Gympie Small Bore Rifle & Silhouette Club Inc | Sport & recreation

Gympie Small Bore Rifle & Silhouette Club Inc

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14.01.2022 Happy New Year With COVID behind us 2021 is off to a good start and shooting has once again commenced. On Friday the 15th January approx. 50 people joined us at the range to improve their skills. Over 25 fired a shot either as a competitor or paid for pre-practice. Neal’s Family Meats on Horseshoe Bend sponsored the meat this week. Did you enjoy one of the finger-licking beef or pork skewers served with a side of salad? A big thank you to Allen and Rachel for their time ...Continue reading

10.01.2022 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GYMPIE SMALLBORE RIFLE CLUB By Eddie Powell No 5 We are now insured, which means, all members are covered and everyone can legally use the range. I want to make it very clear I am opposed to any committee trying to force or coerce all members to join, especially when it entails writing the association into our own constitution. Members I appeal to you to never allow this to happen! Our existing constitution does not need to be re-written. There is ...a very old and true saying; that bad things are allowed to happen when good men do nothing. I appeal to every active member of our club to get to as many of the general meetings as you can and have your say. Always remember that the executive committee which you select are your servants and not your bosses. They are elected to do the bidding of the members but if members are not interested in getting to the meetings then the decisions are left to the executive and if the wrong committee are in power, this can have disastrous results. Members, you are the power in this club. The committee are there to execute your wishes, which is why we call them the executive committee. Thank you all for indulging me. My hope is that with a little knowledge of the club history it might engender a bit of pride in your club and gratitude to those who have gone on before. See more

09.01.2022 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GYMPIE SMALLBORE RIFLE CLUB By Eddie Powell No 2 In 1962 The Gympie Small Bore Rifle Club was born with 37 financial members, many of whom were still members when I joined the club in 1971, at which time the club had 19 financial members affiliated with The Queensland Small Bore Rifle Association. The fees at that time were $ 19.00 per year club membership. The largest part of this went to the association. In 1974 I was asked to go on a sub-committee... as club shooter and handicapper. I willingly accepted and in those days all the shoots at club level were handicapped. Gradings were worked out by the association from scores shot in the State Championships. At one of our meetings the financial statement was read out and I was surprised to learn that we were sailing very close to the wind financially. This is when I discovered that the biggest part of our membership fees went to the association. I queried this with Bob Beard (President at that time) who told me we had to be affiliated with Q.S.B.R.A. to shoot in state championships. By this time the club only had about 7 members who shot the competition circuit of club and state championships. Bob insisted that we all had to be affiliated in order to remain a club. As I was serving on another committee with an associate who was a solicitor, I queried him, was what Bob said about affiliation to remain a club correct? His reply was, That as a club in our own right we had the option to affiliate or not to affiliate with any other club or association. It was therefore a member’s choice as individuals. I rang the secretary of the association and found he was of the same opinion as President Bob and we must affiliate as a club. I had quite an argument with him over the phone and told him what my solicitor friend had said. I took the information I had to a club general meeting and it was decided that all those who wish to shoot in state or club championships, affiliate with Q.S.B.R.A., all other membership fees stayed with-in the club. This practice has been unaltered until 2020. See more

07.01.2022 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GYMPIE SMALLBORE RIFLE CLUB By Eddie Powell No 4 A meeting was held with the local council Widgee Shire back in those days Chairman Adrian McClintock. They were very helpful and started a lease (twenty years renewable) for the block we now have on 7th April 1992. Now the hard work started to build the new range and convert a patch of literal scrub into a place to shoot. We had just over $ 2000.00 in the bank after selling the old club house. We ...went to council to get a quote for clearing the trees and doing the earthworks. They quoted $20,000.00 for the earthworks and $ 6,000.00 to push the trees, again this looked like curtains for us. At this time we had a member John Thompson and he knew a contractor Mr John (Lank) Murnane with earth moving equipment. John approached Lank to come and look at the site and give us a quote. Lank had a quick look around, and then asked how much have you got to spend? I replied $ 2,000.00 and to my amazement he said that would do. Next week he arrived with an enormous bull dozer and pushed all the trees in just a few hours, then cut out the range for us. He finished that same week and still left us with a few hundred in the bank. We were back in business. Our first club house was a small tin shack with a roof, back and one side wall built from pieces salvaged from the old range. The rest was open to the elements. There was no concrete firing point and we shot off bare dirt. We operated like this for about two years, until Zac Skyring lent us $ 6,000.00 to help build a club house and firing point. The frame of the building was built from the trees that had been pushed. We paid $ 400.00 for John Nethercoat to mill all the timber with his portable saw mill and he did an outstanding job. With the money that Zac lent to the club we were able to purchase cladding which made the new club house useable. This was only the start, there was much more work to be done. Working bee after working bee was organised, finally my wife suggested that I take my bed out to the range. Since those early days with some very good committees, this club has facilities which are second to none. A lot of time, hard work and dedication have gone into achieving this by members like, John Thompson, Bill Lintott, John Cross, Darcy Jensen and Gavin Fryar. The original committee were Bob Beard, Alan Strack, Paula Cross, and First Captain Zac Skyring. Latter day members Laurie and Michelle Aberdein, Brian Cooper, Shane Jones, Chris Davy, Mark Brown, Roy Bagust and Mal Davy just to mention a few. There are many more that have put a lot of time and effort into the club. My own sincere thanks go to Ron Owen and Mark Brown for saving this club from disaster. See more

