June 27, 2018
Visitors to Wondai have been greeted with some refreshed, up-to-date service club signs at the town’s two highway entrances over the past few days.
The signs, which were once home to the logos of the defunct Wondai Apex Club and Rural Youth, along with a badly weathered QCWA sign, are now sporting fewer logos, but they’re all for groups that are decidedly alive and kicking.
The aim of the new signs is to help give Wondai a fresh, vibrant look to passers-by – something the former rusted and faded signs certainly weren’t doing.
The two service club signs have been greeting visitors to Wondai for so many years no one can quite remember exactly when they were built.
They weren’t novel – many country towns have similar signs to tell visitors about local clubs.
But with the passage of time several of the groups on the Wondai signs ceased to exist.
However no-one bothered to remove their signs from the hoardings, or tend to them when they started to look weather-beaten.
So last Friday, Cr Ros Heit and members from Wondai QCWA and the Wondai & District Town Band held a mini working bee to strip off the obsolete signs and replace them with bright new ones that reflected what’s really on offer in Wondai today.
It proved to be a slightly more difficult job than anyone had anticipated because – on closer inspection – they found the old signs had been rivetted in place.
But within a couple of hours both the hoardings were modernised.
Cr Heit said she’d first became aware of the problem when the town was declared RV Friendly last May and the council wanted to put up signs to notify passing caravanners about the town’s RV Friendly status.
She received a call from a worker given the job to ask if it was OK to remove some of the older signs so he could make space for the new one.
“That’s when I first realised there were a few signs there that were surplus to requirements,” Cr Heit said.
So she floated the idea with the QCWA and the Wondai Town Band, then used some money from her Discretionary Fund to pay for new signs for both groups, which were prepared by BL Signs at Crawford.
The revamped service club signs now display the RV Friendly logo plus signs for Wondai Lions, Wondai QCWA and – for the first time in its 112-year history – the Wondai Town and District Band.
Two previous Tidy Town awards hang below them, but after Queensland pulled out of Tidy Towns in 2016 they may also pay the penalty of obsolescence some day in the future.
There are also two blank spaces that could accommodate extra logos, possibly for the Wondai parkrun group that meets each Saturday, or perhaps the Wondai Country Running Festival that proved such a hit last weekend.
But Cr Heit said they’re open to any Wondai group that might like to use them, providing they get in quickly.
