By Taylah Eastwell
The popular president of Mt Evelyn RSL recently announced his retirement from the top job, after 10 years of taking the club from strength to strength.
Roger Boness served as president of the Mt Evelyn RSL for the past 10 years and is remembered for his remarkable work in improving the club in a variety of ways.
He will now serve as vice-president and remains connected with welfare at the club.
“When I took over the RSL, it was an era where the last of the World War II veterans were passing away, and the RSL’s were struggling to remain viable,” he said.
“We worked on the premise that every vibrant community should have an active RSL, so we spent a lot of time building up the membership and involving ourselves in the Mt Evelyn community.
Mr Boness said the RSL had representatives on the Mt Evelyn Chamber of Commerce, visited all the local schools and sporting clubs and started creating relationships with various community groups and non-for-profit clubs that now enjoy meeting at the club’s hall on Birmingham Road.
During his time, he has increased the sub-branch’s membership four times over, made record sales for Anzac badges and poppy sales and contributed to vast improvements to the hall to make it a valuable asset for the community. He also developed Thursday social afternoons as a wellness program for retired members, with all his work winning him the nickname of ‘Front Page Roger’ for all the media attention he attracted.
“The RSL grew at such an extraordinary rate, we started to attract a lot of attention and what happened was we became a major news item. I wear the nickname with a smile. It’s a measure of the success of the RSL,” Mr Boness said.
Mr Boness said the Mt Evelyn RSL became active in ensuring that local schools were brought up to speed with local military history.
“Lots of school kids are now familiar with world conflicts and the effects of those. We had a lot of projects with schools, and we also updated all of our cenotaphs.
“Mt Evelyn RSL assumed responsibility for the Wandin, Silvan and Montrose cenotaphs, if anyone goes around and has a look you can see they have all been upgraded with local military history which is very important for the local community to recognise,” he said.
The club’s work in upgrading and developing the Mt Evelyn Memorial Gardens, completed with the help of other community groups, remains one of Mr Boness’s greatest achievements.
“We used to have an avenue of honour with plaques on the trees, but the Mahogany Gums started shredding branches and weren’t really suitable for the business district. We were able to replicate all the names of the veterans on the tree plaques and now have a memorial garden with all of those names and details of people on pedestals around the garden,” he said.
The garden is now enjoyed by Mt Evelyn and surrounding commnunities, with Anzac and Remembrance Day ceremonies at Mt Evelyn being one of the largest public events on the Yarra Ranges calendar.
The former Vietnam veteran, who served as an artillery forward observer in Vietnam between 1967 and 1968, has been awarded a Life Membership of the RSL Victoria, a Mayoral Lifetime Achievement Award from Yarra Ranges Council and Victorian Senior Citizen of the Year over the last decade.
The top job has been handed down “a few generations” to ex-vice president Matthew Crymble, who has been an RSL member for a number of years having served in the Royal Australian Navy.
“Given I’m now a senior citizen, I thought it would be appropriate to get a someone a couple of generations younger to carry out those responsibilities. We are going to give him all of the assistance necessary to keep our RSL prominent in our community for generations to come,” Mr Boness said.
New president Matthew Crymble said he had been learning from Mr Boness over the last couple of years and the pair have “discussed at length” the requirements of the role.
“Roger has done an exceptional job, he has done a lot of great things during his presidency – namely lifting our profile,” Mr Crymble said.
“We will continue to be community minded, I believe Roger has very much lifted our identity, the Mt Evelyn community knows who we are and we play an active role and I plan to continue that work while at the same time ensuring the membership of our club continues to grow,” Mr Crymble said.
