THE NEXT GENERATION OF DEER PEOPLE

FROM THE CHAIRMAN Col Brumley

Celebrating my eldest child’s 21st birthday recently gave me pause to reflect, both on my own advancing years and on the generation of young people who are going to carry Australia, including the ADA, forward over the next couple of decades.

While much is made of the generational divides in society, observing the young people who had gathered to celebrate the traditional transition into adulthood, I was struck more by how alike we are than by how different.

Sure, in my day, there were no silent discos, but in the actions, enthusiasm and zest for life of the young people gathered in our backyard, I recognised myself and my friends facing a similar coming of age in a similar way thirty-something years ago.

You can make the same observations about the changes happening in the ADA. Spending a couple of days on the road with Sean Kilkenny recently, meeting with ADA’s newest office bearers along with some of our stalwarts, I recognised that the path being travelled by the new breed of deer people had a lot of similarities to that trodden by myself and my contemporaries decades earlier.

The challenges that they face will be different, and the tools that they will use to face them will be different, but the reasons why they will face them and the resilience, innovation and integrity with which they face them should be very familiar to ADA members. It’s the same approach that our leaders have taken since 1969 because it is informed by the same values and the same culture.

When I look at the ADA branches that are really doing well, and by doing well, I mean that they are really engaging with their members and the broader community in their orbit, what I see are all of the things that drew me to ADA in the first place being offered in a modern context.

We’re still deer people, talking about deer. Still, the branches that are doing well are operating in a way that is relevant to their community and active hunters and that is not held back by some misplaced sense of obligation to do things in a way that makes us old blokes comfortable. Stuff us, go out and be relevant to the people who will be leading us in 2042 and beyond.