General News
12 March, 2025
Cloncurry CWA left stunned by massive donation
Last-minute guest Margie Ryder donated the speakers' fee to the local branch, which was topped up by local mining companies.
Jen Sackley reckons it would take four or five years of fundraising to replicate the $10,000 received by the Cloncurry Country Women’s Association branch on Saturday.
The president of the Cloncurry CWA branch was left stunned at the community’s International Women’s Day event when guest speaker Margie Ryder and MMG’s Nick Johnson presented the group with a massive cheque.
“It was absolutely wonderful,” Ms Sackley said on Monday.
“That would be several years of fundraising for us in one hit. It was a nice surprise.”
The donation came about after the original guest speaker, Brooke Hanson, was unable to attend due to the Cyclone Alfred in Brisbane.
A replacement was sought, and organisers of the IWD event flew out Ms Ryder from Townsville.
A former Julia Creek resident, Ms Ryder is an emerging force in the guest speaking business and was recently a candidate for Katter’s Australia Party in last year’s state election.
“I was literally a Plan B and they asked if I had a fee,” she said.
“I started laughing. I said ‘no, not for you out west’, that’s where I come from.
“And then I thought, ‘no, let’s do something silly’. I said, ‘tell them there is a fee and then I’ll donate that fee back to a local community group’. Nobody told me what the fee was or anything, we never talked about that and then the next day KellyJo (Litchfield)rang up from the council and said they’d had a meeting with the mines, who were really happy with the idea of donating the fee.”
Ms Ryder admitted that she had no idea the final cheque was going to be for $10,000, which was paid for through contributions to the IWD event from MMG, Evolution Mining and the Cloncurry Shire.
“The mines people were so happy and impressed and then they thought, ‘let’s give it to one group that will have an impact on the community’ and so they picked the CWA and then none of them knew it was happening.
“I knew a couple of them from years ago, so before the event, I said, ‘I heard you’re getting a donation’. They said, ‘yeah, we don’t know what it’s all about’.
“So when I made the announcement, I was looking at them and mate, the look on their faces and the tears ... even Frida Pyke, she said, ‘you know, that would have taken us probably four years to raise that amount’.”
Ms Sackley said the donation would be a great help to the CWA branch, which supports women in both the Cloncurry township and surrounding district.
“It’s certainly going be a great help to us ... this year we’ll be having our big Christmas cent sale in July, hopefully and we’ll be having our Mother’s Day raffles, our Easter raffles, and they’re normal things that can raise $250 to $300,” she said.
“We do the races this weekend, so we’ll be at the race gate on Saturday. The race club’s always extremely generous to us and look after us well.
“They are our biggest money earners.”
The Cloncurry CWA branch has enjoyed a purple patch of form in recent times after receiving another generous donation last month.
“We did have a lovely gentleman in the community a few weeks ago walk up and give us $1000,” Ms Sackley said.
“One of our members, who is a retired nurse, had helped him a great deal when he was sick.
“She’s since passed away and he had been wanting to repay the favour and came up and gave (the money) to us.”
Ms Sackley said there were no immediate plans for how to spend the windfall, but encouraged local groups needing a hand to make contact with the branch.
“We’ll use the money to help others because that’s what we do,” she said.