Council would like to recognise the Bannockburn Lions Club in the lead up to Volunteer Week (8 – 14 May).
The Avalon Airshow is a major event—thousands of guests from across Australia piled into the parking area, and Bannockburn Lion Club volunteers were there to guide motorists and prevent chaos.
Team members began their duties in the dark early hours of the morning. This wasn’t so great, given they couldn’t see the cars’ coloured dashboard stickers, which differentiated the aircrew, VIPs, business operators and so on (so the volunteers knew where to direct each vehicle).
So… there they were… in the dark, hoping for the spontaneous arrival of a night vision superpower. In one of the volunteer’s recounts, he said, “Peering desperately into the glare of the convoy of headlights, it was impossible to see the stickers at all let alone their colour… so we had to guess. Thus the cars ended up in very neat lines, expertly parked, like ranks of soldiers on parade but with their coloured stickers resembling more a rainbow than the disciplined colour coordination anticipated by our Team Leader”.
The crew kept at it, working hard through the morning, receiving the odd “Go away” (or worse!) from inpatient motorists and helping people who lost their cars. Disgruntled guests even held the volunteer team personally responsible for the time it took to leave their homes and arrive at Avalon! In one instance, one of the team members recalls, “Protected only by my Lions Club day-glo parking vest, I backed discretely away [from the unhappy guest] and beckoned a rumbling eight cylinder Chevrolet SS into its slot between me and them”.
The Lions Club crew continued to soldier on through their shift, fielding countless questions from guests about the location of public toilets and taking a range of interesting complaints. “It seems there were many accidents that weekend affecting people’s capacity to walk. Indeed the severity of these disabilities seemed directly proportional to their car park’s distance from the main Airshow entrance. Drivers pleaded of torn hamstrings, twisted ankles, ruptured ACL and more. When I obstinately declared “No disabled sticker, no further”, these souls suddenly experienced a recovery of Lourdes proportions and sprang from their cars with startling agility,” said one of the crew.
That day, the Bannockburn Lions Club became night vision specialists, customer service operators, lost car hunters, injury claims assessors and most importantly, car parking artists. They volunteered their time to help guests park safely to raise funds for Bannockburn, and Golden Plains Shire Council is very grateful for their efforts.