Wednesday 16th JULY 2014
THIS WEEK'S MEETING
Maleny Hotel at 6:30 for 7:00pm for a report on the Convention from Angela, Bernice, Mike and Sherryl.
APOLOGIES
Please tender apologies to Bernice by noon Tuesday.
DUTY ROSTERS
16 Jul 6 Aug
Duty Officer Andy S Malcolm B
Registration Keith R Bill H
ADO & Scribe Chris B Sherryl G
Fellowship Ric T John McL
SAUSAGE SIZZLE ROSTER
19 July
Mike and Sherryl Gregory (Leader) Andy Shouteten
2 August
Bernice and John McLennan (Leader) Robin Thorne
MINUTES OF MEETING OF LAST MEETING
President Ric opened the meeting by welcoming members and our guest speaker Alan Dryden and his wife Aryna.
- Ric spoke re the Women's Shed project. He is to speak to the Historical Society and Women's Groups re what is needed in the Community.
- There is one applicant for the National Youth Science Forum.
- The low cost housing project is progressing satisfactorily.
- The Rotary sign on the Community Centre is finally up.
- Alan is collecting old working laptops to take to Popandetta with all donations welcome. They will be cleaned up and reset with new programs.
Alan Dryden's speech is attached:
We are thrilled to live in the Sunshine Coast. We have already met many wonderful people. This is a very special part of the world and we are honoured to be here.
Aryna, my lovely wife, was born on the banks of the Danube in the Ukrainian town of Izmail. Ukraine,in 1971, was very much part of the USSR and Izmail, as the primary Soviet port on the Danube, was highly Russian influenced. As a result, Aryna grew up speaking Russian rather than Ukrainian. Her father was in merchant shipping and spent some ten months of the year away. When he returned for shore leave, he brought small presents – exotic gifts from the West such as perfume and lingerie - which enthralled his family greatly.
Russian education was a world apart from what we have come to know in the West. All girls studied sewing at school. All became thoroughly proficient. School discipline was rigid. All pupils learned the piano proficiently and most bettered another instrument too. Aryna learned the balalaika – Russia’s three stringed guitar. She played for the city’s junior orchestra. When she left school, in 1988, Gorbachev had already introduced freedom of speech and association. Glasnost had arrived. Perestroika, the time of national change and rebuilding, was ushered in. Soviet communism was in its death throes.
Aged eighteen, having done a fashion design and seamstress diploma in St Petersberg, Aryna and her cousin Tanya moved to the city of Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and started designing and sewing women’s fashion garments. They opened a boutique in Odessa’s Sedmoi Kilometre fashion market. This is a remarkable place. Until the mid eighties, Soviet shipping containers had different dimensions to European and American containers. Russia decided to reconfigure its rail, truck and shipping industry to the world standard. Tens of thousands of serviceable Soviet containers became obsolete. Sedmoi Kilometre is a wholesale and retail fashion bazaar created entirely from shipping containers! The fronts were removed and replaced with glass or wooden paneling. Rows upon rows of containers were placed back to back, separated by narrow aisles. Over three thousand traders opened container businesses here – and buyers came from all over the former Soviet Union.
Highly talented in her chosen field - upmarket leather fashion for women - Aryna purchased Italian tanned leather in Istanbul. She designed leather and stretch chiffon blouses and leather jackets. She then supervised the garments’ manufacture by twenty skilled seamstresses. The early and mid-nineties were good to her. Ukraine’s new found democracy spurred commercial activity. Television and magazines, for the first time, brought western European fashion into the homes and lives of Odessa women. US dollars flooded into the Ukraine economy and facilitated imports. The natural good looks of southern Ukrainian women and growing fashion consciousness provided Arina’s business with a healthy market.
Switching to my roots, my great grandfather x 13, William Dryden was born in Scotland in 1478 and settled in Cumberland England. In 1536, Henry V111 dissolved the English and Welsh Catholic lesser monasteries after the Pope had refused to annul his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. One of the first monasteries dissolved and demolished was Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire. In 1551, William Dryden’s grandson John Dryden built, from stone reclaimed from the Canons Ashby monastic buildings, an Elizabethan manor house that he also named Canons Ashby. That house would remain in the sole possession of our family for the next 431 years.
