‘Citizenship, fellowship and service’ was the creed used by three young Geelong architects who started the Apex Australia movement in 1931.
Twenty-seven years after these young professionals formed the organisation, an eclectic group of 23 men attended a meeting in May to form the Kyabram Apex Club.
Kevin Andrews, who will turn 90 on March 23, is the only survivor from that initial meeting. He was a 24-year-old retail worker at the time of the club’s formation and is one of 20-plus life members of Kyabram Apex.
The club, which had two dozen charter members in 1958, was the 235th to join the service organisation. It served the Kyabram community for 40 years, eventually folding due to a lack of qualifying members (under 40 years old) in 1998.
Almost a century after the first Apex club was formed, the function room at Kyabram Club was filled with men and women well outside the parameters of the long-time membership criteria of being 18 to 40 years old.
Since the Kyabram group went into recess there have been regular reunions of the men who served the club during its four-decade history.
Initially, Apex membership was restricted to males aged 18 to 35, with mandatory retirement at 40.
So seriously did the members of the organisation take the conditions of entry to the organisation that a motion moved at a Kyabram meeting to admit women into the club drew just one supporter — the member that suggested the idea.
In the early 1990s, individual clubs could declare themselves ‘all-male’, ‘all-female’, or ‘mixed’.
The service club has dramatically reduced in size in the past four decades, even in the movement’s birthplace of Geelong — the region’s last Apex club (Barwon) folded in 2015.
There are only a tick over 100 clubs still operating in Australia.
By the mid-1970s, when the Kyabram club was at its strongest, there were more than 17,000 Apexians in Australia — from 715 clubs.
At the Kyabram celebration, there were 55 former Apexians, many accompanied by their wives, who proudly waded through the annual reports, photographs and honour boards that were on display for attendees.
Among them were former professionals (accountants, lawyers, teachers and engineers) who, during the years, had freely mixed with business owners, tradesmen, realtors and farmers.
A report from the 700th meeting, 30 years after the club formed, was prepared by long-time historian Brian Turnbull — at that time detailing all of the 217 members that had served the club.
It recorded where several of the club’s original members were recruited from during its 1957 formation — the Kyabram Bachelor’s Club — before the charter was granted the following year.
Kyabram Football Club was home to the club before the Albion Hotel and Kyabram West Hotel were used as bases of operations for a short period. Not long after, the RSL Hall was used for meetings, before the first dinner was held in 1961 at the Kyabram (Men’s) Club.
That was home to meetings for the next 23 years before a fire stopped the meetings from continuing on the site.
Fittingly, the club was the site for last weekend’s gathering.
Very few developments in the town occurred without the financial backing of the Apexians, and the membership reads like a who’s who of business and community leadership in Kyabram.
Kevin Andrews was flanked by former Kyabram local government representatives Frank Findlay and Doug Crow at one point, and some of the town’s most respected educators were also in attendance.
There were almost 20 former presidents of the club in the room for the event, which had been organised by David Blake, Barry Churches and Gavon and Helen Armstrong.
“This was not supposed to be a formal affair, but it got a little bigger than we expected,” Mr Armstrong, the president in 1987-88, said.
His reunion with a former teacher, Mike Hanrahan, an Apexian of a different era, came at the event after they hadn’t seen each other for 50 years.
“Mike was my form four English teacher at Euroa High School. By the time I got to Kyabram, he had left, and I didn’t see him again until this reunion,” Mr Armstrong, who taught at Kyabam Secondary College, said.
There were many similar stories, as former members from around Australia enjoyed the event.
Jim Higgs, the Australian Test leg-spin bowler who was named the first recipient of the long-running Kyabram Apex Club - Kyabram Free Press Sportstar of the Year award, was also at the dinner.
He has the unique honour of being a multi-generational Apexian. His father, Kevin, was an inaugural member and a former president.
Aside from the Sportstar concept, Kyabram Apex operated a learn-to-swim program, collected paper and delivered it to Broadford as a major source of fundraising, contributed $6000 towards a Kyabram Fire Brigade utility vehicle and was at the pointy end of the Kyabram Carnival co-ordination — the foundations of what is now the Kyabram Charity Raffle.
A feature of the evening was a Q&A conducted by David Blake, which featured the old (Kevin Andrews), middle-aged (Mr Armstrong and Geoff Strachan) and “young” John Costello answering a series of questions and leading what was a remake of the traditional “fines” session.
Being a 54-year-old who grew up in the town, it was a reunion of sorts for myself, former teachers, parents of long-time childhood friends and some of the men who offered great examples for the future — all in the same room.
Long may the reunions continue. Well done, gentlemen.