Issue link: http://ssaansw.uberflip.com/i/1023716
24 Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (NSW) Inc. There's a bit more to organising a National Championship than just the ability to organise. To successfully run a National Championship the host club needs to work as a team, which means there must have been a lot of quiet work done by the club leadership and members: work to build relationships, to build a spirit of mutual support regardless of which discipline one shoots, to build trust, both between individual members, and between groups who shoot different things. In short there must be commitment, commitment to working as a team. In the Indonesian language it is called "Gotong Royong", which translates as "mutual support": in the native language of Southern Africa it is "Ubuntu" which essentially translates as "I am who I am because of who we all are". This was the spirit in which SSAA Mudgee and Districts Branch ran the 2018 SSAA Big Game Rifle National Championship. For the 2018 Nationals no less than ten events were run and run so that every competitor could compete in every event even if they were sharing a rifle with another person, necessitating the running of more than one detail for each match. By the start of the event on Saturday 19 May 2018 there were thirty-two shooters signed up to compete, making this one of the best attended Big Game Rifle Nationals ever. Big Game Rifle NSW Discipline Chairman Ben Doherty personally designed and made target frames specifically for the event, allowing for fifteen shooters per detail with two spare targets available in case someone with a big game rifle managed to miss the scoring area of the target. Big Game Rifle National Championships Group Three rifles are heavy calibre, starting at .500 Nitro Express power level. Here we see NSW State Discipline Chairman Ben Doherty pondering how much this .500 Jeffrey rifle is going to hurt. State Team medal winners: From left to right Mark Savage – Mark Hibbert – Graeme Wright (Qld), Ben Doherty – Laif Foreman – Andy Mallen (NSW'B'), Robert Christopher – Keith Brimley – Robert McCallum (Vic)