By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
DANDENONG’S oldest bowls club and its neighbouring croquet club in Dandenong Park are set to start talks to potentially ensure both survive in the long-term.
Dandenong Croquet Club president Bill Jacobs leads a hardy, ageing core of 16 members – who cheerily brave winter’s worst for a hit.
The club has dwindled to half the size of 10 years ago but is still abuzz with conviviality on social and competition days, washed down with teas and $8 three-course lunches for members.
“There’s a lovely social feeling here,” Mr Jacobs said. Another member describes the game as “very skillful and bloody vicious”.
The club is driving for younger players for its long-term survival, citing 20-year-old world champion and Victorian Robert Fletcher as a role-model.
It also is in a drive to join forces with neighbouring and endangered Dandenong City Bowling Club – which has about the same thin membership.
The bowls club’s executive told the Journal last month that this season could be the club’s last, due to a deteriorating green being leached by a neighbouring Algerian oak tree.
The two clubs have recently squabbled over scarce car parking but Mr Jacobs believes they can both find common cause.
“They would have bowls members who have never played croquet, and vice versa,” Mr Jacobs said.
The bowls club had founded the croquet club – for female recreation – in 1921.
Like the bowls club, the croquet greens are not part of the Greater Dandenong Council’s 2007 masterplan for Dandenong Park.
And like their sporting neighbours, the club has rebuffed a council offer to move to another site.
Treasurer Bob Bromfield said a move to the suggested site Burden Park would be the death of the 93-year-old club, as its members living in Dandenong’s surrounds would not travel that far.
“That club’s been dead for a couple of years,” Mr Bromfield said. “There’s only one chap who is a member, who insists on keeping it going.”
The club is offering three free trial games for prospective players, details on 9792 9004.
