John Curtin Weekend is an excellent volunteering initiative by Curtin University. 500 volunteers go to 40 towns in the weekends between 8 September and 13 October and work with locals on their community projects.
This year, the Rotaract Club of Perth partnered with JCW and the Rottnest Society at Rottnest Island. Arriving at Rottnest on Saturday (and departing Fremantle at the very early time of 7:15 am) we were ushered to our cabins and then straight on to work. Over the course of about 4 hours, we collected about 20 large bags of rubbish from the beach, and about 12 large planks of wood, bringing them all to the roadside for a rubbish pickup. Although the Saturday was supposed to be about removing foreign weeds from the beach, we were happy to report that there were very few weeds spotted throughout the weekend.
On Sunday morning we geared up again to remove plant guards from plants that had not survived. At a cost of $5 per plant guard, we managed to, with the other Rottnest Society volunteers remove between 1,000 – 2,000 plant guards from the island, saving about $5,000 – $10,000 for future years of planting.
The weather was hot all weekend, the wine was free flowing (after hours of course), and everyone thoroughly enjoyed the company of each other – as usual, the Club was all sunshine, lollipops and all that’s good.
Come join us next year at our next JCW!
The writer has been on 4 JCWs now and never regrets that decision!
Alternatively, keep a look out on this page for other tree planting activities that you can get involved in before the year is out!
See you there!