Good evening all. Tonight we are missing several regulars. Among them are numbered John Snowden, lurking tonight in that seething cesspool of a metropolis to our south … Launceston. Phantom artist Glenn Ford was regrettably committed elsewhere. My own son Daniel, money extractor extraordinaire, accepted an offer from his art teachers at the last moment to go and paint for a few days at the artists’ colony of Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River. Bill Higgins, who transported Sy’s terrific artwork from New York last weekend, would rather spend the evening at Star City with some female or other. The Edmunds are interstate and Panozzo is off sketching the pseudo-rich and famous. What a motley band of unreliables we are!

And so, it is a testimony to the strength and depth of the Phantom’s overpowering hold on the Australian psyche, that Phantom Phans immediately come out of God knows which closet to take their places. How many more, I wonder, hide their literary shame in backyard sheds and behind locked garage doors or inside the covers of Hustler Magazine or the Sydney Star Observer, afraid to stand in the light and proudly declare, “I read The Phantom!”? So welcome to Michael Chugg and Jason Frazer and Jeremy Baggs and Peter Daskal and Phil Connole and of course, to our Guest Speaker, Greg Florimo. You have come out amongst friends. Gifts of welcome have been placed on your seats.

A warm welcome also to Stephen Baggs who has made the trek from Victoria yet again, this time with son Jeremy, and to an ex-Guest Speaker, Richard Jones and his wife Lynette, who join us tonight. Daniel Zachariou, the Supanova ComicFest man is here also.

I know how boring it is for some of you when I go through the thank you list to express our mutual gratitude to Dietmar for his generous donations of artwork for the raffle and Richard Lindner in the Barossa for his regular dozen bottles of Langmeil’s best, so I won’t bother with that this time. But I will thank Sy Barry, the supreme Phantom artist, in absentia, who has provided this original artwork for the auction tonight. It’s a one off. I expect keen bidding under the auspices of the good Doctor. As some of you may remember, Sy was on the verge of coming to one of our Dinners just before September 11th 2001, and understandably, decided that international travel may not have been a good idea. However, time has moved on, and I have assured Sy that plane tickets and accommodation are his for the asking, at our expense. He only has to give the word!

Please be generous this evening … I’d like to raise a record amount for the Children’s Hospital tonight. Our contribution is relatively a drop in the ocean but it is appreciated. We even rated a mention and a photo in the hospital’s magazine earlier in the year.

As is our tradition I now ask you to be upstanding, charge your glasses and join me in a loyal toast to Lee Falk, creator of the Phantom.

...To Lee Falk.

Thank you all.