06.01.2022 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE GYMPIE SMALLBORE RIFLE CLUB By Eddie Powell No 3 I became affiliated in 1974 and have retained every affiliation card, 46 cards in total although cardboard cards and washing machines do not mix very well. The club ticked along like clockwork under the same committee for many years until in 1986 the council gave us notice that the range had to close because the full-bore range was to be dissected by the new railway line by-pass of Gympie and the safet...y drop zone. No trophy shoot was held from 1986 to 1989. Range was officially closed on the 18th July 1989. The old range was a real Spartan affair. The 100 yard stop butt was on the other side of a fairly deep gully that ran across almost the full width of the range. In the days before I joined the club the targets, so I was told were elevated on frames. When I became a member the gully was filled in with old car bodies from the local wreckers and earth dozed out the side of the hill to cover them and give a flat even surface. The stop butt was only about six or seven feet high and the firing mound simply a pile of dirt on the high ground and grass covered. Within a couple of years of my joining, improvements began with John Cross (my old boss) suppling timber framing, Neville Zillman suppling galvanised pipe posts, and galvanised pipe brace frames and we built a covered concrete firing point of twenty bays. The club was now able to hold club championships. The club was still using the old big bore target shed, which consisted of one very small lockable room. The main area was open fronted and very compact. In the winter months for our night shoots it was freezing as we all sat and waited for our detail. With the range now in respectable condition the next stage was a new club house which we built some few years later. I don’t know where we got the money, to this day I still don’t know where it came from but it was supplied only then to have the council close the range as I stated previously. The old committee disbanded and the club looked like dying. The only members left were Zac Skyring, Ellis Betts, Tom Miller and my-self. As we sat together at our last social meeting, I looked at Zac and the others and said, What shall we do? I don’t want the club to fold up. Zac said Nor do I, and Tom and Ellis agreed. Together we advertised a notice of a meeting open to the public to be held at The Australian Hotel. I knew the proprietor Trevor Roots and being the generous man that he is, gave us permission to use one of his back rooms to hold the meeting. Trevor even supplied a few jugs of complimentary beer on the meeting night and would not accept payment. There were over thirty people at that meeting and on that very night floated a new small bore rifle club with twenty four members, seven of whom affiliated with Q.S.B.R.A., I being one of them. Now we needed a range to shoot on. See more

03.01.2022 THESE MEN i(n photo) ARE AUSTRALIA's FOUNDING FATHERS Here are the Founding Members Of Our GYMPIE SMALLBORE RIFLE CLUB. If anyone has photo's of these hero's please add them in here. Some have retired to that great rifle range in the sky, Any information concerning them will be welcomed to the page. ron ORIGINAL FOUNDING MEMBERS 1962... M Green Bert Graham Harry Baxter Thomas Henry Brady (Peter) G H Brady (Harry) John Richard Cross Harry Stoker Gordon Warne H J Goatham Samual Thwait John Notley Robbie Turner Junior Wallie Ricketts David Sami Maude Beard (Mrs) Robert Beard (Robert) J Sorenson Junior Mollie Punter (Mrs) W H Punter (Jack) Leslie King Colin Wakeham Ken Edwards Junior Alan Strack Mervyn Strack (Merv) Paul Reeve Cecil Cross (John’s Brother) Paula Cross (John’s Wife) Norman Pratt (Norm) Colin Webber (Col) Wilfred Carlson (Wilf) Neil Groundwater Kevin Collins (Kev) Rob Robinson Noel Ruff Gwen Skyring (Mrs) Zacheriah Skyring (Zac) Stan Walsh (Stan the Soft Drink Man) Additional Members Early January 1963 R McIntyre (Mrs) R McIntyre (Mr) R Green Barry Sturgess S Christie Carlson (Mrs)