Honours for extraordinary couple
SHIRLEY and Trevor McIvor describe themselves as an “ordinary couple”, but there’s no hiding from the fact they have accomplished some extraordinary things.
The long-time Rangeville residents have both been awarded an Order of Australia Medal, as part of the Queen’s Birthday honours list.
“It was quite an honour, and a surprise. I don’t think they give those medals out to ordinary people too often,” Mr McIvor remarked.
Now married for 61 years, their long list of achievements begins with the founding of the Space Pilots’ Club, a Christian youth group and model rocketry club, in 1965.
Mr McIvor was president, and Mrs McIvor the secretary for 27 years.
Over the decades, the club mentored and taught hundreds of boys and young men, filling their minds with the exciting possibilities of space.
It was in the early 1990s the McIvors began their widelyrecognised and appreciated work of documenting Queensland’s thousands of war memorials, which resulted in the publishing of Salute the Brave – A Pictorial Record of Queensland War Memorials by the
University of Southern Queensland Press, and the 1999 CD-Rom Queensland War Memorials and Tributes.
Their work is credited as sparking a renewed interest in the state’s war memorials, and in 2008 they donated their research to the State Government’s Queensland War Memorials Register.
To this day, not a week goes by without someone contacting the McIvors’ “command centre”, as Mr McIvor has named it, in search of a longlost digger or memorial.