Josie Emery, Tarrangower Times
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a country town in possession of an event, must be in want of volunteers,’ so said Jane Austen when she was asked to chair the development committee for the Steventon, Hampshire, Annual Agricultural and Horticultural Show, in 1812.
And 210 years later, Clif Edwards and Valentina Tansley are discovering the same universal truth as they work towards the unfolding of Maldon In Winter (MIW) and Goldfields Gothic (GG) during June and July 2022.
For the events to run smoothly will require a lot of on the ground, behind the bar, and at the door work. In short: volunteer work. And volunteers have gone to ground since COVID first hit.
To encourage people to step up for a taste of volunteering, SteamPacket is sponsoring and paying for Responsible Service of Alcohol registration courses for local volunteers who’d like to help with set up, assisting patrons and helping at the bar.
Volunteers will also be ticketed to attend other MIW/GG events for free.
Volunteering has many other side benefits, as Ms Austen has written previously.
‘Volunteering is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.’
And, of course, as she had Elizabeth Bennett famously say to the honourable Fitzwilliam Darcy, ‘From the very beginning from the first moment, I may almost say of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish distain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of the disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world on whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry…but then, the moment we fell to volunteering together at the Church Fete I discovered an hitherto unseen, unrecognised, and wholly unexpected side to you which has caused me to reverse that previous hasty decision. ’
If you, too, would wish to savour the pleasures of volunteering, then send an email to Clif Edwards at clif@steampacket.com.au.
Our fact checking team is still verifying the authenticity of these alleged quotations from the works of the late Jane Austen of Steventon, Hampshire, Great Britain. You can authenticate them yourself by visiting the Athenaeum Library in High Street, Maldon, Victoria, Australia.
This article appeared in the Tarrangower Times, 3 June 2022.
