Rotary Club of South Gladstone 50th Anniversary Dinner

Thank you, Chair, for your kind introduction. I at once acknowledge the traditional owners of these lands and extend respectful greetings to Elders and emerging leaders.

Mr President, officeholders, members – past and present, I am delighted to join you this evening to celebrate, almost to the day, the 50^th anniversary of the Rotary Club of South Gladstone.

I was also delighted, a little earlier, to present your Club Treasurer, Mr Bruce Hunt OAM, with his actual Medal of the Order of Australia.

I reiterate my thanks to Bruce for his wonderful contributions to Club and community, and wonder whether he took the hint on your Facebook page about ‘his shout’. 

When this Club was chartered in September 1970, Gladstone had already embarked on its first industrial boom, John Gorton was Prime Minister, and the average price of a house in Australian was around $27,000.

There have been remarkable changes since then, and not only in this city. What would those first South Gladstone Rotarians have made of Club meetings via Zoom?!

But there is continuity too. The Club’s fifty years represent many meetings and guest speakers, Sergeants gleefully handing out fines and, to borrow words from Bruce Hunt’s history of the Club, much fun and fellowship.

Yet there is another word in that title – ‘service’. This anniversary represents the Club’s fifty years of dedicated and generous support for the community of Gladstone – for those in need, for youth, for the older generation, for the arts, for honouring the ANZACs. The list is long.     

That admirable record is the embodiment of Rotary values, and a powerful contribution to the character and resilience of the Gladstone community.    

In recent times the community in this region has needed that resilience once again – because of the drought, the Central Queensland fires in 2018, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kaye and I have seen and been inspired by that community pride and strength during our busy program when, for the sixth year since we launched this initiative, we have transferred the operations of Government House to a base outside Brisbane – in this case, Gladstone.  

I pay wholehearted tribute to the succession of Club Presidents, other office-holders and members who guided the Club’s contribution to Gladstone’s community through that half century. 

I thank those keepers of the Club’s history in the past, and Bruce Hunt for bringing together so vividly all 50 years of that history.   

And it is with great pleasure that I now formally launch Fifty Years of Fun, Friendship and Service, heartily congratulate the Club on its half-century of marvellous service to Gladstone, and wish the Club the greatest success in the future.    

Thank you.