Hello everybody,

The August meeting featured trip or activity reports from three members. Alberto had some very professional photos of the Outback Challenge, Barry described the history of our regular visits to the sand at Portland along with pictures from this years event. Finally Laurie showed photos from his recent 'Wet Wild and Windy' trip to Mt Eccles in western Victoria.

These are indicative of the breadth of activities that our members are involved in. From full on, heavy duty through play to relaxed leisurely sight seeing. We could have just as easily had a series covering trips with a community focus such as Tree planting, Alpine sapling removal, Mt. Stirling wood chop, Christmas tree delivery, bushfire relief and the list goes on.

We are justly proud of our club and I would encourage every member to get involved in more than one kind of trip – especially to contribute to community focused. Along these lines your committee has fine tuned the sub-committee positions and as a result has merged the Environment and Landcare positions. We are also formally acknowledging several 'sub-committee' such as Collating and Distribution and the Webmaster along with at least one new one of 'Sposorship' – some are new and some very established, these will all have their job spec included or updated in a revised by-lay to be released shortly.

The revised club web site was officially launched last month with Ron sending all members their login details. If you have looked at this site you would see the tremendous amount of work that has gone in to creating it. Stewart and Ron are to be congratulated of this supreme effort. The new site is to be managed by committee members or their delegates so the content should be quite up-to-date.

The committee is also taking a very active and proactive role in the club sponsorships for next year. A sub committee of Ian Salmon, Alberto Pamintuan, Barry Walker, Mike Pratt and Kayren Browne has been formed to review and polish up the sponsorship packages. When this work has been done and approved by the main committee then we will be seeking sponsorships for next year. Obviously the existing sponsors will be the first to be approached in order to continue our relationship.

As suggested last month the September meeting will feature the taping of one of the ‘The 4WD Radio Show’. We will have a short regular meeting then be the ‘audience’ for the show for exactly one hour. Alison is suggesting that some sponsors of our club and the show will also be in attendance. So if you don't really like the formal part of our meeting – September will be the month to be there! As always we welcome visitors to our meetings.

Enough of this – lets go select 'low range' somewhere - Enjoy your club.

John Campbell (755)