Warragul Ranges Probus

The Probus Club movement began in England, and the first club was formed in 1966 by members of a Rotary club.

By 2018 there were more than 400,000 members and about 4000 clubs worldwide. Over one quarter of this number, 110,000 members, were in Australia and New Zealand.

Probus began here in 1976 and there are currently 306 clubs in Victoria alone.

These numbers showed how the Probus club model was so readily accepted by the retirees of Australia.

The Warragul Ranges Probus club was established in 2006 and was sponsored by Warragul Rotary. Some Probus clubs are ‘men only’ and some ‘womens only’, but our club is a ‘combined club’ with a fairly typical mix of 70 per cent women and 30 per cent men.

Probus is not a service club, it is all about making friends, with good fellowship, and having fun in your retirement years. At the last monthly meeting we had a sports themed day when all were encouraged to dress up in their favourite sporting gear. There were certainly very few svelt figures in the room on the day and most of the men, many in their original footy club gear revealed what could best be described as ‘land-slide’ figures.

This was a departure from our usual meeting format where we will have a guest speaker, carefully selected for a mature audience.

But this still allows a great assortment of speakers as evidenced by the last three speakers; a former surveyor-general of Victoria who spoke on dams and rivers of Victoria, the manager and founder of the Trafalgar Holden Museum, recently allocated more funds by the State Government to expand their offerings, and the head of the Cardiovascular Endocrinolgy Labs at the famous Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, and given the average age of the club this speaker had a most attentive audience.

We have dine-out groups, theatre, movie, walking, garden, golf, cards, Armchair Travel and Book groups, and we have bus trips for days out, plus annual tours, often interstate, for a few days.

If you are interested in joining, contact the club’s membership officer on 0428 348570.