[dropcap]D[/dropcap]espite living in the Sutherland Shire temporarily while their new house gets built, Jan McLaughlin drove her husband John all the way to Campbelltown Hospital when he felt unwell recently.
The couple, who have been married for more than 50 years, have lived in Camden and Campbelltown most of their lives.
John, who helped establish the Campbelltown Blues, one of the great AFL clubs in the Sydney metropolitan area, received a phone call informing him his younger brother by almost 10 years would not last the night.
Distressed by the news, he feared he may have a heart attack and started feeling seriously unwell, so he said to Jan: please take me to hospital – Campbelltown Hospital.
It all turned out OK but John wanted the South West Voice to tell our readers how wonderful everyone had been at Campbelltown Hospital the two days he was in there.
“Just fantastic, everyone, the nurses and doctors, nothing was too much trouble,’’ John said.
“Please put something in the Voice for me about how wonderful the people at our hospital are.’’
We did have one question for the great man: Why didn’t he just get Jan to drive him to Sutherland Hospital, just in case?
“If I was going to die, I didn’t want to die anywhere but Campbelltown,’’ was his quick response.
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It’s the annual general meeting time of the year for many of our local groups and organisations.
That means electing new office bearers or not, as was the case at the Campbelltown Camden cricket club.
After a very successful year, the Ghosts kept the same administrative team in place, including former NSW premier Morris Iemma as president and Liberal MP for Camden Chris Patterson as vice president.
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Another “former’’, this time the former Campbelltown mayor Paul Hawker, is now president elect of Campbelltown Rotary.
Which means that he takes the reins in 12 months as per the Rotary Club rules.
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Not all local greenies are in the same tent or to put it another way, it would be easier to herd cats.
Why we say that is because the Voice published a story about court action by local environmentalists against a rezoning for housing at Gilead and a few days later one of them rang to request we take down the story.
Why?
Well, it hasn’t been approved by the committee or something, we were told.
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A new series of Everyone’s a Critic premiered recently on ABC television.
The program visits different cultural institutions around Australia bringing a group of Australians before art and asking for their critique.
As one of the cultural venues, the show visited Campbelltown Arts Centre during the 2017 Fisher’s Ghost art award.
This episode will be aired on the ABC on Thursday, August 16 at 8.50pm.
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In another life – it was that long ago – lawyer Patrick Duffy worked for Jim Marsden but their paths hardly ever crossed since then.
Duffy, after stints working for big law firms in the Sydney CBD and a local council in the metropolitan area, returned home to Campbelltown where he has set up his own firm, Duffy Law Group.
Marsden these days is one of the elder statesmen of the legal profession in Campbelltown and Macarthur.
Well, there they were, the two of them having a beer in the retro surroundings of The House of Bamboo, one of Campbelltown’s iconic Chinese restaurants during its heyday.
When Jim got up to leave, he said to Duffy: you can take care of this.
Duffy fired back: Sure, I drank plenty of your beers back when I worked at Marsdens.
Great to hear John is feeling better. Nice pic.
Some ex news photographer took it