It was with a great deal of pleasure that the Club invited Rotarian John Kendall AM to deliver the thirty-sixth Sir Angus Mitchell Oration on 22nd February 2006.

"SAPLINGS, SEATS, SINGULARITIES and SERVICE."

President Mev, District Governor John, Past RI Officers with special reference to Past RI President Royce, Fellow Rotarians, Friends of Rotary.

"When a man plants an unpromising sapling,

can he be sure that someday here will grow a mighty tree?

But once he sees the first bud

--Ah--

Then he can begin to dream of shade."

These words were in the last message that Paul Harris addressed to Rotarians of the world two days before he died on 28 January 1947 and they followed his reflection at the end of his life that when he met with three friends on 23 February 1905 he had not foreseen that he was founding a world wide movement.  At his death Rotary had grown from 1 club with 4 members to 6 540 clubs with 320 000 members.

Traditionally an oration is an address to honour a person or event and the orator is free to talk on the person, the event or a subject of his choice.

You might expect that when your President asks a museum fossil to give an address of his choice he is going to concentrate on the history of the Club because he has spent his floriat years collecting and researching the physical evidence of natural and human progress and who has latterly nurtured your club's archives.

My enigmatic title may have the feel of a non sequitur but I am hoping to meld the links into a chain before I finish.

You may well ask why bother with the past?  We already have two published histories of the Club by John Thompson and Owen Parnaby and there are at least four other books covering the history of Rotary in Australia.  Well you may be aware that last year Geoffrey Robinson published a book called "The Tyrannicide Brief" which was an analysis of the trial of King Charles the First in 1649.  Last year there were three new biographies of Shakespeare—did he in fact write Shakespeare, whilst every six months since 1975 we have had a new version of the dismissal of the Whitlam Government.

Historians use archives to make judgements on the importance of people, things and events and of placing them within the context of the social, political and intellectual climate of their time and of linking them with the development of society.

So the simple answer to more histories, and to me talking history, is new perspectives, new evidence or as Geoffrey Blainey puts it in his estimable "A short history of the 20th century:

"they reflect the untidiness that characterizes the course of history"

Sometimes this analysis results from a request from the President to the archivist for information on a charter member particularly if she knows the charter member has left an estate worth three million and that the Trustees tend to favour giving the money to Rotary projects.  It may also come from the current President who attended a ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance to honour Monash and thought we ought to find out what was the specific role of Monash in the formation of our Club.

The first club to be formed outside the United States was in Winnipeg, Canada in 1910 and the first President from outside the United States was F Leslie Pidgeon in 1917 and he was the President to set up a Canadian Advisory Committee as part of  the International Association of Rotary Clubs (IARC) to strengthen Rotary—not just in Canada, but to strengthen Rotary.

The Board of the International Association of Rotary Clubs had set up a Foreign Extension Committee in 1912 - note the name Foreign Extension Committee - but shortage of funds prevented much action, and all effort to expand to Europe stopped in 1914 for obvious reasons.  Late in 1920 the Board decided to promote extension outside North America and gave the Canadian Advisory Committee a specific role—a leading role.

Crawford McCulloch, from the Rotary Club of Fort Worth in Canada, was First Vice President of IARC and he appealed to Canadian Rotarians to do something special to assist this foreign (overseas) extension especially in Australia and New Zealand.  His reasons are fascinating. I have not been able to locate the specific speech but  Margaret Ross's (she is with us today) father Sir Jock Reid in a speech to our Club on "The History and Growth of the Rotary Club of Melbourne" on 22 May 1957 gave me the quote I wanted from Crawford McCulloch:

"It would be worthwhile from the standpoint of having something to do in the linking up, even more closely, of the parts of the British Empire."

Historians put things in the perspective of their time and Crawford's interest in asking was to build the links of the British Empire.

The result was an offer to the Board to meet the costs of sending two Rotarians to establish Rotary in Australia and New Zealand and to provide two suitable men.  Behind  this ready and positive acceptance by Canadian Rotarians of the appeal made to them was not only Rotary patriotism, it wasn't just Canadian patriotism, but it reflected the thinking of the time—it was Empire patriotism!

The Board accepted the Canadian offer of financial help in January 1921, - you need to keep these dates in mind because they are integral to the story - appointed the two Canadians, Lt Col J Layton Ralston and James W Davidson as Special Commissioners on 12 February 1921 and the two embarked on the S. S. Ventura from San Francisco on 1 March.  We have gone from January to March and it is all done!  All expenses paid, but no salary for four months!

