Welcome to Issue 19 of the weekly bulletin for the Rotary Club of Bendigo Sandhurst. Find out about our upcoming events, who our guest speakers are, what we covered during the last weekly meeting and more!
The RYLA Rotary dinner is on Thursday 1 December at Camp Getaway. As host club we have invited all clubs in District 9800. Realistically, we can't expect many from the Melbourne clubs, other than the ones who are actually sponsoring RYLA participants. It's important though that our club and the other Goldfields clubs support the dinner. It's for members and guests including young people who might be inspired to apply for RYLA in the coming years. If you can be available to come along for what should be an interesting and good fun evening, please do so. The information including how to RSVP is in the flyer below.
Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) - Volunteers needed for the last day lunch.
RYLA runs from Sun 27 Nov to Sat 3 Dec. On the last day (Sat 3 Dec), the catering team want a break from preparing and serving the lunch so that they can be part of the final day festivities. As host club, we are asked to manage the lunch (prepare, serve and clean-up) using the Camp Getaway kitchen. We don't have to organise the provisions. We will need about 8 volunteers from 10am till around 3pm. We are expecting some volunteers from Bendigo Club (maybe 3), so if we could have 6 from our club then we will have it covered. If you can help with this, please advise Stew or Cathie.
A request to all members from incoming joint presidents Adrian and Ray
We would like to receive, as early as possible please, expressions of interest from members who would like to serve on the board of the club for the year ahead, namely 2023 / 2024.
While all members of the current board are doing a sterling job, we would like to ensure that each and every member has the opportunity now to put their name forward if they are interested in being a board member for next year.
For those members who have not served on the board before, it is not a daunting task, and it brings you right up to speed with everything that is going on in the club, in our cluster, and our district. There is usually a mix of experienced board members and relative newcomers, making for a good range of views and opinions contributing to eventual decisions.
All meetings are very pleasurable, and conducted in an extremely polite and democratic manner.
So, please give it some thought, and contact one of us as soon as reasonably possible to register your interest in any of the following positions.
Rain, rain, go away, come again another day!! But not this month.
BBQs x2 at Rochester Friday and Monday supported by Eaglehawk, Bendigo, Bendigo Sth and our supervisor Rob. No further BBQs are required at this stage, but maybe for a community day when that is planned.
Some shops are open now and we visited IGA on Monday to purchase some essential items then delivered to the Foodshare site {open to the community to shop at no cost.}
Donations had been sent from Melbourne and stored at the Court House. These were transferred to the Foodshare warehouse as well, for their volunteers to sort .
A meeting with the Community Development Officer Lachlin was held to update us on the situation.
The community Hub was well set up with service stations in the hall including: Centrelink for disaster payments of $1000; Vic Govt payments for disaster relief; Rural Financial Counselling; Salvation Army for Recovery Grants; Bendigo Bank; Insurers; Echuca Rural Health for wellbeing and Mental Health.
Elmore Event Centre is progressing with caravans being set up and plans for Portable Pods .
Disaster Relief Australia are now managing the cleanup and organization of the situation
This Friday the hub services may close at their present location. And possibly run for 1-2 days depending on the need.
The Cluster Clubs have held Zoom meetings most nights and decided that as the immediate need for relief has shifted, we will move back and look at our next role.
Last night Stuart McIntyre, International Chair and RAWCS representative joined us, to discuss possible grants and fundraising from the districts. Eg Vouchers and transport fees for DIK items.
Tony Plant Bendigo South has suggested a concert at Ulumbarra next year as a fundraiser for the flood victims. He has asked for support to arrange this from each club.
The Governor General has been visiting Rochester today to access the need and plan from here.
Wonderful to have James Lerk step up this week as guest speaker, very interesting to reflect and learn of the early Chinese stories of the Goldfields.
Two important dates:
The RYLA Dinner on 1st December, hoping many of you can attend this.
The Foundation Dinner on 23rd November following the AGM. See the flyers.
Once again Covid is prevalent in Bendigo, so precautions are necessary.
Remember Huntly next week. Take care.
President Judy.
** Details for donations for the Rochester Flood Project if any one wishes to contribute or pass onto friends:
President Judy shops up a storm, gathering vital supplies for the Rochester flood victims.
The items were very gratefully received.
Photos from the recent science & technology challenge
Several club members recently assisted the RC of Bendigo South with the Science and Technology challenge.
Our club members were there as supervisors of the student teams that had the exciting challenges of, amongst other things, making a hovercraft, designing and building a catapult, making a bionic hand and building a bridge out of wood that could carry “heavy” traffic
LEFT: Students with their extraordinary artificial hand made out of paper straws.
RIGHT: The challenges were interesting and, well, challenging!
Guest speaker - James Lerk
Last week’s guest was James Lerk, a long time Bendigo historian, who gave us a detailed and interesting history of the early years of the Bendigo gold rush, with particular emphasis on the Chinese diggers.
Interestingly, the Dja Dja Wurrung people were aware of the existence of alluvial gold for millenia, but with no use for it.
