The Ponderers

Meeting every Wednesday, 7:30pm upstairs @ Mars Hill Cafe; 331 Church St, Parramatta. Just turn up and join in!

'The Ponderers' is an idea I got from a country pub in Cranbook, Western Australia. Once a month a group of people (usually about eight of them) would get together in the pub for a chat around a table. The chat would be over a topic they agreed on at the end of their last meeting. E.g. Love, Happiness, what three things would you bring to a deserted island, drugs, sex... etc whatever.

Anyway, literally anyone can join in the group and the chat goes for an hour or two where everyone gets to have a say and hear each other's opinions. It's very casual.

What appealed to me mostly about this was that it was a social outlet that wasn't based around banal chit chat and it wasn't based around getting off your face and picking up.

It was just based around hearing different people's opinons on interesting topics in a non-competitive environment (with no politcal, business or religious agenda), where everyone had an equal say. That's it, pretty simple, really.

Anyway, the Parramatta gig has been going like this. Each week from Wednesday 7:30pm til 9:30 we start on a topic and then usually end up on several others topics by the end. We then choose the topic which interests us the most and make that the starting point for next week.