This almost frenzy of activity was not linked to the earlier contacts between our future first Secretary Walter Drummond and IARC Secretary Chesley Perry which began in 1913 and had involved Drummond meeting Paul Harris in Chicago.  This action was completely independent.

I was astonished in preparing this address to find that Ralston and Davidson, whom we have coupled together for 70 odd years - we thought they were like Alan Watkin & John Jennings or David Jones & Jack Shaw - met for the first time in San Francisco the day before they sailed!  I found that astonishing!

They arrived in Sydney on 22 March.  Davidson wrote later:

"The Easter holiday was on.  When they do a thing in Australia they do it well. A holiday is a holiday, though it seemed like a two weeks 'dislocation' to us.  Including Sunday, it lasted for five days and then there was a week on the part of many business houses getting ready for it and a week recovering. Horse racing is a great national sport and the big events come during the Easter holidays. It was scarcely an opportune time for us and we decided to proceed to Melbourne and institute the first Club there."

They reached Melbourne on Tuesday 29 March and our club started 23 days later!  And this is in April from the January decision to do something!  Astonishing!

How they went about their task has not been spelled out before in any account of our beginning.  First they had practiced "selling rotary" to selected passengers on the ship.  Davidson noted:

"the passengers formed a sort of human grindstone on which we sharpened our weapons, for we tried Rotary out deliberately and with malice aforethought on several carefully selected types and learned from the experience just what appeal would be most effective."

And Davidson continued:

"it was then that we found out the difficulties which anyone fathering an unknown movement in virgin territory is likely to encounter!"

Second they had some letters of introduction from Chesley Perry, the long time Secretary of IARC.  Perry had contacted Donald Ross, Canadian Trade Commissioner and Thos H Sammons, U S Consul General.  Both were very helpful, and became Charter members, and probably arranged for this article to be published in the personal column of the 'ARGUS' on Saturday March 26.  This is the first reference to Rotary in a newspaper in the State of Victoria.

(Sammons had been a member of the Rotary Club of Shanghai chartered in 1919 and President Mev will be interested because  we are currently negotiating with R I to become a sister club of Shanghai when it becomes the first club to be reintroduced to China after the Communist excision of Rotary from the country.)

"Lieut.-Colonel J L Ralston, C M G, D S O, K C, and Mr. James W Davidson are visiting Australia as commissioners for the extension among professional and business men of the 'Rotary Club' movement which claims about 80,000 members in - note the order - Canada, the British Isles and the United States.  (It is the Empire thrust coming through).  They have been busy in Sydney during the last few days and intend to be in Melbourne on Tuesday.  The Rotary Club movement had its beginning in 1905 and has for its slogan 'He profits most who serves best'.  In each club there can only be one representative of each line of business and each profession.  Its aim is to encourage and foster high ethical standards in business and profession."

The following Saturday, April 2, a long interview with Davidson was published.

Three Melbourne residents who had experienced Rotary in USA contacted them as a result of this publicity and became Charter members.  They were Ernest Peacock, Sydney Stott and Fred Ryall.

Next the first call was made, alone, not the pair, just one, by Lt Col J Layton Ralston, C M G, D S O and Bar, Mentioned in Dispatches (twice), Commanding Officer, from April 1918 to the Armistice, of the 85th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) on General Monash, the former C I C of the Australian Army Corps to which were attached in the great battle of Hamel two Canadian Divisions.  I am still unable to confirm that Ralston actually served under Monash.  What is certain is that Ralston took active part in the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 and that Monash drew the battle plan and commanded overall.  I think there would have been a huge nexus between the two but, what is important, is that Monash agreed to become a Charter member.

The next day both called on Professor Osborne at the University, Frank Tate, the Director of Education, and the three respondents.  On April 7 they had a small luncheon, set up an organizing committee which met frequently and drafted the Constitution and the Rules.  They then received a cable from Perry in Chicago advising them to contact Harold Clapp who was head of the railways.  When Layton met Clapp he found that he, Clapp, had been a Rotarian in the USA for longer that he had been in Canada and he instantly came on board.  Clapp involved Sir Robert Gibson who, as President of the Chamber of Manufacture - in those years an all powerful body in Melbourne - was one of the most influential people in the community.  Davidson wrote:

"...he expressed his interest and arranged for us to meet six of the leading manufacturers.  We spent a good part of the afternoon with them and had the pleasure of receiving their acceptance of charter membership."

I find it strange that Sir John Gellibrand, Executive Head of the Victoria Police and who had succeeded Monash as C O of the Third Division when Monash was promoted C I C of the Australian Corps, was suggested by Gibson and not Monash. Gibson was a Commissioner of the State Electricity Commission and apocryphally first suggested Monash to the Government to head that body.  He was a foundation Commissioner of the Commonwealth Bank and later as Chairman he invited Sir Otto Nieumeyer, Head of the Bank of England, to come to Australia in 1930 - with disastrous results.  Gibson believed that governments could not be trusted with people's money and defended the separation of monetary management and government policy.