In 1611, the Irish were being unruly and England’s King James I created the modern order of baronetcy in order to raise funds for an army to quell the Irish disturbances. In 1619, Erasmus purchased a baronetcy for £1095. At the time this was an enormous sum of money – sufficient to maintain thirty soldiers at the front for a year! The Drydens have been baronets since that time. The Dryden baronetcy is still extant – currently being held by a distant cousin, Sir John Stephen Gyles Dryden who lives in London.
A famous Dryden was my great x 9 uncle, English Poet Laureate John Dryden. He lived from 1631 – 1700 and is buried in Poet’s Corner in Westmister Abbey beside William Shakespeare. Humorously, despite being far less famous than Shakespeare, Dryden has the larger bust at Westminster Abbey! Canons Ashby house remained in the hands of my family throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. My great great grandfather Sir Alfred Dryden had only daughters and the baronetcy reverted three generations and came down a different branch of the family. My great grandfather Alfred Pritchard was in the Indian Army in Burma.
When my grandfather was born in Mandalay in 1896, he was named Cecil in honour of Cecil John Rhodes, then at the height of his diamond trading and political power. In 1926 my grandfather Cecil, despite being sole heir to Canons Ashby estate, resolved to migrate to Southern Rhodesia. He set up as an accountant to tobacco farmers. He also established franchises for Studebaker and Standard cars in Rhodesia. In 1939 he changed his name by deed poll back to Dryden. From 1946 with the last of our English family having died, Cecil Dryden rented Canons Ashby manor to a succession of tenants. One of these, Louis Osman, designed and handcrafted, at Canons Ashby, Charles’s crown for his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969.
My father followed in my grandfather’s footsteps as an accountant. My mother, hailed from Yorkshire. My brother, sister and I were born in Rhodesia in the 1950s. An idyllic life. Fantastic weather. Great schooling. Great civil infrastructure. Agriculture and mining boomed. Hunting. Fishing. Shooting. The British colonial dream. Whites had it good. They were scrupulously honest and benevolent toward the blacks. But the system preserved the wealth for whites.
Sub Saharan Africa experienced a wave of independence in the fifties and sixties. Bucking that trend, Ian Smith declared Rhodesian independence in 1963. And the liberation war began. I fought in that war as a conscript for 18 months. The outcome was inevitable. 1980 saw Zimbabwe born from the ashes of colonial Rhodesia. I was an armoured car gunner. My commander in the three man crew was a fellow named Rob Coventry. Rob subsequently fathered Olympic gold medallist backstroke swimmer Kirsty Coventry.
The eighties and nineties were good for most Zimbabweans with the exception of the Matabele tribe. Mugabe slaughtered several thousand Matabeles in order to cement his grip on power. By and large, though, blacks rose up social and business ranks. Racial tolerance was the envy of the world. I worked for a weekly business newspaper for ten years and then became managing director of Zimbabwe’s largest cinema group. In 1994 I started my own tourism trade newspaper Africa Travel News. That title took me personally to most of the high end safari camps throughout southern and East Africa. I dined round evening winter campfires - with lion roaring nearby and hyena chuckling in the distance. I tracked elephant and buffalo through the day. I have been fortunate to frequent African wilderness destinations that are on the bucket list of many an Australian traveller.
But, in 1999, Mugabe’s popularity dipped and the country was subjugated by the dictatorship regime that prevails to this day. Mugabe’s primary political detractors were several million African workers on commercial farms. To establish control over this sector of the indigenous population, Mugabe orchestrated an agricultural land grab that saw many white farmer owners killed and the rest forced off their properties. Instead of distributing the confiscated land to the black population at large, Mugabe and his politburo gave it to themselves and their cronies. Agricultural production collapsed. Because white farmers and black political opponents were being murdered, tourism dried up. The economy shrank. Foreign investment vanished. Corruption grew. Zimbabwe was to record world record inflation – there was a ten trillion dollar note that barely purchased a loaf of bread. The Zimbabwe dollar would later die, forcing the adoption of the US dollar as the de facto currency.
