The David Syme
Four members from the East Central District Rifle Association headed to Bendigo for the David Syme Competition.
The competition is held over two days and involves shooting six ranges. The competition is one of the oldest if not the oldest contested competitions still running. In 1867 an Australian Rifle team was invited to England to contest the British Championships. This was the first international sport ever played by Australia the event still continues to this day and Australians travel to Bisley England to compete every year.
The competition was so successful that other invitations followed one of those was for a Victorian team in 1897 to contest the Kolapore, a teams match contested by countries that belonged to the British Empire. The trophy is a pair of cups presented by His Highness, the late, Rajah of Kolapore in 1871. A generous donation of two thousand pounds ($4,000) the entire cost of the trip, was made by Mr David Syme. The Victorians went to Great Britain and rewarded the faith of David Syme by winning the trophy and bringing it back to Victoria.
To honour the generous donation made by Mr David Syme a special resolution of the VRA unanimously commended him and awarded him a citation. In recognition of this generous donation the two day lead up event to the Victorian Queens is, to this day, called the Syme.
Marty Kelly left, Graeme Kerr centre, David Wallace right
Enough of the history how did our shooters do in this marathon event? As you can see in the picture above they are all pretty happy. The reason for such a marathon event is to test the shooters skills in all types of weather that may occur and at different distances from 500 yrds to 1000 yrds from one end of the range to another. So I wont bore you with the scores for each range however the final placings were. In F STD B, David Wallace First Place, In F/TR Graeme Kerr First Place and Marty Kelly also in F/TR Third Place. Terry Gee also shot extremely well considering he had only shot his rifle a few times in the past few weeks after not being able to shoot due to back injury.