The state’s surf clubs are struggling, and sausage sizzles won’t cut it any more

It took 25 years of sausage sizzles and shaking the tin for a small northern NSW surf club to fund a new clubhouse to replace the 1967 brick and fibro facility.

Every time Brunswick Heads Surf Life Saving Club neared its target, the small community north of its more glamorous neighbours in Byron Bay hit another disaster. First COVID, then bushfires, court cases, floods and asbestos added delays, increased cost and washed out its savings like a rogue wave.

In the end, Brunswick could only afford half a new clubhouse.

Last Saturday, the club kick-started a $5 million fundraising drive to add the second floor, designed for functions and weddings to generate revenue, which was approved in its original development application.

“Sausage sizzles will not get that done for us,” said Ray Linabury, the head of its building committee for the past 15 years.

About two-thirds of NSW’s 129 clubs are being replaced, repaired or upgrading weather-beaten windows and roller doors, Surf Life Saving NSW chief operating officer Phil Ayres said.

Many clubs were near the end of their lives. Those in the regions had “less propensity to fund” new ones. Some clubs gave up, Ayres said. Others didn’t “get going because it’s just too unachievable”.

He took his hat off to Brunswick.

“It has nearly broken them, and the club financially.”

Unlike big Sydney surf clubs such as Maroubra, Manly, and Bronte that are planning or building new clubhouses, Brunswick did not receive any local council funding.

Serving an area where the median household income is about 40 per cent of Bronte’s, it is short on affluent club members and sponsors.

Before COVID, Linabury and club president Craig Reid thought they’d raised enough, with $3.8 million from the Berejiklian government, $600,000 in the savings account, and $650,000 from the state’s surf club facility grant.

“That was enough for us to build a two-storey ‘you beaut’ surf club with a whole fully functioning surf club on the bottom and on the top floor,” Linabury said.

Reid said it became “obvious that we could never save enough money to get a new club … because if we saved $100,000 in 12 months, building costs went up $150,000”. And it spent its savings on cleaning up asbestos uncovered on the site.

In the past decade, Surf Life Saving NSW membership has grown by 10,000 (mostly new female members) to 82,585 last December; about five times as many as in the 1960s when most clubhouses were built. But the facilities are too small and unfit for purpose for today’s membership (nearly half female) and the large numbers of families and the Nippers who regard it as a social hub.

In 1980, Jenny Kenny was one of the first women to train as a lifesaver. Back then, she was lucky if a clubhouse had a female toilet. “There was a lot of resistance from male members – partly misogyny and unwillingness to believe women could do the work.”

Her club at Cudgen Headland on the NSW Far North Coast also wants to rebuild, partly to provide an “equitable environment” for its female members.

It has four showers for men, two toilets and a urinal. Women, nearly half the members, have two toilets and two showers.

Even the new clubs she visits don’t have enough. “They forget women have periods, get UTIs, and need more.”

Volunteer lifesavers prevent drowning, supplement councils’ paid lifeguards and teach children surf safety. But their clubs occupy some of Australia’s most contested real estate: beachfront, views, public land and Indigenous history.

“Nobody wants their patch of paradise to change,” Linabury said.

In Brunswick, a local suggested the club move its lifesaving gear to the school’s grounds – a 10-minute walk from the beach and over a little bridge.

In Bronte, club members had their cars keyed by locals who opposed earlier plans for a new clubhouse.

With 1000 Nippers and members under 18, and about 800 adult members, Bronte is three times the size of smaller clubs like Brunswick.

Compared to Brunswick’s $600,000 in savings, the eastern suburbs club raised $7.6 million through donations, federal, state and Surf Life Saving grants. Waverley Council also contributed $15 million towards the cost of the $31 million facility, which will be shared with council lifeguards and park staff.

There are parts of the public who will turn around and go, ‘Why are they the tenants of this unbelievable building?’

Bronte SLSC president Basil Scaffidi has been planning the new clubhouse for 13 years. Several proposals, though, failed to win public support. Finally, a new clubhouse designed by award-winning Warren and Mahoney – the fourth architectural practice consulted – is under construction.

Scaffidi said the club initially didn’t consult or listen enough to locals, and members presumed the public knew (and cared) that Surf Life Saving was a non-profit that saved lives.

“There are parts of the public who will turn around and go, ‘Why are they the tenants of this unbelievable building?’” he said.

“We didn’t start too well. We came out with some designs and the community just didn’t like them. And all hell broke loose.”

He told members that they shouldn’t feel entitled to use this valuable land on the beachfront in the middle of a historic park.

Architect Sven Ollmann, a principal with Warren and Mahoney, benefited from reading the hundreds of objections to previous proposals.

Locals said repeatedly that they weren’t going to give up a “square centimetre of either sand or park”.

The solution was to add parkland, covering the rooftop of the new clubhouse in a blanket of grass – and move the clubhouse a bit further back into the hill so it was mostly hidden from view from above.

Up in Brunswick, Linabury, 75, has written guides for others planning a new club. It includes a section on why they need “an Emma”, a woman at the council who rescued them from a bureaucratic nightmare. “If you don’t watch [ABC TV planning department satire] Utopia you should. I thought that it was a comedy, I now believe that it is a documentary.”

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