photo: Museum Victoria website
One of the great attractions of paddling at Fairfield is the seemingly endless opportunities to spot wildlife in and around the river. There are a multitude of birds and at different times of the year you are likely to spot turtles, water rats and water dragons and perhaps an elusive platypus.
What a lovely way to end a week of work; getting out of the city on Friday afternoon and heading up to Echuca to camp on the banks of the Murray.
As part of the club history project Tony Payne has uploaded over 40 newsletters onto the website Do you have any old newsletters that are not in our collection? Please let us know. See what club members were doing in 2002.
In early October I was in Kununurra, in the East Kimberley of WA, for my medical elective at the local Aboriginal health service.
FCC Paddlers Perform Well in Summer White Water Races.
Tuesday 20th November found twenty Club Legends from the 50s & 60s gathered together by our two living Life Members, Marg Buck and Jonathon Mayne, to share a lunch to re-connect and unearth old memories to aid our Centenary History Group broaden our knowledge of the Club from a very different time.Needless to say, the History Group, with audio recording devices in hand, were hard at it capturing amazing (hopefully truthful!) stories of the day.
These stories that rushed forth were wonderful and the re-telling brought lot of laughs amongst old friends.
Since the first Murray Marathon was run in 1969 FCC members have been regular participants – either as individuals, relay teams or land crews.
As part of the History project, members Kel and Joan McMeeken (Murray marathon 1980) presented us with a copy of “The story of the first Murray River canoe marathon 1969” written by the instigator of the race, Mark Thornthwaite. It turns out the Kel’s mother Hope McMeeken was the original Red Cross contact for Mark and together they were responsible for establishing the MM as a major Red Cross fund raising event.
