President Barry opened the meeting at 10.30 am and welcomed 35 members and one guest, then handed the microphone to secretary Lloyd who called for apologies which were moved and accepted.
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Lloyd read the minutes of the previous meeting and, after these were moved and seconded, all normal meeting procedures were handled.
After morning tea, Allan Toole introduced Robert Shore, President of Parkes Rotary Club, as our guest speaker for the morning.
Robert has had the privilege of interviewing many ex POWs who related their experiences and anecdotes of being in a Japanese POW camp.
He related many stories eg building roads through the jungle with 1600 men and ending up at the end of the section with only 600. They had been eating cats and dogs or anything they could find and were too weak to work, so were bayoneted or shot and left in the jungle.
Robert has had the privilege of interviewing many ex POWs.
In a camp because of eating rotten food, some prisoners were vomiting and were left to die very painful deaths.
He had many stories of hardship and death and so much cruelty in the many atrocities that took place in the camps.
Also in the European theatre of war, a prisoner escaping from a camp in North Germany cycled all the way to Switzerland and freedom, and many more anecdotes too numerous to be included in this report.
Robert wrote a book titled 'We did our bit' which no doubt will be a very interesting read.
Robert was thanked for his very informative presentation by Mal Smith, who found it very difficult to adequately thank Robert for his quality talk.
President Barry Wright announced that the speaker of the August 26 meeting will be Anthony Durkin, a policeman who will talk mainly on stock theft.
