CWA Victoria elects Marion Dewar as its president

The newly installed president of the Country Women’s Association knows how to make an organisation sound pitch perfect.

Newly elected CWA Victoria president Marion Dewar from the Gippsland Hills branch during the organisation’s annual general meeting last week at Williamstown Town Hall. Picture: Dannika Bonser

BEING president of any major organisation requires its membership all singing from the hymn sheet.

So the top job at the Country Women’s Association should come naturally to Marion Dewar.

The freshly appointed CWA state president has a degree in music education, a master’s degree in theology and served as a music teacher for more than four decades.

Mrs Dewar took over the reins from Lyn Harris at this year’s state conference in Williamstown last week and, unsurprisingly, is keen for education to be a key theme of her presidency.

CWA Victoria conference

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“The association has always educated its members in various ways — mainly instruction in home industries to start with in the early days,” she said.

“It was essential in the time of the Depression to have those skills and now here we are, 90 or so years later, and a new generation are exploring how to make things around the home, to save money and be more environmentally friendly.”

Mrs Dewar joined the CWA in 1981 but her ties to the organisation started decades earlier.

“My stock answer about joining the CWA is that I became a member from nine months before I was born,” she said.

“My mother (Elinor Scott) was a practising, active and dedicated member from when she married in 1946 until the day she died in mid-2013. She was a life member of the association.”