Dear Poets,
It has been an honour to serve as president of the Australian Haiku Society over the past 4 years.
Prior to taking up this position, I had primarily lived abroad and was not in regular contact with Australian haiku poets nor writing haiku from a particularly Australian perspective. Rather, I was a peripatetic poet whose only real home was the suburban ground of my beloved football team here in Melbourne. Four years of interacting with local poets, both here in Victoria and interstate, has made a lasting impression on me and has left me wanting to contribute more to Australian haiku (more on that later).
The past four years have not been without challenges and the most formidable of those, of course, was the Covid pandemic. Already becoming a distant memory and a reference point for scholars of history, Covid-19 was a difficult but curiously galvanising time for Australian haiku poets. Forced into involuntary isolation through rolling lockdowns, poets were quickly reconnected via virtual technology which, via platforms such as Zoom, provided sufficient sustenance for poets seeking contact with each other. Thanks, in some way, to these hardships, AHS members and haiku groups around the country are now in more contact with each other than they were before. Highlighting this, on April 17, we will again celebrate International Haiku Poetry Day with a national reading of haiku on Zoom, which we hope will become an annual event.
In my view, the two major achievements of the past 4 years have been the establishment of the John Bird Dreaming Award for Haiku and the release of the Fourth Australian Haiku Anthology (4AHA). The JBD award has quickly become recognised as a major international haiku award, attracting interest from poets all over the world. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ron C. Moss for his invaluable contribution to the award by providing original ink drawings to the winners. It is s truly unique prize which I am sure will be much sought after for years to come. 4AHA was a privilege to be involved with and is an outstanding collection of haiku in this country at this time.
I would also like to pay tribute to outgoing Vice-President, Lyn Reeves. Lyn has made an outstanding contribution to the Australian Haiku Society over many years and deserves much credit for all the positive things the society has delivered to its followers. A brilliant haiku poet, Lyn has served the society with professionalism, dedication and incredible patience, often through difficult personal times. She has been a great support to me and I will miss her gentle and wise counsel.
There have been so many great things happening here during my term as president, including the solstice kukais, haiku strings, featured haiku and group meeting reports, to name a few. I have met so many poets, too, and I would like to pay special thanks Simon Hanson, Vanessa Proctor, Beverley George and my local haiku group, the Fringe Myrtles, for their valued support at various times over the past few years.
Finally, I would like to welcome Leanne Mumford as the new president of the AHS. She has acquitted herself extremely well as Secretary over the past two years and shown herself to be a person of great integrity and initiative. She will take the society forward with vigour and I am very happy to say that I have agreed to stay on the AHS Committee as Vice-President. I look forward to working with Leanne and the rest of the Committee, including new committee members, Alison Rogers, Maureen Sexton and Wanda Amos, over the next four years.
Rob Scott.
Australian Haiku Society 