50 years ago
MUNICIPAL and tourist industry representatives meeting in Hamilton yesterday agreed in principle to form a South-West Regional Tourist Authority which will include the city of Mt Gambier. Delegates at the meeting also elected a steering committee to bring the authority into operation. They were told tourist promotion in the region would cost at least $30,000 a year on present estimates. Tourism consultant to the Minister for Tourism, Mr. Dick Brown, said effective promotion was going to cost money. “That’s the crux of it,” he said. “Tourist promotion cannot be done on the cheap. Money has been wasted by groups throughout Australia who have tried to do it on the cheap. They tried to do too much with too little. A contribution of something like $50 a council is useless.”
SOUTH Gambier the side to beat…Millicent the big improver…gate-takings of $1475 at Mt. Gambier…and Imperials headed for the bottom. These were the main highlights to emerge from the opening round of the Western Border League on Saturday. East Gambier went ahead and played Dennis Blowes despite a warning from league officials it could lose its points for playing Blowes. South is not likely to protest over Blowes as it did the job on the scoreboard in the style of a really good team, and South now deserves to be premiership favourite. Although West is likely to be the weakest of the four Mt. Gambier sides, the form displayed by Hamilton against it on Saturday, clearly points to the Magpies having a better combination than last season.
25 years ago
A SHORTAGE of services for Hamilton district heroin users will be partly addressed with a local general practitioner to become a prescriber of methadone. Despite increases in heroin use, a new report released yesterday, said there were only two other GPs prescribing methadone across the West Victorian Division of General Practice region. South west patients requiring methadone treatment presently have to travel to Warrnambool. The report, ‘Between a rock and a hard place’, shows a lack of services for rural heroin users, despite a 200 per cent increase in visits to Barwon South Western needle exchange programs between 1993 and 1997 and more than a quarter of country-based calls to a drug and alcohol advisory service coming from the south-west.
UP to 350 players aged between eight and 40 something will take to the Hamilton and Coleraine hockey fields today for the opening round of Glenelg Region Hockey Association’s 1999 season. Thirty teams from divisions one to five will take part in this year’s competition, representing clubs such as George Demons, College, Coleraine and Heywood. A new team from Dunkeld will join divisions four, while George Demons has increased its presence, fielding two sides in division one men and three in division five. Only three under-14 boys teams have entered and so they will be combined with the B grade women’s teams to form division three, as also occurred last year. Similarly the under-16 boys and division one women will compete against each other.