All the charter members had been interviewed by one or both the commissioners, in most cases, for two hours.  When they came to the luncheon on April 21 they didn't come to find out about Rotary, they came to become charter members of the Rotary Club of Melbourne.  30 of the 38 Charter members were present and 16 took part in the discussions; Davidson was in the chair and the meeting lasted only one hour and fifteen minutes!  They were efficient in those times!

We know of only one person approached who declined the offer to join Rotary -from the media - we do not know the name!

The report of the Foreign Extension Committee listing the inauguration of our Club was presented to the IARC Convention in Edinburgh in June 1921 and adopted with the omission of the word "foreign" wherever occurring.  A British motion need I add!

At the 1922 Convention in Los Angeles under the now Presidency of Crawford McCulloch the name Rotary International was adopted and the word "foreign" was formally dropped from the Constitution of Rotary International.

Owen Parnaby has dealt at some length in mini biographies of some 20 of the Charter Members.  When Past President Anne asked me for comment on one of them I had to devote some time to the search.  This took some time.

William Charles Frederick Thomas was 58; married with no children when he joined with the Classification Flour Miller & Grain Merchant and being Chairman of Directors of the company founded by his father in the 1880's which was the largest operator of mills in Australia.  He was a man of great vision and in the great drought of 1903 - the year in which H V McKay sent the harvesters he could not sell in Australia to the Argentine - the total failure of the Victorian wheat crop meant there was no wheat in Victoria to mill and no wheat to make flour for the population.  What did Thomas do?  He imported wheat from Canada and then built a new mill at Newport to mill it - all other mills were near rail heads in the wheat country in order to reduce freight costs.

He was a doyen of his industry, President of the Victorian and Australian Flour Millers Associations and Treasurer of the Chamber of Manufacturers.  In 1922 he had been appointed Chairman of the new Board set up to rationalize the dried fruits industry and he was awarded the C M G for his success in this role.  Bob Glindeman's apricot drive is a Thomas legacy!  In 1924 Prime Minister Stanley Bruce decided that Australia should at last be represented at the International Labour Conference to be held for the sixth year in Geneva.  He appointed former Prime Minister Sir Joseph Cook as Leader; chose to represent Labour Party/Union interests a rising West Australian journalist and party member named John Curtain. To represent the employers of Australia he named W C F Thomas.

The Thomas family were staunch Methodists, they contributed heavily to the cost of the Morrissey Memorial Church in Dilkusha, Fiji - a church in memory of one of the Australian missionary ladies - and W C F attended its dedication in 1910.  In preparing a Paul Harris for our Rev Dr Doug Fullerton I had noted his 21 years as a Methodist missionary in Fiji and then found he had served five years at that church in Fiji and was visited by a Thomas relative during that time.

After the death of his wife in 1932 he remarried and left the Club in 1935.  He was killed by a falling tree limb in the garden of his home at Ascot Vale in 1943.

The last Chairman of his company was his nephew, Sir Frederick Thomas, who would be known to many as our Lord Mayor in 1957-1959.  The company, the family company founded in the 1880's, closed in 1977 after the then Commonwealth Chief Inspector of Flourmills recommended revocation of the Export License of its last active mill under the provisions of the Export Flour Regulations.  That Chief Inspector of Flourmills was named Melville Connell!

The history department at Melbourne has now appointed a researcher to compile a full biography.

I have dealt at length with Thomas because he reflects the quality of the charter members of this club.  Many we know about but there are still sixteen or so, like Thomas, for whom we do not have the full story.

The essence of Rotary as expressed by Paul Harris was service to others.  He saw this coming from the blending of the skills of worthy representatives from different businesses and professions and the members would become friends through their regular attendance at meetings and once they became friends they would look outside themselves to help others.

Attendance for Rotarians was not then, and is not now, a discipline but an aid to friendship.  Paul said it better than anyone since:

"There is no friendship in an empty seat!"

These essentials remain the core of Rotary and in 1932 were perhaps in the mind of the Chairman of the Club's Acquaintance Committee, Reg Barham, who gave this message to the Club:

"When you greet another member at the Club if your face wants to

smile, let it.  If it doesn't - make it!" 

