About Edwina Mason
Edwina Mason has worked as a journalist and editor in regional and metropolitan media for over 30 years. Her loop of NSW regional newspapers includes Young, Griffith, Armidale, Singleton, Camden and Queanbeyan before she joined Eric Beecher's Text Media Group. There she transitioned from print to online journalism firstly in content strategy, then as an editor at News Ltd and over to ninemsn where she was head of News, Current Affairs, Technology and the network home page.
A couple of years living in Toronto, Canada found her learning the art of documentary filmmaking in the Mississipi Delta before she returned home to the family farm to live. A year of planting trees later she joined the Young Witness as its managing editor. Then it was over to learn the political ropes under Member for Cootamundra Katrina Hodgkinson before she became Senior Electorate Officer for Katrina's successor Steph Cooke.
Home is the family farm at Thuddungra where she's laid her hat, surrounded by too many four-legged critters for her brother's liking. Now breeding quarter horses with her partner, she feeds, rides and pats cutting horses morning and evening around her About Regional work.
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Arts & Culture
A Coolac woman’s year of journaling after the shock loss of her husband has resulted in her story being chronicled in a book released last month. Julie Willersdorf said when she sat down to write about the grief and anguish she experienced after her husband of 34 years suddenly collapsed and died, the process took her just one month. It...
News
Tributes and condolences are pouring in and around Tumut with the news that popular long-time shire councillor Audrey McKenzie has died. She was Tumut's deputy mayor in the 1990s, and is being remembered for her tenacity and advocacy for the townspeople during her seven terms as a councillor with the former Tumut Shire Council, which later merged with Tumbarumba Shire Council to...
Environment
It hasn’t happened since 2016, but this week Blowering and Burrinjuck dams finally breached their spillways after reaching capacity, giving downstream residents a reason to hold their breath and farmers a reason to breathe a little easier. It’s taken a while for the two dams in the south to fill after years of protracted drought, but steady falls of rain...
Environment
A Cootamundra soil recycling facility has been slapped with a $15,000 fine by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) for allegedly accepting and storing asbestos-contaminated waste at its contaminated soil treatment facility. Environmental Earth Sciences International (EESI) Contracting is permitted by its licence to receive hydrocarbon – petrol, diesel, waste oil – contaminated soils from NSW, ACT and Victoria. Its Cootamundra...
Environment
Alpine wilderness wanderers Ian and Michael Brown are seeking to have the stigma associated with dingoes tempered by their own experiences of sightings in Kosciuszko National Park, one just weeks ago. The pair trek into the mountains weekly to document, through images, their encounters with wild horses, but occasionally they’ll come across something entirely different. It was a flash of...
Community
A community theatre in Tumut that once served as the centre of cultural life for the townspeople is just one of the recipients of funding under Snowy Valleys Council’s Recovery and Resilience grants program. More than $62,000 has been allocated to 16 projects covering the local government area’s vast footprint including Tumut, Tooma, Tumbarumba, Talbingo, Adelong, Khancoban, Welaregang and Batlow....
News
Snowy Valleys and Cootamundra Gundagai Councils will not be allowed to demerge, with the NSW Local Government Minister Shelley Hancock instead turning her attention to a review of the Local Government Boundaries Commission (LGBC). The minister has said reports from the LGBC lacked the information necessary to determine whether each of the councils could demerge. “The reports do not provide...
Environment
The future of wild horses in the Australian Alpine region looks bleak after two government panels advised on their future, throwing aerial culling into the mix. Reclaim Kosci, an offshoot of the conservationist group, the Invasive Species Council, claims the NSW Government ignored advice on feral horse removal in Kosciuszko National Park following the devastating bushfires of 2019-20. Reclaim Kosci says...
Opinion
Right now as the rain falls, winds gust, the chill factor drops and we all have the comfortable respite of home, lambs are being born and kids are on holiday. A lethal combination for any parents who delight in quiet and calm in their lives. My mother has muscle memory of those times she looked into the sheepish eyes of...
Environment
The 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires caused untold devastation to people and wildlife, but a team of researchers say something of a miracle has risen from the ashes in the Snowy Valleys region of NSW. They have recently determined three rare Macquarie perch from the only remaining population in the NSW Murray catchment mysteriously defied the odds and survived the horrific water conditions...
Community
If you were looking for a safe port in any storm – Tumut Citizens Boys Club might be quite respectable. But there’s only so much space. And it certainly proved its worth when fires hit in the summer of 2019-2020 acting as one of two mountain evacuation centres for residents fleeing the towns, villages and farms of the Snowy Mountains....
Opinion
Throughout the past 10 years of their lives my niece and nephews have been regaled with stories of animals - mostly of the woolly variety - by me. It started with lambs - Pogo, Alfy, MooLoo, Tigger, Piglet, Geronimo, Fearless, Ollie and Alfie. Then Little Bear – after Bear Grills. And Gherkin – with his wrinkled nose – who, as...
News
A Young woman’s campaign for stronger safety measures at level railway crossings has been reinforced through the reduction of speed limits for vehicular traffic using active crossings throughout southwest NSW. NSW Minister for Regional Transport and Roads Paul Toole said previous speed limits of up to 110km/h will be reduced to a maximum of 80km/h to improve safety at active level crossings,...
Environment
As farmers, householders and retailers in southern NSW contend with an insidious plague of mice, researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) are celebrating the discovery of another type of mouse off the Australian mainland. An Australian mammal thought to have been entirely wiped out more than 150 years ago can now be crossed off our list of extinct animals,...
Environment
WARNING: Some images in this story may be confronting to readers. Having clocked hundreds of kilometres trekking the Snowy Mountains, Michelle Brown is bewildered brumby critics can justify their arguments as Snowy 2.0 decimates the very land they’re trying to save. “I’m seeing pristine tracts of land turned inside out as the construction continues” she said. "Yet we have the...
Community
Breeders of stud sheep have a tradition of plying their classer with a sumptuous feast before an evening of stories that would leave children wide-eyed before bedtime. Sheep work was interspersed with a morning tea and lunch – the likes of which never appeared the other 364 days on the farm – before the special guest was waved off by...