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Laurel Clarke – office manager retires |
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Monday, 21 December 2009 00:00 |
Laurel Clarke at her retirement party
December 18th brings to an end the TDA career of Laurel Clarke who has been at the “sorting table” end of TDA for almost 18 years. Laurel has been the voice on the phone, the first point of contact for all those years and with her go thousands of personal contacts that will remember her happy, smiling voice.
With Laurel go almost the last links to the traveling roadshows, the Building Information Centre Showroom, the Advisory Service, and the NSW Timber Framing Manual. Laurel was our coordinator, the roster maker, the librarian, the go-to girl, and our contact man. When we were in the field pre-mobile phones, she was our lifeline.
Laurel commenced working for TDA in May 1992, and has seen TDA change tremendously in that period of time: from a direct industry funded association for which timber promotion and training were paramount to an association enjoying national levy funding – and able, thereby, to focus on research and development. She started not long after TDA moved into Nichols Street, Surry Hills, to be part of what was a short lived unification of the NSW state timber associations. And she has seen the wheel go full circle as all three associations, TDA, TABMA and FPA come back together at the new complex in St Leonards.
At the turn of the millennium and with little call for roadshows, seminars and training, TDA developed the Australian Timber Design Award (ATDA) program, a project that Laurel has made her own. Now ten years since its first introduction the program has grown from a local production to one that is presented nationally. Laurel has been responsible for the entries, the judging, the presentation nights and the displays. She regularly converses with architects, designers and engineers across the country, cajoles them to enter and coerces them to send in their project details. The ATDA has come of age under her watchful eye, a legacy of which she can feel very proud.
Laurel has been the public persona of TDA for all those years, and those who have worked with her will miss her daily antics, the tea and coffee, the boys, the laugh and the talking. At the height of each ATDA year Laurel has threatened to retire and this year it has actually happened – but as the true professional she is, she waited till all was finished. We never thought she would do it any other way.
Laurel you go with all our love. Enjoy your travels and have a happy retirement. |
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