Annual General meeting

The Australian branch AGM will be held on 31 march 2008, at 2pm EST to elect new office bearers, and confirm the financial results for the year. Due to the geographic spread of members, we will be holding this meeting by tele-conference from specific venues. At this stage we anticipate using locations in Melbourne, Newcastle, Sydney/Wollongong, Perth, Whyalla and Brisbane.

Any member wishing to participate should contact Mike Walton or Alan Blanch for venue confirmation.

Note: only financial members can stand for office or vote during the meeting.

Election of Office bearers

The branch seeks nominations for Office Bearers for the year to 31 March 2009.

These include:

• Vice President
• Secretary/treasurer
• Training co-ordinator
• State representatives (2 per state preferred)

If you have an interest in being active in the institute, and believe you could spare the time to take on such a role please feel free to contact Mike Walton or Alan Blanch for a discussion on the relevant responsibilities. Note that being VP for the year has the expectation that you will be available for the post of President the following year. We view the Training co-ordinator role as of increasing importance, and the nominee should have some background, or at least a significant interest, in industrial training issues. We would seriously consider allowing this and the VP role to be merged in future, and nominees may like to keep this in mind for the 2009/10 year.

Overdue Fees

There are a number of members in imminent danger of becoming unfinancial. Once membership lapses, that (ex-) member ceases to have voting rights and will cease to receive the Refractories Engineer as from the May issue.

If you are in this situation due to memory lapse, please contact Alan Blanch asap to renew. This can be done by cheque or Bank transfer in local currency.

2009 Conference

We intend to hold the next conference in Sydney late October/early November, approximately 18 months from the last one. The date will be confirmed after discussions with the Novotel, and a scan to avoid any clashes with other events around that time.

The format will be as the last conference, a formal day of technical presentations, followed by a facilitated training day. The focus of both is now open for discussion and suggestions.

We also need one or two NSW based people to form a Conference Committee with Alan Blanch-any volunteers?

Training

Dave McDonald will be standing down as Training co-ordinator, to enjoy a well earned retirement. Although not much may seem to have happened on this front, we have made significant progress in establishing a core resource of training material from a wide number of sources, and are clarifying copyright issues. We are currently transcribing much of this to electronic format with updates of older material, as we go. We would like help in handling this material, some secretarial, and some technical. If anyone thinks they could assist in either area, please raise your hand. The Branch is prepared to pay for secretarial assistance where appropriate.

We are still working through the new organisation of Training Boards, left to us by the outgoing Federal Government. This has obviously been further complicated by the changes of November 2007.