In 200I, recently separated from my wife, I began corresponding with Aryna in Odessa. I took my two children: Michael aged ten and Ashleigh aged 5, across to Ukraine to meet her and her son Zhenya. We courted for another seven months and then she and Zhenya came out to Zimbabwe. Zhenya could not speak a word of English. I taught him English and maths at home for six months, he went to school and he has never looked back. Aryna and I married. In 2002 I adopted Zhenya. With Zimbabwe in tatters and my tourism publishing business shrinking as a result, we resolved to migrate with our three children to New Zealand.
We spent twelve years in Auckland. Aryna set up as a fashion designer with a boutique for her Moda Aryna label on Auckland’s Vulcan Lane. Aryna’s label has dressed trainers in the infield at The Melbourne Cup. We decided in September last year, after a trip to Noosa that took us on a drive through the hinterland, that we had to move to Montville! We just loved the feel of the place. Casting around for an opportunity, I tried to buy the Hinterland Times but Michael was already drying the ink on a deal with Heatley and Michelle Gilmour under whose excellent stewardship that good title now resides.
We then found the Falls Montville on Kondalilla Falls Road and purchased it at the beginning of February this year. When we took over, The Falls was ranked 9th of 15 Montville Speciality accommodations on Tripadvisor. As of this morning we were number one. We are currently number two of 337 speciality accommodations on the Sunshine Coast. It is a beautiful business with four ensuites in the Queenslander manor house and six delightful rainforest cottages.
We have invested substantial capital to upgrade the property and are very pleased with the results. We are working on a new brochure and a new website. Our Queenslander is furnished with Dryden family antiques from the last five centuries.
Our three children – now a beauty therapist, a logistics graduate and a mental health care worker still reside in Auckland but are very regular visitors to Montville. My two uncles and I ceded Canons Ashby manor to the English National Trust in 1982. The Trust spent five million pounds restoring the manor house and its adjoining small church – all that remains of the magnificent monastery that that Henry V111 tore down. Canons Ashby is open to the public and records roughly 40 000 visitors a year. We have a family flat within the manor house and get back to the UK as often as we can to stay there.
Ukraine is currently in the news. Vladimir Putin drew a sharp sword in February and lopped off the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine is in turmoil right now and Aryna has many family members there - which is extremely worrying for us. We have some male family members under threat of being conscripted to kill their own countrymen. When a group of 40 separatists were burned to death in Odessa last month, the destroyed building was just two hundred metres from Aryna’s old apartment in the city. Our broader family supports neither separatists nor the Kiev government in this matter. We support neither Europe nor Moscow. We’d just love the various power brokers and political players to back off so Ukrainians stop getting killed ..
As for our family here, we are New Zealand citizens and have a great love for that country. But our new and strong allegiance is to Australia. We’re in Queensland to stay. To conclude, rugby support becomes difficult. With an English heritage, having attended university in Cape Town, lived for twelve years in New Zealand and now settled in Australia, I am not sure which team to shout for. Perhaps I will just shout for the game!!!!
Robin proposed the vote of thanks for this very interesting talk.
FUTURE MEETINGS & EVENTS
19th July
Charter Night for Rotary Club of Eumundi.
23rd July
Masonic Hall at 7:00pm for Club Project Meeting with $10 meal.
30th July
Vocational evening TBA.
6th August
Maleny Hotel at 6:30 for 7:00pm with Guest Speaker Audrey Raymond on Buddies Refugee Support Group.
BIRTHDAYS FOR JULY
11th Jacinta Townsend 20th Beth Wann
NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT
A GUIDE TO THE POTENTIAL PITFALLS FOR DIY ENTHUSIASTS. LIKE ALL GAUL, THIS IS ALSO DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS.
TOOLS AND HOW TO USE THEM - PART I
CIRCULAR SAW:
A portable cutting tool used to make boards too short.
BELT SANDER
An electric sanding tool commonly used to convert minor touch-up jobs into major refinishing jobs.
A tall upright machine useful for suddenly snatching flat metal bar stock out of your hands so that it smacks you in the chest and flings your beer across the room, denting the freshly-painted project which you had carefully set in the corner where nothing could get to it.
MULTI-GRIPS:
Used to round off bolt heads. Sometimes used in the creation of blood-blisters.
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