Happy 30th birthday

Prof Henry Brodaty details Alzheimer’s Australia NSW’s evolution from cottage industry to professional organisation

By Natasha Egan

While politicians, carers and dementia advocates gathered at Parliament House in Sydney yesterday for the launch of a discussion paper, they were also there to mark the 30th anniversary of Alzheimer’s Australia NSW.

The event was hosted by the organisation’s national president Ita Buttrose, opened by parliamentary Friends of Dementia group co-convener and Labor MP Andrew McDonald and closed by fellow co-convener and Nationals MP Leslie Williams.

It also featured presentations from Alzheimer’s Australia NSW CEO John Watkins and the NSW Minister for Ageing, Andrew Constance.

But the highlight of the speeches came from Professor Henry Brodaty, who has been with the organisation since the beginning.

Prof Brodaty, who is director of UNSW’s Dementia Collaborative Research Centre, told the audience the organisation had changed from a cottage industry manned by volunteers to a very professional national organisation.

“We’ve really come a long way. We have thousands of members. We have lots of support groups who run the living with memory loss program. We give a lot of money out for research. And we have a network of state organisations that really work together as a federation,” Prof Brodaty said.

Prof Brodaty said the service used to focus on the carer but over the last 10 years there has been a shift to focus more on the person with dementia. And the organisation has gone from being reactive by giving counselling to people who phone up to being proactive by offering courses to help people prepare themselves, he said.

The biggest achievement of the last 30 years is “certainly the increase in recognition – Alzheimer’s is now a household word,” Prof Brodaty told Australian Ageing Agenda.

Other key accomplishments include “the fact that we have governments really aware this is an issue they have to deal with; the advances medically, although we still haven’t got that magic bullet; the fact that we can do so much – we can and do help people with dementia themselves and their families; and the fact that there’s such a high research effort going in to try and find the cause,” he said.

Evolution

1982

• Alzheimer’s Australia NSW was established on 8 May as ADARDS (Alzheimer’s Disease And Related Disorders Society)

• Formed under the auspices of the NSW Association for Mental Health

• The first public meeting was held in Teachers’ Federation Hall and attended by 500 people

• The financial resources of the society were the contents of a shoe box labelled “Donation Box” by the Occupational Therapy Department of Prince Henry Hospital.

• The first logo was a handwritten design from the letters of the name of the new society

• The dial of a rotary telephone soon superseded that first logo showing new phone numbers as the society became more established

1987

• The Elephant Logo was adopted – the elephant because it never forgets, with a knot in the trunk indicating blockages in the memory of someone with Alzheimer’s disease

1990

• ADARDS received $1 million by the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and $500,000 by the State Government of NSW to build a Resource Centre.

• The name of the organisation changed to the Alzheimer’s Association NSW

2002

• The organisation formally adopted its new name, Alzheimer’s Australia NSW, and new corporate identity in line with a move to greater national unity

2011

• Alzheimer’s Australia adopted a new brand and launched the Fight Dementia campaign to acknowledge its versatility and strength and reflect how far the organisation as a whole had come

Highlights

2006

• The Bega Dementia and Memory Community Centre (DMCC) opens