THE TWEED SHIRE Volume 1 #26 Thursday, March 5, 2009 Advertising and news enquiries: Phone: (02) 6672 2280 Fax: (02) 6672 4933 editor@tweedecho.com.au adcopy@tweedecho.com.au www.tweedecho.com.au
pages 10 &11
LOCAL & INDEPENDENT
Dot takes on late hubby’s horse passion Neighbours
meet over the wall Luis Feliu
Roxanne Millar
Dot Walsh with Uki Sporting Horse Association members Alan Boyd and Barry Green. Photo Jeff ‘Home on the Range’ Dawson
Dot Walsh may have only learned to ride a horse at the age of 55, but the 71-year-old still holds a special place in her heart for campdrafting. The Reserve Creek resident has thrown her support behind the second annual Uki Campdraft for Cancer competition to be held March 21 and March 22. The inaugural event in May last year was organised as a tribute to her husband, campdrafting legend Kevin ‘Stumpa’ Walsh, who died of liver cancer the weekend of the event. Dot said he had been determined to attend the event ‘even if he had to be carried out there’. ‘Unfortunately on the Sunday he was in hospital in a coma but some of the girls came in after the campdraft asking if anyone had told him who had won,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘No one had so I told them to tell him and they whispered the results, the turnout and how much money they had raised from the event into his ear. Less than 10 minutes later he passed
away. I really do feel he was hanging on until he got the news.’ Stumpa was an apprentice jockey in his youth but shunned horses for 20 years before taking up campdrafting. He was an early member of the Uki Sporting Horse Association. It was when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, that the campdraft community decided to rally around their legend and organise the weekend-long event. ‘He would be absolutely marvelled to think they are holding a second event,’ said Mrs Walsh. ‘He was thrilled the first time. ‘It was funny – I never thought he would agree to it but when he got sick his attitude changed and when the organisers told him what they wanted to do he said if they wanted to go to that kind of trouble he would be honoured.’ Mrs Walsh said she had become a camp-
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drafting fan through her husband’s passion and would await the results of next month’s competition in suspense. ‘I never used to get into any of it, but he would talk me into going and I’d sit on the fence,’ she said. ‘But then one day I decided I was going to ride. I was 55 and I had my two bobs worth of fun on the horses.’ This year the event will include a family roast dinner night on the Saturday night to raise money for the NSW Cancer Council. Tickets are $20 and reservations are essential. Raffles and auctions will be held during the evening to boost fundraising efforts. Sunday will feature all the thrills of campdrafting. Entry is free and cattle have been donated courtesy of Tyalgum’s Cloverdale Droughtmaster Stud. To attend the Saturday night dinner phone Mrs Walsh on 02 6677 7239.
The job agency in charge of a panoramic mural project being painted by work-for-the-dole participants on a levee wall in Murwillumbah has vowed to back it all the way to completion. A spokesman for Job Futures told a residents meeting on Tuesday night, called to discuss stage two of the longterm project, that the employment and training agency was committed to completing the project as long as the agency, established for 32 years, was ‘around’. Job Futures business manager Brad Peters was responding to a member of the public who told the small meeting she feared the mural project could meet the same fate as another similar work-for-dole mural project on the Gold Coast some years back, which was not finished after funding ran out. Members of several households in Commercial Road facing the large concrete levee wall have appealed to council to put a stop to the mural taking shape, forcing a suspension of the project. They say, among other things, that the mural made the street ‘look like Nimbin’, could potentially affect their property values and that they ‘just don’t like it’. But others in the street say they absolutely love it and want it to keep on going. The federally-funded project costing around $100,000, with an in-kind component from Tweed Shire Council, provides training and skills for unemployed locals over the project’s three-to-four-year life. But the future of the colourful 700-metrelong mural project, stretching along most of the length of Commercial Road next to the Tweed River, is now in the hands of Tweed Shire councillors who will vote on it at an upcoming meeting after considering a report on the issues. The mural, aimed at beautifying the huge concrete wall, depicts endangered fauna and flora of
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