Active Page Article October, 2023
By Alison Colwell
Blackberry Festival
This year the Galiano Club’s Blackberry Tea will be on Saturday October 7th. Doors will open at 11am, and you can pick up your pies, or enjoy a soup, or a slice of pie and ice cream until 2pm.
We will be accepting pre-orders for pies again this year. Email the galianoclub@gmail.com with your request. We will have Blackberry, Blackberry & Apple, Blackberry & Peach, Apple Cinnamon, or Maple Pumpkin Pies. Pies are $20 each.
We will need volunteers to serve and help with the clean up on Saturday. Plus, pie making volunteers all week – contact Alison for more information.
The Galiano Club’s New Truck
Three years ago, the gleaning coordinator for the Community Food Program, asked if the Club would consider purchasing a truck. Moving the orchard ladders was sometimes challenging, plus hauling the rest of the equipment and the boxes of fruit. “A truck would make life easier,” said Emma.
It took two grants and two years but this winter the Galiano Club purchased a work truck.And we never anticipated how much we’d use it, or just how much easier it would make life. It’s being used for gleaning, of course. And the garlic co-op. But I also use the truck to pick up supplies for the food bank. The first time I took it to town, I got almost 1700 cans of salmon in the back, plus three carts of groceries for Soup Monday.
And thanks to the United Way and The Victoria Foundation for making life easier for all of us moving food around Galiano.
Galiano Club’s Annual Christmas Market
The Galiano Club’s Annual Christmas Market will be happening over two days again this year. Saturday Dec 2nd and Sunday Dec 3rd. If you would like to be a vendor, please send us an email at galianoclub@gmail.com with your preferred day. (Day requests will be accommodated on a first come basis.)
Galiano Players
By Sonia Baker
Not long after arriving on Galiano, I became involved with the Galiano Players and began producing a Christmas pantomime. Our first Panto was Cinderella, and very quickly the Christmas Panto became a fantastic success. I have directed seven Panto’s so far on Galiano, but now I’ve turned the tradition over to new director, Brahmi Brenner. The Panto is in very good hands, and we can look forward to a wonderful production again this December.
Now I’m moving in a new direction. I’m privileged to be directing a dark comedy with two very talented actors, Joy Wilson, and Christina Stechishin. Working on their character development has been fun for us all. This one-act play will keep you wondering about the outcome until the very end. Please join me Friday October 20th or Saturday 21st, at 7pm at the South Hall.
Come watch these two incredible actors in a play you’ll be talking about for a long time.
For as long as any of us can remember there has been an old wooden building located next to the Galiano Community Hall. It is a simple enough four-sided structure, thick wood boards nailed to unfinished posts rooted into the ground, sloping corrugated metal roof. A single door, no windows. The floor is made up of packed soil and one very old tree stump. One side of the structure seems to have been left open (to receive firewood?) and was eventually covered over with a number of reused wood doors. Originally built in 1931 as a “wood shed”, the structure has been used as a general storage shed since at least the late 1950s. Stage props, food stuffs, archival papers, garden tools, excess lumber, retired furniture, kitchen pots and pans, sandwich boards and much much more, all found temporary and even long-term storage there. In the last few decades the outer walls became a place to post old event signs (in the days when these were still made of wood with hand painted letters), signs that advertised a wide variety of Hall functions: dances, art shows, craft markets, etc. While the building probably served very well as a wood shed, it was never a satisfactory storage shed: drafty and uninsulated, rotting boards, rodent infested. Historic though the building was becoming, it has long been in need of replacement and relocating. Just this past month the Club Board decided to do both. Under the supervision of Club Director, Diana Burgoyne, the old building is being dismantled, the boards and poles saved for use elsewhere. (One of those helping with the dismantling is Barry New. Barry’s grandfather, Donald New, was one of the founders —- in 1924 —- of the Galiano Club and was most active with the Club in the early 1930s. Mr. New quite probably helped with the construction of the original shed, the very one that his grandson is now helping take apart.) A stronger, more efficient storage building is soon to be constructed closer to the Hall itself.
In 1949 a group of local entrepreneurs established the Galiano Light and Power Company. Initially the Company provided electrical power to some 30 customers in the Sturdies Bay area. In the early 1950s the Galiano Club agreed to invest in the Company with the arrangement including the bringing of electricity to the Hall. A single power line was eventually strung on wood poles (cut from the Bluffs) stretching from Sturdies Bay to the Hall. By the early 1960s, with the creation of both BC Hydro and BC Ferries, a more reliable supply to the island of both electrical power and of natural gas (originally named ‘rock gas’) eliminated the need, from the Hall, of all the oil lamps and of the wood burning stove, replacing them with electric lights, gas and electric heat. The need for a wood shed was no longer there.