By Tania Phillips
It was a full house at the Commercial Hotel in Allora on Friday afternoon as some of Queensland’s best known footballers held court for the Allora Sports Museum’s second Long Lunch.
And if one of the guests (and museum patron) Shane Webcke has his way it won’t be the last of these events according to Museum president Perry Cronin.
“Shane Webcke is going to organise the next one in another six months or so,” Cronin said.
“He’s said leave it up to him and he’ll bring back someone special. I don’t know who it will be yet and he doesn’t either but no doubt it will be someone good.
“He’s our patron, he’s good for us. He helps us along greatly. He’s wonderful. There’s no money changes hands with Shane or anyone else, that’s why we can keep the price of the dinner down – we only charge $65 its wonderful.”
Cronin said there were a lot of Wattles Old Boys at the event which features eight Qld representatives, four of them Kangaroos.
“Not a bad go for one room.”
He said there around 82 guest for the event which he said wasn’t a full-blown function, more a lunch for friends.
“It’s a unique sort of a day – more or less a big counter lunch,” he quipped.
“But it was a wonderful event – the guest speakers were well received. Bernie Pramberg and Geoff McDonald, Mayor of Toowoomba, split the honour of being the MCs. Geoff McDonald interviewed Ben Ikin, because of his connection with the Queensland Rugby League through his father. Then he introduced and interviewed Bernie Pramberg and then Bernie interviewed Shane Webcke and Trevor Gillmeister. They are all good speakers and they’re all good fellas and it was just a delight. Webcke and Gillmeister carried on down the three hotels and we all had drinks and fun. They went down and drew the Wattles raffles with the boys so everything worked out really well for the whole day.
“We haven’t got a final figure on how much we raised for the museum but the beauty of it is, Trevor Gillmeister had a clean out of his wardrobe of all of his Australian stuff – tracksuits, pants and beanies. He signed it all and auctioned and raffled it off – we made pretty good money out of that for nothing.”
Cronin said the money raised will go towards their planned expansion.
Amongst the football fans in the room were retired Warwick Today/Stanthorpe Today sports team Neil “Casey” and Perditta O’Connor. Perditta couldn’t help taking plenty of pictures and sending them through for the paper.
