What We Do
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Fund Raising
The Brigade spends a considerable amount of money it has raised itself on making our tasks easier, more efficient, safer and more comfortable. A lot of our equipment is supplied by Council but it is much enhanced by our own purchases and efforts. To this end we get involved in a number of fund raising activities.
Christmas Trees
This activity started in 1966 and has continued every year since then. A couple of weeks before Christmas a team from the Brigade goes to some area where we can get Christmas Trees cheaply and cuts, loads and transports about 500 trees back to Blaxland where we sell them to the local residents from the Railway Station Car Park. In the early days we used to get the trees from the Forestry Commission for next to nothing, (a few cents per tree) and we would go and cut them from the areas we were given and then bring them back (often a round trip of couple of hundred kilometres).
Some years ago along with many other Government departments it suddenly became policy to get as much money as possible from everything the departments did and the cost of trees escalated to very close to our selling price. Along with a continual battle to get formal consent to our being allowed to cut the trees this was proving a tedious exercise.
A few years ago we found a commercial tree farmer who would give us a much better price ( and he has kept it fixed for the few years we have used his facility) and also to our delight he cuts the trees for us so all we need to do is go out to his property on the arranged day, drag the trees to the trucks and load them.
Every year we get significant help from many different places for this, a local hire firm has let us have a trailer for nothing, other businesses from time to time lend us large tabletop trucks and often even pay the fuel for running them. Brigade members and friends give their time and lend their vehicles to assist
(500 trees is a large volume).
Then it is a case of sorting the trees to size, pricing them and selling them off. It is a major logistical exercise.
We have always had much local community support for our sales and each year we get numerous phone calls in early December from locals wanting to know when we will be selling. We even have people coming from the inner suburbs of Sydney (40 or 50 kilometres) to get their trees from us.
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Gala Day
For a number of years the Brigade has had a static display of its vehicles and equipment in or close to Blaxland Mall during Blaxland Gala Day in October.
We also put on a stall selling sausage and steak sandwiches and cold drinks to the people who come to see the various stalls set up for this day. This has proved quite a good fund-raiser for us but again it is a very labour-intensive activity. We need to estimate, order and purchase, sausages, steaks, bread, onions, sauces, soft drinks, paper napkins, disposable gloves, etc. assemble the barbeque, get tables, barbeque plates, tools, cutting boards, storage trays, knives, LP gas, soft drink chillers, ice, garbage bags, not to mention Brigade members to cook, prepare, take orders and take money.
Usually the exercise extends from about 08:00 on the morning until lunch time or just after, and then we have to pack up, clean up and count and bank the proceeds and return the vehicles to the Brigade station.
Ivy Market
Again this activity has been going on for a number of years.
Each year in late August or early September the Brigade is invited to hold a Raffle at Springwood Community Centre to accompany their function which they call the Ivy Market.
The hall is filled out with stalls by local ( and not so local) craft and small business operators selling virtually anything portable you can conceive.
We set up a table at the entrance door and raffle off a prize of some description. It may be a hamper of foodstuffs, a tray of meat, or perhaps, as one year, some home appliances pertinent to our activities. That year it was a number of smoke alarms and fire extinguishers donated by the firm to which a member belongs.
We get support from all sorts of places.
During the morning of the market, Brigade members also go around the stalls in the Community Hall and sell tickets to the stall-holders. These always support us enthusiastically and the activity returns us a modest but welcome income.
Sun-Herald City-to-Surf
The Sun-Herald City-to-Surf marathon every year in August is a very well-known fun run in Sydney and around Australia. Over the years it has grown from three or four thousand entrants to about 50,000 entrants from Sydney, all over Australia and all around the world.
For a number of years Blaxland Brigade worked with the Sun-Herald supplying personnel to supervise the setting up of the tables and organising of the drinks stalls that are placed every few kilometres throughout the 14-kilometre course. This entailed getting 25 Brigade members to the course locations in Sydney city (75 kilometres from our Brigade Station) for 6.00 am on the day of the race, to supervise 30 or 40 volunteers at each drink station filling, setting out and handing out cups of water. The logistics of delivering water to 30,000 runners at each drink station on the run was something to behold and 40 people desperately filling cups and handing them out was often far too few during the peak time of the race.
We did this for several years but found it difficult to get sufficient numbers to be able to continue the activity and had to withdraw from it a few years ago.
While we were doing it we received considerable acclaim from Sun-Herald organising staff for our efforts and a donation from them to our funds was always acceptable.
Bicycle Race Marshalling
Another fund raising activity of a similar nature to the City-to-Surf was the annual Penrith Panthers cycle road races around mid-year.
We supplied marshals from the Brigade for this activity and again it took up a number of our members and a lot of time. We used to supply twelve to fifteen Brigade members to act traffic control marshals during the course of the various races which made up the program. Some of the races were relatively short (fifteen kilometres or so) but one was the long distance race from Blacktown area to Hawkesbury Heights and back.
Our task as marshals was to control traffic at each of the intersections on the courses to allow the cyclists right-of-way as they went through.
Again we have ceased to do this now but more for legal reasons than anything else.
In the later years, O.H. & S. regulations as well as re-interpretation of the RTA legislation made it potentially legally hazardous for us to become involved in traffic control and we ceased to be do this activity.
Donation Tins
The Brigade has placed a number of donation tins in shops around the Blaxland township shopping centre and every couple of months or so they are cleared and the proceeds added to the Brigade funds.
We are grateful to the following shops involved and thank them for their support.
Mitre 10 Hardware (since withdrawn)
Blaxland Credit Union
Blaxland Newsagency
Blaxland Day & Night Pharmacy
Blaxland Post Office
Blaxland Fine Wines
Highway Hardware
For various reasons a number of these shops have shut down and we thank them and the Blaxland community for their now-missed assistance.
Blaxland Pizza Shop
Blaxland Hairdresser
Peachie's Ice Cream Parlour
Blaxland Patisserie
Morahan's Pharmacy
South Blaxland Newsagency
Blaxland Cafe