Rotary Central Melbourne 15 June 2021 meeting report
Our Chair for the day, Allan Driver opened the meeting with the toast to Rotary International.
President Therese Robinson respectfully acknowledged the Traditional Custodians of these lands and welcomed our guest speaker, Christopher Lamb and two visiting Rotarians: Tim Anderson RC Essendon; Stephanie Rodrigo RC Capital City Sri Lanka, who was joining us from a challenging international time-zone.
Speaker: – Chair Allan Driver introduced Christopher Lamb to speak on Myanmar Today. Christopher has had an extensive and distinguished career in diplomacy, including humanitarian diplomacy. He is the president of the Australia Myanmar Institute, a non-governmental organisation with over 1500 adherents in Myanmar, Australia and other countries.
Christopher gave us a comprehensive recent history of Myanmar, pointing out that the nation has a number of ethnic groups and has effectively been in a state of civil war for about 70 years, with armed forces having heavy involvement in national and/or regional affairs since pre-colonial times. The surprising high vote for the National League for Democracy in the 2020 elections gave the military an opportunity to claim election irregularity and hence its take-over. Christopher believes the military currently has less focus on “the nation” than in the past, and there are worrying signs of collapsing services and infrastructure. Questions from Allan Driver, Brett Jones, Therese Robinson and Rob Hines covered food security, civil war and the Rohingya minority issue – all are remaining problems in Myanmar. Christopher described the Australian Myanmar Institute as having a networking and coordinating role and supporting education.
Christopher has kindly made his slide deck available to members of our club. Chair Allan Driver thanked Christopher for a comprehensive informative talk.
Announcements
1 Allan Driver informed us of member milestone dates:
Member Birthdays
Nil
Partner Birthdays
Nil
Wedding Anniversaries
Nil
Date Joined Rotary
Tony Thomas 21st June 1999 22 years
Hon Member Geoff Fairhall 25th June 2007 14 years [as Hon Member]
Neville John 25th June 1995 26 years
Koren Harvey 28th June 2011 10 years
2 . Anne King requested all of us to consider joining the Garden DesignFest Committee, and also to provide her with suggestions for possible advertisers for the DesignFest booklet.
3. Peter Duras told us of the great/grand/glorious sausage sizzle at Port Melbourne Bunnings last week that made the grand total of $1707.55 – Wow!
4. Allan Driver informed us of the Asylum-Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) telethon this coming Sunday. It will be broadcast live over their social media channels.
Announcements by President Therese:
President Therese reminded us of our Changeover function on Friday 25th June [Critical to book via TryBooking], which we are hoping will still go ahead. And please note that there will be no meeting on the 22nd June due to the Changeover Event.
In closing the meeting, President Therese thanked our speaker and, since this was her last regular club meeting as President, thanked everyone who had helped her during the year.
Therese then opened a closing segment of the meeting especially to honour Bernie Gerlinger who passed away on the weekend. She expressed the club’s condolences to Marjorie Gerlinger and invited reflections from club members. Those reflections were beautifully expressed with several members providing affectionate anecdotes and noting the extraordinary work Bernie did for our club and for District: a great contributor.
Meeting closed.
Postscript: The club has now received information on the funeral service for Bernie at Allambe Memorial Park Parkview Chapel, Nerang, Qld. It will be held on Thursday 24th June from 11am to 12pm. Arrangements have been made to livestream the funeral for people that can't attend in person. Alternatively, the recording can be viewed for 90 days. Streaming details are
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