It was a privilege to recognise the hard work and efforts of many community members at our recent Australia Day celebrations, with eight people and community organisations receiving awards at our Stawell and St Arnaud ceremonies.

It was fantastic to see Member for Ripon, Louise Staley, at our Stawell ceremony, and I’d also like to thank our Australia Day ambassadors, Robert DiPierdomenico and Maree Caldow, for their help in making the day a great success.

As part of the celebrations, we welcomed eight new Australian citizens to our shire, who all took part in a citizenship ceremony in Stawell to finish the evening.

We’ve just begun a roads, rates and waste management review that we are taking to the community to get their thoughts on where we’re at currently and what they think can be done moving forward.

To help with this process we’ve put together key statistics and information around where our service in these areas sit to better explain how running these areas work.

Recently we’ve seen some terrific growth within our shire on a number of fronts.

The re-opening of the Stawell Gold Mine and the continued progression and development of the Bulgana Wind Farm, among other industries, has seen a spike in job opportunities while leading into Christmas our local real estate agents have been telling us that the current rental market is more or less at capacity.

This obviously means that we need to attract more investment, both residential and retail, to the area to capitalise on this demand.

The start to the year has also seen a number of big events taking place within our shire, headlined by The Resilience Project spending three days in Stawell to deliver community sessions and workshops centred around their three pillars of gratitude, empathy and mindfulness.

Presenter Martin Heppell did a phenomenal job across the three days with local community members, teachers, professionals and students.

I have no doubt that those who took part will have walked away with some great strategies on how to become more resilient when adversity hits.

In St Arnaud, we had the 2019 St Arnaud Harvest Festival which proved to be a huge day/night with over 400 people attending Market Square to enjoy an afternoon of live music, free kids activities, food and drink by local vendors and a spectacular fireworks show to end the night.

It was a wonderful way for farming families to come together and enjoy an evening together after a difficult year.

As you can see it’s been a huge start to 2019 but there’s plenty more to come on that front.

Cr Kevin Erwin, Northern Grampians Shire mayor