, and is, most keenly felt in this stretch. Here, joined by the rushing waters of the Thredbo and Eucumbene, the river would once have swept clean a wide path over the stones lining the riverbed. These days, that path is much narrower, the water slower, the stones often covered with a thick layer of sediment. While canoeing upstream of Dalgety, we enountered a long stretch of reed-clogged river. The water moved from side to side of the old riverbed, meaning we had to paddle back and forth, searching for a gap in the reeds. We often had to jump out of the canoe to drag it down rapids between each reed-walled pond, trying not to fall and twist our ankles, hoping we weren't annoying any snakes in the reeds!

Despite the reduced flow, the Snowy River around Dalgety is meant to be a great spot to see platypus. One evening we wandered up from the campground, following the handmade signs to a riverside spot recommended for platypus sightings, and sat in a pair of plastic garden chairs provided for just such occasions. We were instructed to sit still and silent for as long as we could, as platypus are rather timid animals. I was enchanted by the delicious sunset light playing on the river (above). As we waited, a flock of galahs provided a soundtrack - screeching to roost on one tree, then swirling away behind us to another. We saw no platypus, but it was a relaxing end to the day.

Dalgety sits on a natural crossing place over the Snowy, which has been used for thousands of years. The first non-Indigenous settlement here was known as Buckley's Crossing, uncreatively named after a colonial settler-farmer in the area. The present day pub (built 1889) is still called Buckley’s Crossing Hotel. Buckley’s Crossing became a key point on the droving route down into Gippsland and back, being one of the easiest places to ford the Snowy. It was sometimes called Barnes’ Crossing from the mid-1800s (surprise, surprise, after another settler). The name Dalgety was not applied until the early 1870s, when the town was formally surveyed. Before the bridge was erected in 1888, there was a punt in operation - I think from the bottom of Barnes Street, pictured above left. The Catholic church, Our Lady Star of the Sea (above right) opened in 1878. I think the outdoor dunny opened more recently. (There was another outhouse a bit further away, made of stone and stuffed so full of hay or grass and other organic material that the door couldn't open properly.)

Did you know that, for a few years, Dalgety was set to become Australia’s capital city? Here’s a history lesson for you. After European invasion but before federation in 1901, settled Australia was not a single nation but a series of British colonies. Victoria and New South Wales were the two largest and most powerful colonies and there was a deep-seated rivalry between them, partly based on their differing trade policies. This proved to be a hurdle on the track to federation, as both colonies believed the new nation should follow their trade practices. In addition, a new nation needed a new capital city and bitter debates raged over whether that should be Sydney (the older city, in New South Wales) or Melbourne (then the larger city, in Victoria). This disagreement called for a compromise - and section 125 of the Australian Constitution states, “The seat of Government of the Commonwealth . . . shall be in the State of New South Wales, and be distant not less than one hundred miles from Sydney” but that “Parliament shall sit at Melbourne until it meet at the seat of Government.”

I wonder if the Snowy’s fate might have been different if Dalgety had indeed become the capital city. Would the river have been turned into a large ornamental lake, just as in the Griffins’ winning design for Canberra? Or would it have been redirected and sculpted like the Yarra through Melbourne?  It’s likely that the Snowy and Mowamba would have both been dammed - when Dalgety was being staked out for the capital, the surveying team noted the Snowy’s potential for hydro electricity, and part of the reason for the Snowy Mountains Scheme was to provide power for Canberra. But I doubt that the Snowy and its tributaries would have been so mercilessly strangled if their damming and diversion inland for irrigation might have had a visible, tangible impact on the aesthetics and lifestyle of those in the capital city. As it stands, a small weir just upstream of the Dalgety Bridge (above) only gives an illusion of fullness.

For a couple of years, over a century ago, Dalgety must have felt like it was near the centre of Australian culture. But the New South Wales politicians kicked up a stink about the site - they thought Dalgety was too close to Victoria and too far away from Sydney, too cold, too dusty, too sparsely vegetated, too wild. In addition, there was concern from the powers that be that placing the capital at Dalgety would draw sea trade to the port at Eden on the south coast of NSW, which might eventually supersede the harbour at Sydney. To be fair, there were also some practical objections, such as Dalgety’s distance from the main Sydney-Melbourne railway line and how much it would cost to build a branch line to service the proposed capital. And so the search began afresh and the “Seat of Government Act 1908” named the site of present-day Canberra as the location for the new city.

