Our chorus is very much on the rise as we scored our best result ever at the recent Convention in Adelaide, something we are very proud of. There seems to be a whole new culture within the club and those songs that we all thought were beyond our abilities are now being reassessed. Brian Martin, our MD and Graham Kingsford out assistant MD have made a considerable contribution to the improvement of the singing.

We are very proud of our founding member, Mel McMichael, who was given the highest accolade in Adelaide with the BHA medal for services to Barbershop in Australia. We were also well represented with three quartets in the competition who all came away with personal best scores.

The chorus and quartets have been involved in a number of sing-outs over the past two months and culminated this week-end with our annual fund raising concert. We were very privileged to have Benchmark, the multiple Seniors’ quartet gold medal winners, as our headline act. They are always so accommodating with their time and provided two wonderful and entertaining sets.  We were also fortunate to gain the services of the Queensland Eisteddfod gold medal winning Oriana choir, who sang three fantastic songs in wonderful harmony and an octet from local school Matthew Flinders High, who sang beautiful acapella songs. We topped this off with a superb Sweet Adeline’s quartet, Fancy That and local Statesmen quartet, Rimfire.  Sunshine Statesmen rendition of I am Australian, with lights and smoke was well received but unfortunately set off the smoke alarm much to everyone’s amusement. All in all, despite the rainy night, the evening was a great success.

We are now looking forward to being part of the Hinterland Harmony Bonanza in Maleny this week-end, and follow this with a retirement village concert with Hot Ginger Sweet Ads Chorus and then into a number of Christmas sing outs.

We are filling up our new web-site with interesting items (http://sunshinestatesmen.harmonysite.com) so please check it out.

Malcolm Woods
President