All posts filed under: The Community Champions

Gary and Pam Lovell | Leaving as locals

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When Gary and Pam Lovell first came to Clunes in 1978, Bangalow Road was still a stock route for farmers taking their cattle to the dipping yards. “Old Billy Noble used to drove 100 head of cattle down there with his dogs, and no-one blinked an eye,” Gary says. The couple married in 1980, when Pam was just 18. “She was a child bride,” laughs Gary. “He was nine years older than me. Still is,” Pam teases. “Funny that!” replies Gary. “I was a… what do you call ‘em? Cradle snatcher? But we’re still here.” They both chuckle.  Gary knew the area from visiting on surfing trips with a mate from Sydney. “One thing led to another and Pam said she was going to do teachers college and I said, ‘well there’s a good one up the Northern Rivers.’ After finishing her studies Pam taught in Kempsey for a few years before returning to Clunes and retraining as an Indonesian teacher. She has just finished at Eltham Public School after 27 years there, and still …

Jim and Doris Armstrong | Community Champions

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James Byron Armstrong will tell you that one thing can change a person’s life. For him, that moment came in 1969 when he was elected to the now defunct Terania Shire Council by just one vote. Keen to accurately champion the needs of his new constituents, Jim needed a way to connect with them. “I decided to do something in every district, so I knew what the people wanted”, he says. Already playing table tennis at Dunoon, he took up bowls at Rosebank, and started attending euchre in the under croft at Clunes Anglican Church. It was at euchre that he met Doris Warburton, and in time Jim was invited to go dancing with her group of friends at the Casino RSM club. They married, both for the second time, in April 1974. Jim’s only daughter from his first marriage had returned to Sydney with her mother, and Jim moved in with Doris at her Walker Street home. Now 94, Doris attended primary school at Clunes, and has given much of her life to serving …

Anne Thompson | Anti-CSG Campaigner

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“The first real blockade I went to was at Glenugie about two years ago. I slept in a tent for the first time in my life.” Anne had joined coal seam gas protesters trying to prevent Metgasco accessing a drilling site. Getting up before dawn, surviving on little more than a cup of tea all the hot January day, she faced the police riot squad as they marched her slowly but determinedly out of the way. “They kept pushing me in the back and I said, ‘Do not push me! I’m a 76 year old grandmother and I will not be pushed!’” Now a familiar face of the anti-CSG movement and Knitting Nannas Against Gas, Anne had never been an activist before. But when the British-born grandmother heard of the threat of CSG being mined near her home she could not sit idly by. “When we knew it was coming to a place near you, well that was it. There’s no turning back once you know that. And if you love the countryside & love …