With ANZAC Day on the horizon, we began planning for the event, perhaps our most important of the year.
There's much to do to ensure a smooth, efficient ANZAC Day is provided for our members and community. This planning will continue now until after ANZAC Day when the crosses we erect at the Garden of Remembrance will need to be removed, cleaned and stored away until Remembrance Day.
Member Neville Jaeschke has been doing this for years with the help of a few other members and a handful of students from Faith College.
Committee Roles: As we have a new committee we had to review the roles that each of us has so that nothing gets missed. Apart from the obvious roles as president, secretary, and treasurer, we also need a catering team, someone to look after maintenance, rostering for our donation activities, social media, and veterans' health. A team needs to be available to clean the Hut after each Happy Hour or open session. These arrangements need to be flexible enough to cover members on holidays, in hospital or for other reasons, unavailable.
Maintenance Issues: We had to have the Hut sprayed to keep an increasing number of tiny ants from infesting the bar and decide how we could ensure hygiene would be sufficient to discourage them from searching for food scraps.
Our water heater in the bar is leaking and we had to decide how to remedy the situation. We're buying an on-demand gas heater to replace it.
Wall Planner: Commonly known as a Gantt chart, the wall planner is displayed on our noticeboard and shows significant dates for meetings, holidays, and special events such as our sausage sizzle and other fundraising activities plus significant days within our military history.
It will be kept accurate when things change or are added. Later we'll add it to this site.
Member of the Month: Vice-President Patsy came up with the idea of a Member of the Month who will be asked several questions and the answers displayed on the noticeboard. Treasurer, Craig Dunning was the first lucky person to be grilled by Patsy and you can read all about it on the notice board.
The idea of Patsy's is for us to get to know each other a little better.
Who will be next?
Going forward: We have had an extension of our liquor licence area and can now consume alcoholic beverages in the area between the Hut and the canon placement. We plan to install three sails in that area that will be erected when we are using the area.
Two fans, generously donated to us by members Elizabeth and Tony Boyle have been erected in the Hut, and dimming of the LED lights in the main area of the Hut has been made.
President David wants to see if we can rearrange our display cabinets by theatre of war if we have sufficient memorabilia from each of our major theatres. This will be a long-term project.
We have some insulation material and hope to insulate the main shed with the help of some friendly tradies and several of our own members.
Expanding some of our activities is a work in progress and could include:
- Opening for an hour or two on significant historical ADF days eg, Korean Veterans Day; we already do this for Vietnam Veterans Day
- Opening on ad hoc days inviting any members who wish to attend for an hour or two
- Inviting guest speakers to address us on significant and interesting topics
- Showing short military-related videos on our overhead projector screen
- Visiting other RSL sub-branches by arrangement
Well, that's it folks. I hope you found this interesting and informative. You can always tell us what you think by sending a comment below.
