Guest Speaker Prof Allan Curtis.Born and raised in Orbost, East Gippsland in Victoria, Allan was directly involved in farming, fishing and forestry before leaving Gippsland to attend Melbourne University. From an early age he was aware of the issues facing rural communities dependent on natural resources. After completing his undergraduate degree, Allan moved to North East Victoria, teaching geography and politics to country high school students. His interest in natural resource management led to a long term involvement in landcare and catchment management, including initiating the first secondary education landcare program in Australia, which was awarded the Greening Australia/ ABC TV National Tree Care Award in 1990. Allan has represented North East Victoria as a Ministerial appointee to the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council’s Community Advisory Council, and served on the North East Catchment Management Board for five years.  Allan’s  research examines the social dimensions of regional natural resource management. He has specific expertise in the role of local organisations in rural development; understanding rural landholder adoption of conservation practices; the policy and institutional arrangements supporting catchment management; and in the evaluation of natural resource management programs. Allan has authored/co-authored in excess of 250 academic publications. He has gained in excess of $6.7 million in research grants, including $5.2 million over the past 10 years. He has been awarded Australian Research Council funding through the SPIRT and Large Grant programs and has been successful through the general calls by the Rural Industries R&D Corporations, including RIRDC and LWA. He currently leads the social research in the ARC National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training, the Landscape Logic CERF hub and in the CRC for Future Farm Industries.

Guest Speaker and Local midwife Mary Doyle is hoping to continue to raise more funds to buy supplies for mothers and babies in Uganda. A local midwife and family health nurse is sharing her 30 years of experience to the extreme to come face to face with startling poverty and a devastating lack of health and education in Uganda. Mary spent 5 weeks working as a midwife in Fort Portal Referal Hospital, a government hospital in Uganda, that regularly has a waiting room of around 300 pregnant women every day. She faced many challenges working in conditions and with equipment far less favouable than we would expect here in Australia. Mary is a member of the local Murray Valley Sanctuary Refugee Group and has contact with a few Congolese and Sudanese families in the area. Through this connection she has  learnt what hardship they’ve come from and what severe poverty there is in places like Uganda, Congo and Sudan. She knew her assitance and expertise would only be a drop in the ocean, but wanted to experience it and see if she could help in some small way. Mary said she expected to see some confronting scenes as the many differences between Australian women and those of third world countries became immediately apparent. She experienced a maternal death, which is virtually unknown here in Australia, common over there, and foetal deaths as well. Mary mentioned that women in these areas are having not just two or three babies, but eight, nine, 10 and 11 because they don’t have the education, they don’t have access to family planning and they’re still very primitive in many ways… many of the women were young teenagers. Only a few of them come to the hospital to have their babies. Many of them still give birth at home with traditional midwives. The ones who come to the hospital are often the ones who have been in labour for a few days and are in real trouble. The poorest areas of the country are in the north, where poverty incidence is consistently above 40 per cent and exceeds 60 per cent in many districts – and where outbreaks of civil strife have disrupted farmers’ lives and agricultural production. In 2012, Uganda ranked 161st among 187 countries on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index, in the Low Human Development category. The lack of resources is also shocking, with no linen and no food provided for the mothers. Medical supplies are also desperately needed … since her return Mary has continued her efforts to raise funds for additional supplies … she says every little bit helps … “The poverty is so bad and it’s easy for us to forget”

Guest Speaker – Lance Boswell A lifelong resident of the Albury area Lance Boswell has been Manager of the Albury Club, our new weekly lunch venue, for nine years.  At last week’s meeting he presented  a history of the club from its beginnings in the 1800’s. The club has a current membership of 500 and Lance was able to pass on numerous pieces of information of interest, including the recorded consumption of whiskey and cigars The Albury Club has been part and parcel of the region’s history since it was created in the 1875 by a group of like-minded businessmen and graziers as a congenial retreat where they could exchange ideas, conversation, and amusements and generally share experiences. Leafing through the pages of the Club’s Centenary publication* is something of a social history lesson. The previously unimaginable idea of having ladies present at Club social events gained ground as younger members returned from WWII, bringing with them changing attitudes and the Club adjusted accordingly. Ladies had to wait until 1968 for ‘modern facilities’ to be provided, so they could comfortably take lunch and be entertained in the ‘Strangers Room’. Many of the present club facilities came about as a result of ideas put down in the Suggestion Book. The leadlight ceiling in the Member’s Bar was ingeniously designed to extract smoke from the room in the ‘good old days’ of cigars and cigarettes. The leadlight panel above the Function Bar area depicts Albury’s iconic War Memorial – a sight the lift operator at the old Mate’s department store building must have seen a thousand times as this was the original home of the panels. It is only in recent years that the Club has hosted functions for non-members, and until that time three magnificent full-size billiard tables had pride of place in the President’s Room. The special supports for these incredibly heavy tables with their slabs of slate can still be seen on the dance floor. The Albury Club continues to provide members, their families and guests with a retreat from everyday life, enabling them to relax in a friendly atmosphere. For some local families this is a tradition that has extended over three, and even four generations so far and is likely to carry on for many more to come.

Guest Speaker PDG David Cooke gave a serious and concise update on the polio fight and the role of RI Foundation which the editor is not going attempt to summerise.  CLICK HERE FOR DAVID’S SPEECH  ROTARY FOUNDATION Polio presentation.

Instead a statement from the RI web dated 9^th December 2013 is attached to give you all the very latest information. Rotary International will provide a US$500,000 emergency response grant to support efforts to quell a recent outbreak of the crippling disease polio in strife-torn Syria. The funds are the first to the World Health Organization in direct support of a Global Polio Eradication Initiative plan aimed at outbreak response throughout the Middle East, as the region gears up for a multi-country response to the threat of polio. As of Dec. 9, there have been 17 cases of wild poliovirus confirmed in Syria since October, the first reported cases in the country since 1999. The Rotary grant to the World Health Organization will support immediate response activities in late 2013 and January 2014, such as the establishment of emergency response control rooms and initial vaccination rounds to immunize children in Syria and surrounding countries against polio. “It is imperative that we stop this outbreak quickly to protect children in Syria and throughout the region, and that is the purpose of this grant,” said Dr. Robert S. Scott, chair of Rotary’s PolioPlus program. “Rotary and our partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative are working together with local health authorities to activate the outbreak response.” He noted that the cases in Syria appear to be “imported” from Pakistan, one of three countries where the wild poliovirus remains endemic. “These and other recent polio cases in previously polio-free countries serve as stark reminders that as long as polio still exists anywhere in the world, all unimmunized children everywhere remain at risk,” Scott said. Today, seven countries across the region rolled out vaccination campaigns aiming to reach 22 million children. These campaigns are planned to be repeated over the next 6 months to protect children in the region from the polio outbreak.