Amusingly, despite the story of the dams and the rain shadow of the Great Dividing Range, it absolutely pissed down on our first evening in Dalgety. But during our few days there, I was lucky enough to see the famed rain shadow in action. I walked out of town and headed down a long gravel road to get a glimpse of the Snowy downstream (above). I watched as a huge rainstorm billowed over the Divide, while only a few dark clouds sporting small skirts of rain made it onto the Monaro.

You can see in the photo above how reeds and other vegetation encroach on what was once riverbed. I have to say that, while small, the river was livelier than I expected - perhaps due to the recent rainfall.

We drove past many farms and talked with Dad about the history of sheep farming and shearing in Australia. It plays such a big part of the country's colonial (and racist) history, and as we travelled through the Monaro we could see signs of a much more prosperous past - a time when wool was a key part of the Australian economy. There was shearing at a couple of the nearby farms/stations when we were staying in Dalgety; we heard a few people at the pub talking about it. And it was pretty interesting to see this old corrugated iron-clad building a way outside of town. We presumed it was old shearers' quarters. The smaller structure looks like a meat shed - before refrigeration, this is where carcasses would have been strung up and butchered for consumption. The top half would be covered in flywire/mesh to keep the insects out and to let the cooling breeze in. 

The roads took us through grasslands choked with lamb’s ear and thistle and hoarhound, past neat, abandoned farm houses. Perhaps the successful graziers are those who have land elsewhere, somewhere the grass can catch a coastal rainstorm and cattle can put some flesh on their bones before market. Somewhere the local council hasn’t given up on spraying the worst of the weeds. Somewhere the wild dogs don’t terrorise the ewes into miscarrying, or pick off the calves with the tiredest mothers.

In the hills near Bungarby, tucked away down a dirt track to the river, secluded amongst the trees and granite, it’s astonishing yet strangely understandable to find a monastery. Understandable, because isn’t this precisely the half-wild, hard landscape, sitting on the edges of formal civilisation that people seeking spiritual nourishment have been inhabiting for thousands of years? Astonishing because, in an area colonised by Protestants and Catholics, this is a Russian Orthodox community for women, established in 1999. ​Finding this community, with its connections to far flung places and famous political revolutions, reminded me once again that the Snowy River’s colonial history is not homogenous. We wanted to go down to the river, but thought we'd ask permission first. I ducked out of the rain under a vine-covered verandah and spoke to the Abbess/Mother Superior through the window to the kitchen. She told me the track was pretty sketchy (well, she didn't use those exact words) after the recent downpours and that she didn't fancy having to come to our rescue if we got stuck.

We'd had a bit more luck getting down to the river earlier in the day, right on the extremities of what could be described as the Monaro. The road we were following veered into a paddock beside a small, old farm house and became barely more than a smudge in the grass. I knocked on the door, but the house was empty. Halfway up a nearby hill, we could see a couple of people on a bike rounding up cattle and we waved to get their attention. A few minutes later they came down to chat to us, to let us know they were only here for a couple of hours to pick up their mob and take the cattle down to their paddocks down on the coast, a property with more rain and more grass. It was lucky we’d caught them on the right morning! They doubted our car’s chances of getting to the Maclaughlin, but suggested we could drive up and around through their property, park near an old sheep run and bushbash down to the river at the top of Stonebridge. My ears perked up at that, because I’d read about it in George Seddon’s book Searching for the Snowy and knew it's a place not many people get to see. Thanking them, we headed off, following one of the aforementioned unmaintained roads, going slowly - very slowly - over the enormous waterbars until we came to what we thought must be the place they said to park the car.

We left the car, crossed through the paddock (full of mullein and horehound) and over the ridge, then used the fence line and feral goat trails as our guide as we bush bashed down the steep hill. In the photo above, I think that the dark green trees are the native black cypress pines - quite distinct from the duller colours of eucalypts surrounding them. 

Our friendly guides had told us to look out for goats and for a big stone outcrop that they called Goat Rock, which they said always had goat poo on it. We knew we were on track when Goat Rock appeared as promised. We'd caught glimpses of the river before, but the view from the top of Goat Rock was pretty special. We scrambled down and across the rocks, made slippery by the drizzle, until we stood beside the river at Stonebridge.

George Seddon describes Stonebridge in Searching for the Snowy (1994:71) like this: