NEWS DESK
‘Wonder women’ set to walk to raise cancer awareness A WALK by 18 women from Safety Beach Yacht Club to the Sorrento Hotel on Sunday 29 October will raise funds for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation (OCRF). And they will stand out, too, as all the women will be wearing red Wonder Women t-shirts helping create a “sea of red” on the foreshore near the sailing club at 8.30am. Organiser Helen Powell said she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer four years ago and has been “living with the disease ever since”. “Throughout this time I have worked and continued to raise a family through treatment,” she said. “I have been in awe of the support many of these women have been shown. We did a walk last year as six friends. This year the number has increased to 18. “Some women who are friends of friends and who I have never met will be walking.” Ms Powell said the aim of the walk was to raise awareness of the disease and its debilitating effects. “Ovarian cancer has the highest mortality rate of all the gynaecological cancers, due to the fact that there is no early detection test,” she said. “This means that women like me are not diagnosed until the later stages of the disease: I only had two weeks of vague symptoms.” Research funds are the only answer, she said, but “so is the importance of community and [the] community of support that other women can bring to each other”. “Wonder Woman – or man – is not just the person with the disease, it is the community behind them.”
Councillor eviction COUNCILLOR and police woman Julie Edge used her training to good effect last week when
a member of the gallery became boisterous at a meeting at the Rosebud shire offices. The News was told the Hastings man – who wanted a drinking fountain installed at the Hastings library – was so badly behaved that Cr Edge fronted him and helped manhandle him out of the chamber. She was assisted by CEO Carl Cowie and chief operating officer Niall McDonagh. “A gentleman was politely removed from the chamber after inappropriate behaviour towards the mayor and CEO and refusing the mayor’s polite requests for him to refrain from his inappropriate behaviour,” Mr Cowie said later. “After a period of time outside … the gentleman calmed down and was welcomed to stay to the end of that part of the council meeting which was open to the public.” He was not charged with any offence.
Women on water MORE women and girls will get the chance to emulate their sailing heroes next month at the Women on Water coaching regatta, 11-12 November, at Westernport Yacht Club. “Women still face an unlevel playing field when it comes to participation and leadership roles in sport but, through initiatives like this, we’re working to change that,” Carrum MP Sonia Kilkenny said when announcing a $5000 grant for the event. Women on Water is the largest all female coaching, mentoring and sailing regatta in Australia. This year’s regatta will acknowledge the many female Olympians and elite sailors who will be sharing their enthusiasm and commitment to sailing. Details: westernport.org.au.
Island not koalas Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au THE history of a koala rescued from a mooring near Warneet and its safe delivery back home to nearby Quail Island can be traced back to the 1920s. Research by Hastings historian and author Ruth Gooch tracing the rise and fall of the island’s koala population shows that the one picked up on Sunday 8 October by the Coast Guard is one of just a few still calling the island home (“Soggy koala finds solace in blanket” The News 17/10/17). Gooch’s book, Quail Island, Western Port, Victoria, tells of campers in the 1970s hearing koalas “bellowing” during the night and field ecologist Malcolm Legg in 2008 reporting seeing a “few” koalas in the manna gums. There have also been other accounts of koalas swimming between Warneet and the island, with some becoming stranded on moorings, possibly caught by the “dramatic” 3.42 metre tides. Gooch says the koalas swimming style has been described as “neither a dog paddle nor a breast stroke, but a bit of both”. But back in the 1920s it wasn’t koala drownings that most concerned the then chief inspector of fisheries and game Frederick Lewis, it was the animals’ imminent extinction. Lewis said the only way to avoid koalas becoming extinct on the mainland was to put them on islands in Western Port for protection. As Gooch’s research shows, elsewhere in Australia koalas were still be slaughtered in their thousands for the fur trade. Although introduced to both Phillip and French islands in the early 1880s, Lewis was concerned that Victoria’s koalas were threatened by habitat loss. He saw Quail Island as an ideal refuge for koalas and requested the Lands Department to
declare it a sanctuary, saying it was already home to “silver gulls, kangaroos, magpies, opossums, plover, bronze-winged pigeons, quail, wallabies and black swans”. Through Lewis’s efforts, the island was declared a Sanctuary for Native Game on 13 March 1928, with 165 koalas being transferred from French Island in 1930, where residents were complaining about them destroying
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Southern Peninsula News 24 October 2017