As we gear up for our holiday festivities, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the wonderful (and hectic) year that was 2019 at the Australasian Corrosion Association.
Our Melbourne Head Office moved this year to better our association opportunities and now enable us to facilitate training and events on-site. The new premises at Preston Polytechnic will officially open in late February 2020 for all to see.
In 2019 we have delivered nearly 100 events including an International Symposium, full day technical seminars, evening lectures, site tours and our very popular networking and social events. We attracted over 1800 delegates from every Australian state, New Zealand and internationally.
Our annual Corrosion & Prevention conference in Melbourne sold over 850 tickets with our satellite events, including the Women in Corrosion Breakfast, Young Corrosionists Group Dinner and Our Foundation Event and Gala Dinner being hugely successful. We were extremely pleased to have the support of our sponsors for for this year’s event and the positive feedback we received from delegates about our international speakers, the exhibition and networking opportunities, was a testament to our amazing community.
The training program continued to grow in 2019, with over 700 students attending our numerous sold-out courses all over Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Thailand and the USA. We also managed to deliver a well-attended Cathodic Protection series, which is a first for the ACA and quite a feather in our collective caps.
The ACA’s online presence has also seen extraordinary growth with over 8000 subscribers to our mailing list, and growing numbers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Google+ and LinkedIn. In 2019 corrosion.com.au achieved the remarkable statistic of becoming one of the top 50k most visited sites in the world! Nevertheless, our Corrosion & materials magazine will continue its tenure, ensuring we keep reaching our members across all platforms. Keep your peepers peeled for a sign-up announcement in the new year.
As ever, we would not have achieved our successes without our incredible volunteers who comprise branch officers, committee members and partners who all work tirelessly on behalf of our Association. I would also like to make special mention of our Applicators Group who have re-engaged with the corrosion community and are working hard in helping better our industry applicators. They have fantastic plans for 2020 so stay tuned.
So, before we leave for our holiday adventures (or misadventures), I would like to thank our members, volunteers and hardworking staff for their support this year.
On behalf of the Association, may you and your family have a holiday season that is full of wonderful surprises, treats and non stop laughter.
Dean Wall
Chairman
Office Closure
The ACA Head Office in Melbourne will be closed from
21 December 2019 – 05 January 2020