In 1954  Charter member Tom Lothian in an address to our club titled "Something of Rotary" (we often had talks on Rotary in previous times) referred to the 1925 Victoria wide campaign to stabilize the Boy Scouts Association which had been decimated of leadership through the loss of so many of its leaders in the war.  It was a very successful outcome - thirteen thousand pounds raised in three months.  Those funds are still held by the ANZ Trustees and an annual distribution is made to the Boy Scouts.  Tom told us that the main gain was to the Club, not the Scouts, in that,

"it transformed a remarkable collection of fine individuals into a unified club of friendly social members.  The getting together, the associated activity had fused the club and brought the dormant attraction of man to man into living reality."

Later in 1925 Tom met Paul Harris in Chicago and filled him in, with some pride, on the success of the Boy Scout campaign,

"Yes, yes," Paul said softly, "these things are very well but the big result is the increased friendship among members.  That alone makes the endeavor worthwhile."

I cannot just leave Tom at that.  Tom founded Lothian Printers in 1905 and gave first life to many Australian authors and was almost a mentor to Henry Lawson.  He was a Charter member, was twice Secretary and once Vice-President.

He was a loyal member for 53 years and had 100% attendance for the last 48 of those.  He was at our meeting the week before he died suddenly at the age of 93 and had made up at three other Clubs that week.

His remarks however remind me of the immense unity of purpose and harmony engendered by the work for the 1993 Convention.  This was a cohesive time, not only for our Club, but for many other clubs in the District.  As a Club we are not very good at finding projects that can involve us all, hands on involvement—we are not really good at that.

I note now that privacy concerns, mandatory police checks on volunteers, rigid rules for food handling, liability of management and the litigious society have become the determinants of what voluntary organizations can do and I think that is not good for our society.

I suggest to you that the launch of the Polio Plus campaign in 1987 brought all the Clubs in Rotary into a united endeavor in a way nothing has before or since.

It is entirely appropriate that a member of Angus's Club should give this Oration to his Club in his former home.  Why former home?  When Teenie, Lady Mitchell, died in 1947 Angus took up residence here in the Windsor Hotel where he lived until his death on 18 August 1961.  It really was his home for a long, long time!

In the first years of our Club we followed the Standardized Classifications issued by Rotary.  We followed it rigidly, no excuses, no exceptions!  Thus when a nomination was received on June 21 1927 from Alex Anderson for his brother-in-law, Angus Mitchell, with the proposed classification of Wheat Broker it was marked 'no classification' and filed!

The minutes record that on September 7 the Board endorsed a proposal from the Classification Committee that "Grain Broking" be made a new Classification and on September 13 Anderson submitted a new nomination which was approved by the Board on 2 November 1927 and the future World President of Rotary was inducted on 7 December 1927.

In the same vein when he became a Director of Rotary International in July 1937 the Board ruled that he had lost his classification, but then elected him as a Past Service Member.  There were some sticklers for the rules in those days!

You will all know of our proud record in establishing 25 new clubs.  A study of the dates is interesting.  Essendon in 1935 was our eighth.  Apart from Footscray in 1937 none until 1949 but we ceded territory to Essendon to form Brunswick in 1947.  You see we decided that it was a risk to form too many clubs in the suburbs and we refused the request of successive District Governors to cede territory which was the only way a new club could be formed.  In 1937 Angus was named an R I Director and we had to show solidarity so we agreed to form Footscray as a test club - one that had no residential base of potential members.  In 1947 Angus was named President Nominee and our club noted and weighed Angus's view, based on his special experience, and from then on was gracious in acceding to DGs' requests.

In his Golden Anniversary address to our Club in 1955 Sir Angus repeated what he had said about Paul in his final address as World President:

"His influence will ever be with us, a shining example, and an urge to greater and greater service.  We have all benefited from the friendly shade of that tree of Rotary which he planted years ago, but we must not be content.

Let no one Rotarian think his efforts futile and unimportant, provided they are the best he can do, because it is the sum total of efforts which counts.  Let us make a decision not to be just members of a Rotary Club, but Rotarians in the truest and fullest sense as Paul Harris would have us be."

Today there are 32 507 clubs and 1.2 million members spread in 168 countries.  There is a lot of shade in that sapling Paul planted in 1905 and the tree is still growing!

Lord Forteviot, whose name before ennoblement was Dewar, distilled wisdom as well as whisky when he said:

"You cannot leave your footprints in the sands of time by sitting down."

Finally I commend to all the Rotary motto, first stated in 1911, formally adopted in 1919 and formally put in the Constitution in 1989.  Our President this year, Carl-Wilhelm Stenhammer, could not find a better theme for his Rotary Year than to remind us as his theme of the Rotary motto

"SERVICE ABOVE SELF"

I thank you President for the honour of presenting this Oration.