Hello Everyone and Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a terrific festive season and, notwithstanding the continuing annoyance that COVID brings, I hope you managed to spend some special moments with family and friends.

We are planning a Picnic-In-The-Park event on Tuesday January 12th, starting at 5:30PM at Jells Park. Note that this event will only proceed if current restrictions remain in place and the weather cooperates. It is important that you monitor your email for any updates on the Tuesday.

This will be a catered-for event (with the option to BYO food if you prefer). To make this as easy as possible in the event of a cancellation, we are planning to cater with pizzas, a simple green side-salad, and a choice of two desserts. This approach means we do not have to order anything until the day of the event.

If you have decided to join us, the most important thing is that you must register for the event for the purposes of contact tracing and catering.

And don’t forget, we want to get our print competition up and running again in 2021, so please bring along your prints to the picnic event to submit for the February competition night.

I hope to see you at Jells Park on the 12th.

Putting a difficult year behind us, and looking forward to 2021, requires you to do one important thing… renew your membership! We are going to continue to use TryBooking for renewal as it was a great success last year.

Renew your membership right now and we’ll look forward to seeing you in 2021!

We have all been inundated with information around the escalating COVID-19 virus, and today the Premier of Victoria declared a state of emergency.

Today’s statement accompanying the state of emergency declaration included words to the effect that “clubs” should avoid “non-essential” gatherings. And while the context of that sentence refers to “bans” outlined in the previous paragraph (gatherings of 500+ people), it is also clear that our governments intend to take further action.

The WCC Committee is focused on putting the health and safety of our members first. We note that a reasonable proportion of our membership is in the older “at risk” age group. It is clear that conducting meetings (of any sort) would be taking on unnecessary risk with our member’s health. Finally, we note that VAPS have cancelled meetings and have discontinued handling prints.

For all these reasons the WCC Committee has decided that the club will suspend ALL meetings, workshops, outings and any other gatherings until further notice.

Also note the following:

1. The InFocus Exhibition will continue until it’s scheduled finish date (March 22). This is held in a very large space and we only have a couple visitors at any time. If you are scheduled to be a monitor at the gallery, we ask you to please attend. If you have concerns for your health in attending, please contact either Vicki Moritz or myself.
2. In an effort to stagger picking up prints from the InFocus Exhibition, please arrive any time after 12 noon – we would like to avoid everyone arriving at 3pm.
3. The April 7 Competition Night will NOT proceed. We will announce winners electronically. We will work through print collection at a later time.
4. We intend to continue to accept EDI images for monthly competitions and have them judged (our print section, in all groups, is suspended from next month onwards)
5. For April and subsequent months, we will work with judges to see if we can distribute judge’s comments.
6. We understand there are a couple of “special” workshops and events scheduled, some of which we have accepted payment for. We will work through that shortly. The fate of these may be decided at the next committee meeting.
7. Please take advantage of social media and networking in these uncertain times. Join the club’s Facebook group and/or the WhatsApp community. This is a great way to stay connected.
8. The committee is looking at other measures to improve our ability to stay connected and mentor each other.

As regrettable and painful as this decision is, we hope that this decision makes sense to our members. Hopefully we can all get through this health event with limited additional disruption. We will continue to update members via our website and the weekly Watson emails. We will also provide additional updates (such as this one) as required. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me or another Committee member

Take care and stay healthy.
Kind regards, Russell