Had a flashback to twenty odd years ago in Sydney when there weren't enough Rubyists to get a reservation at the pub for a meetup so we had to team up with the Smalltalk guys. Ahhh, different times.
It gave me a flashback to 2007, when I was a hobbyist programmer and signed up for a Ruby meetup on a whim, and a recruiter called me 5 minutes later and ended up getting me my first programming job. Crazy to think how much that changed my life.
Interestingly, Sydney does not seem to have an event listed on this site when I checked. Adelaide and Auckland lead the charge, with an occasional Melbourne meetup.
As an aside, I dislike the strong association between Rails and Ruby. Ruby can be a fun scripting language. In my experience I'm generally about as productive writing Ruby as I am with writing Python, but Ruby seems to get bucketed into a very Rails centric world of "not the worst choice you could make if you wanted to make a web service" (at least when it comes to meetups).
Maybe it's just that the web service guys are more likely to need a support group! :)
I agree with you, but it’s an indisputable fact that Rails is why the overwhelming majority of Ruby programmers have paying jobs.