A message from your Club President Chris Murphy

​Hi Members and welcome to our Annual General Meeting for 2025, and I am pleased to report on your Club for 2024.

At the very end of my report last year, I wished everyone a successful 2024, and that we were able to “flood” our Shows in 2024 with plenty of entries and support. As you now know, the BSSA held 4 shows in 2024, and all were extremely well supported by our members. Our shows are the highlight of our year, and are a terrific opportunity to not only exhibit our birds and find out where we need to improve, but also get involved in the very important social aspect of our hobby. Our hobby is not only about our birds, but about our people and the social element as well is very important.

Thankyou George for organizing and preparing all 4 of our shows, with the first staging of the November 24 Show being an absolute success, and one of the highlights of our year. George puts a lot of thought and planning into our shows and the fact they are well supported by our members is testament to the work that you do.

Congratulations to Andrew Swift for winning Grand Champion at both the Murphy Classic and Stan Watson Breeders Show with your Black Eye Self. Ken & Janet Harris for winning the Ron Norman Annual Show, and to Sue Adams in exhibiting the Best Bird in Show at the November 24 Show. As I mentioned earlier, all 4 shows were very well supported. The only exception to this was in the Intermediate Class where a couple of times, we did not have the 3 Intermediates required to allow status points to be awarded.
George will follow shortly with his in depth Show Manager’s report for 2024.

At the ANBC show in Tasmania, we were very proud to have 3 BSSA members win the best in class award for their variety. Congratulations to Dennis Lomman, Jason & Wayne Weidenhofer & the Holmes Family for being the best in Australia.
Our monthly meetings have been very well attended, and the 7pm start time has been well received.

The various entertainment during 2024 included our first Gather Around, a brilliant slideshow from David Pace, a visit from Marijke Mellor from Unusual Pets, a great presentation from John Mulley and Doug Lange on show preparation, a talk from Sue Adams on medications, an ANBC summary from George, Christmas in July for the very first time was at the Goodwood Hotel, a virtual aviary tour of the Holmes Family aviaries, and a couple of “come and try nights” for good measure. Without doubt it has been a very busy year, and our thanks to Troy for coordinating our guest speakers and the meeting schedule.

Financially the Club is in a very sound position and whilst we have run at a “cash book” loss for 2024, we have utilized our funds to start the production of 200 show cages, which will be available to our members once they are finished and we can accurately work our costings. Over 50% of our income is from our on-line auctions, and the importance of these auctions cannot be understated. The covid years of raising funds for our club are well and truly behind us, so now it will be an on going effort to cover our expenses each and every year in to the future.
One of the legal requirements we have as a non for profit incorporated association is to outline at our AGM the type of activities our funds raised will be spent on in the forthcoming year. I think this is to allow members the opportunity to be aware of the spending plans of the Club.


So whilst it is not hard to imagine where our funds will go, the 5 main areas are:
1. Shows for members and other interested people including the general public to exhibit and visit.
2. Hall Hire for meetings and shows.
3. Meeting costs to provide entertainment and light meals at our meetings.
4. Necessary administration charges such as Insurances, Public Liability and secretarial and show manager expenses.
5. Selective promotion and advertising of the Club to attract people to our Shows and Meetings.


The BSSA You Tube Channel was not added to in 2024, so our subscribers only lifted from 734 to 784 in the past 12 months. I have suggested to the Committee that we record our meetings, or at least the entertainment section of the meetings and post these to our Channel. So if you have the ability to operate a camera and some editing skills, the Club needs your help ASAP.

Our Facebook page has over 5,100 members, but we need a bit of a rethink as to how to convert the Facebook members to BSSA club members. If anyone has thoughts on how we can do this, please don’t hesitate to share them with any of us. The facebook page also seems to be flooded with repeat posts of events or pet carriers – this is certainly a topic of review for the next few months.

The BSSA website is now up to 74,000 visits – that is 16,000 visits in the past 12 months. Thankyou Danny for keeping our website informative and relevant to our members and the wider audience. Again, I am sure we can do more promotion of our hobby via our website.
Now to our Committee,

Thanks to all our Committee for the effort and care they have for our Club and for the Members. Each of our Committee perform an amazing role in keeping the wheels of our Club operating, and I really mean that without each one of the Committee the Club would struggle operating or reduce its functions significantly. That is how important they are to the future and success of the BSSA. I firmly believe that it is because of the quality of the Committee group that members want to belong to our Club and continue to keep, breed and exhibit budgerigars.

Aside for George, Troy and Danny who I have already mentioned, my thanks also to
Ken & Marie – who along with Danny are the organisers and promoters of the on-line auctions. Quite simply without the auctions, our Shows would be very basic and we wouldn’t be able to provide the trophies, rosettes, or prize money. I also wonder how many carry boxes Ken has made to enable our members to transport their birds when sold at auction
.
Sue – for always doing what needs to be done – attending EXPO’s, picking up supper, and anything else we need doing plus the responsibilities of the Secretarial role.

Ian – an absolute professional with the rings – doesn’t miss a trick, and looks after the Club merchandise as well. Ian also has suggested we hold Junior specific events for our junior members, as we have quite a few at the moment, which is a project for 2025.

Paul – apparently Paul is the ‘Budgie Man” from Gumtree. We also appreciate Paul’s facebook posts as well which provide some variation on our facebook page.

Tom – has taken on the role of official staging coordinator for our shows. Without Tom and Steve getting stuck in, our shows would certainly be extremely late in starting.

Jane – is the sense check of the Committee and is always asking questions about what we do, and more importantly what we can do in the future. It’s great to have Jane, Tom and Danny on the Committee as the newer members of the Club provide different ideas to what we have always done.

Janet – stepped into the role of social coordinator and is always willing to support at our shows and in the background of our events.

Kerry – the trading table is very important to the fabric of the Club, and its not an easy task to keep on top of everything our members ask for, and provide it at next to near cost price.

Brice – welcome back Brice – without you, the show cages would not be happening. This is amazing and greatly appreciated.

Finally, I would also like to thank our members. So much support is given to our Committee and the Club by the wider membership, that it cannot go unmentioned.
So, in closing I wish you all well for the upcoming year. As I said last year, I hope everyone breeds lots of healthy strong birds and we flood our shows with stack of entries.
​
Thankyou
Chris Murphy
BSSA President
February 2025.