In 1851, Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Farrell (the wives of drovers working on local pastoral property) are credited with discovering gold in the Bendigo Creek. Soon after, 12,000 diggers descended on the area to make their fortunes.
The first of the Chinese miners arrived around 1863 and were soon to make their presence felt. The gold mining was all alluvial, or water based at this stage, and the Chinese were experts at using Cradling and Puddling methods of extraction.
They also went back over abandoned alluvial sites, and reworked them successfully, to the annoyance of the earlier miners. It is said that there were over 300 Puddling machines operating in the area.
By 1867, the alluvial gold was diminishing, and quartz crushing batteries were the established means of extraction, with 19 crushing plants thundering away in the town.
One of the largest was Hustlers, which was on the site now occupied by the Soldiers Memorial building in Pall Mall. In 1874 the Chinese were prohibited by law from working underground, which was just one of the many discriminating rules that they faced.
The resourceful Chinese diggers turned their hand to re-working the tailings produced from the Quartz crushing machines. Tens of thousands of tons of the tailings were stacked into huge hills, which the Chinese diggers ran through their puddling and cradling machines extracting gold that was too fine to be picked up in the crushing process.
The Chinese miners were described as peaceful, hardworking, and law-abiding, doing the work that no-one else wanted to do, but as was the overarching feeling of society in the goldfields at the time, were denied their rightful place in the history of early Bendigo.
Rotarian John C thought this article may be of interest to club members. It's by Megan Backhouse from the October 21 issue of The Age Digital Edition. (Thanks John!)
Earlier this year our club ran a BBQ at the gardens as part of the highly popular Bendigo Sustainability Festival.
Everyone likes the idea of their garden lasting forever. Who wants to dwell on their toils and triumphs vanishing into thin air? But as for actually coming up with a space that will survive long into the future, well, that is a difficult ask.
When, about seven years ago, landscape architecture firm TCL and planting designer and landscape architect Paul Thompson were commissioned to do just that at the Bendigo Botanic Gardens, they mulled over exactly what a ‘‘ garden for the future’ ’ might be.
‘‘ It’s all very well to describe a garden like that,’’ TCL director Lisa Howard says. "But what does it mean?’’
Not surprisingly, the designers homed in on a garden that could tackle the rapidly changing climate – specifically , how it was projected to be in 50 to 60 years. But as everyone currently contending with unusually high rainfall and boggy, airless soil knows, even next week’s weather is hard to predict.
While hotter, dryer summers are what typically springs to mind when we think about Victoria’s climate in 2060 or 2070, climate change is also expected to bring more severe frosts and heavy downpours.
Howard says a climate ‘‘ that was more extreme in all areas’ ’ is what the designers decided to plan for and, while they chose plants that would ‘‘ most likely work’’ , they were upfront about the possibility that some might fail.
‘‘ It was a ground for experimentation,’’ Howard says of the garden that opened in 2018. ‘‘ That’s why it’s important to revisit five years, 10 years, 15 years down the track to see what has worked.’’
Members of the public can now take a tour of the garden four years down the track.
It will be a lesson on which plants can withstand weeks of temperatures above 40 degrees, can soldier on through hard frosts and survive extensive dry periods. It will be instructive in how, by mounding beds, you can improve drainage and ensure plant roots can breathe through even the heaviest deluge.
It will also highlight changing aesthetics. What visitors to this garden will immediately notice is that this ‘Garden for the Future’ looks very different to areas laid out when the Bendigo Botanic Gardens were first established in 1857.
There are sculpted lawns, rounded beds and graphic lines. There are hedges pierced with hot pink viewing boxes and conifers clipped into whimsical forms. There are more than 30,000 specimens of 500 different types of plants, hailing from both Australia and other areas in the world that currently experience similar rainfall and temperature patterns to those projected for Bendigo in the next 50 years. And, great news for those wanting to try some of this at home, most of the plants are labelled.
While the 165-year-old gardens took a sizeable knock during the Millenium drought, with a number of mature trees dying, visitors can expect the plants in this area to be more resilient.
But constant tweaking will still be required, and some plants that have failed to thrive have already been changed from when the garden first opened. The gardens’ team leader, horticulturist Kirstie Paterson, says they are generally ‘‘ giving plants three goes’ ’ and, if they die a third time, they are not replanted.
The Daphne genkwa is now on its third and final chance. ‘‘ It’s on a mound, it’s got good drainage, but it’s just not liking it.’’ Paterson says.
‘‘ I am not sure if it needs a more protected microclimate.’’
The ‘Jacquemontii’ silver birches, however, are already out. Paterson says they burnt so badly in their first growing season that they were immediately replaced with ornamental pears.
When the lilly pilly ‘Cherry Surprise’ hedge – chosen to form a clean visual line through the central garden and to help establish important microclimates for other plants – was badly frost damaged two years straight, it was replaced with box leaf privet. ‘‘ We needed something fast, because it was two years behind everything else,’’ Paterson says.
