Last Friday I presented our Club’s Dr John McDonald Medical Scholarship to Madeline Burrell, a 6th year Medical student from the University of NSW who is at their Rural Clinic at the Base Hospital.  It was great that Margaret McDonald also came and spoke.   It was a great privilege to present Madeline with the scholarship on behalf of our club. She is a truly deserving recipient. She comes from Gilgandra where her family are farmers and have been in drought for a number of years. Madeline decided she wanted to be an obstetrician when she was 14 !! She did all her schooling at Gilgandra.  She is very keen to work in the regional areas and the scholarship funds will definitely help her in her studies.  There were about 30 medical students at the presentation and Margaret spoke to them about John and really engaged with them so they got a sense of who John was and how he spent the majority of his career in a regional area.  Madeline will come and speak to us at one of our meetings. Thanks again to Vicki and Roger S for organising the scholarship for 2016.

I was just reading The Cog and it had a story written by a student, Courtney Blick from Glenrowan, who attended the National Youth Science Forum (NYSF) in Canberra in January this year.  Courtney was clearly already a motivated student but not sure about following a science career path. She was exposed     through the NYSF program to a range of stimulating science programs.  Over 12 days she went to 5 labs or field sites, including the Canberra deep Space Communication Complex at Tibinbilla and the Molongolo Observatory. She met with mathemeticians, Nobel Prize Laureates, politicians, business people and academics. Our club has the opportunity to nominate a Year 11 student for the NYSF program in Januray next year.  Expressions of Interest are now open, and close at the end of May. If you know of any student who maybe interested, please let us know as we would really like to sponsor a student on this excellent program.

 As I was not at last week’s meeting I haven’t reported on the Board meeting we held last week. We did decide on the disbursement of some $4500 to worthy causes which I will mention on Wednesday. Also Vicki and Roger S have been in discussions with Dr Neil Bright from the UNSW Rural Medical School at the Base Hospital and we have awarded our Dr John McDonald Scholarship for 2016.

What a weekend for our Club members! I imagine everyone  put their feet up on Sunday night !

Barry ran the thirteenth River of Stories like clockwork. Once again a wonderful collection of winners, poetry and stories. Hopefully we can get them on the web site.

The Applause BBQ was so busy they sold both their sausages as well as those meant for the Sunday’s Paws BBQ!  Julie ‘onions’ Frauenfelder announced she has now finished her 55kg bag of onions in 2 weeks. Over at Paddys, or ‘Beer de Luxe’, Oktoberfest was a little less frantic,however Dan managed to sell a lot of pretzels attractively attired  as he was in his leidehausen.
I am looking forward to hearing more repeats of the weekends activities at the meeting this week.  We have a Board meeting on Tuesday and the film for End Polio Now on Wednesday evening.
I am especially looking forward to inducting Gordon Miller this week and I hope you can all be at our meeting for that.  Cheers Gordon.

Rod and Maree put on a lovely BBQ lunch on Sunday for Jules and her host families. Rod also invited Lorraine Greenwood, the District Youth Exchange person responsible for the exchange students who come from Western Europe – France, Spain and Italy. As a host parent I am finding that not only do we have a wonderful opportunity to have an exchange student live with us, we also meet and get to know the other host families who in the case of Jules, come from outside our club.I did feel for the intrepid members on footy gates on Saturday (and I had particularly strong feelings of gratitude to Dave G. for filling in for me!). Thanks for doing the job, and it is good that come rain or shine, we still get paid for the job, unlike the BBQs. On the subject of BBQs, thanks to Dan for alerting Rod to the fact that there was going to be a BBQ at Spotlight handing out free sausages on Saturday, which led to a wise decision not to do our scheduled Harvey Norman BBQ. As it was Rod tells me there were in fact two free BBQs there on Saturday! This month is membership month, so perhaps it is a good chance to bring along a guest to one of our meetings and introduce them to Rotary. In fact, this week Jules is talking to us about her home, country and first experiences of Australia, which will be great to hear, and to a newcomer will be a demonstration of a really wonderful Rotary program.