The End

With absolutely no warning at all, the SBW committee decided to cancel the membership of Brett Davis at a meeting on April 15th 2025. Under the terms of the club's constitution, Brett then had one month to present an explanation to the committee - although the most likely explanation is shown in the panel at right

The committee had called Brett's many suggestions for improvements to the club "a vexatious deployment of email communication", but unfortunately had not specified whether it was the number, the length, the frequency or the content of the emails that was vexatious. In addition, the committee had never produced guidelines about any limitations on the number, length, frequency or content of emails that could be sent to the club, so providing an explanation was difficult because no rules had been broken.

Brett provided the committee with a comprehensive response - sent on May 12th - which can be read here - the former Webmaster's response to his SBW membership cancellation

The content of that response email was deliberately vexatious so the committee could see what a vexatious email actually looked like. 😀

After receiving Brett's response, the SBW committee met again on May 17th and unanimously confirmed its decision to cancel Brett's membership. They sent their confirmation email on May 19th. As the committee that sentenced the former Webmaster was the same committee that considered Brett's explanation, it is not surprising that their decision remained the same. Brett had until Saturday 19th July to exercise his right to appeal this decision at a general meeting.

For more than a month - from May 20th until June 20th - the former Webmaster made repeated requests via email for the committee to provide club members with access to the allegedly "vexatious emails" so they could make an informed decision at a general meeting about whether those emails were "vexatious" or not.

Brett made this process as simple as possible by creating a web page containing a list of his emailed suggestions - see https://www.emailstoshoalhavenbushwalkers.com/index.html

He sent one email to the club's email address of info@shoalhavenbushwalkers.com on May 20th. After 15 days without a response, he sent a second email to the same address on June 4th.

After nine more days of committee silence, Brett sent his third request for the committee to provide club members with access to the allegedly "vexatious emails" - but this time he sent the email to the private email addresses of all committee members, fearing that the lack of response from the committee to his first two emails may have indicated that the info@shoalhavenbushwalkers.com email address had stopped working. This third request was sent on June 13th.

Again, the committee failed to respond to that email, but additionally, not one of the individual Shoalhaven Bushwalkers committee members responded to that third email either. Such is the lack of fairness and lack of integrity so evident in the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers committee and its members. Brett's emails were never answered or actioned, and the details of the allegedly "vexatious emails" were never made known to the members of the club who were supposed to decide his fate.

After more than a month of silence from the committee which showed that they would not provide club members with the information they would need to determine the former Webmaster's fate, Brett decided to forego his right to an appeal as he preferred to be kicked out by an incompetent committee rather than an uninformed group of club members at a general meeting that could possibly be composed mostly of committee members anyway.

Instead, as a direct result of the committee's continuing SECRECY - and in the interest of openness and honesty - Brett provided the content for this website.

He also sent a private email to his "friends" on the committee as well. It can be read here.

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