If you’ve watched my channel for any amount of time, you would likely be familiar with
my club, or at least what it looks like. There have certainly been visitors to the club,
even overseas visitors, who instantly recognise the location – the football oval, the tin
shed, the temple in the background. Southern Cross Archery Club has been my first and only
club, from when I started archery in the Come ‘n’ Try program, to my role as president
and coach, and on the global stage as an ambassador of the sport online. It’s a humble beginning,
and perhaps I’ve never really gone far from this metaphorical tree. What is without doubt
is that without this club being here, everything that has come about from my channel would
not have happened.
That’s why I feel that I owe it to the club to support it through its uncertain future.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had to steer the club through a crisis. Unfortunately,
we’ve had poor support from our local council, who have a lot of negative misconceptions
around the sport, the people who play it and the safety around it. Due to a combination
of these factors, the Council has decided to remove the club from its current location
on Pennell Reserve under a redevelopment master plan.
According to the master plan, the entire reserve is being redeveloped to become a more modern,
open-access venue with new facilities. The current buildings will be all demolished,
to be replaced with multi-purpose facilities. Our particular corner of the Reserve, of which
we have been on for around twenty years, will be replaced with public netball courts and
a playground.
While we understand the overall strategic planning of renewing the space, opening it
up to the public and connecting it to the wider green spaces around the area and by
the river, the master plan has no provision for the future of the archery club.
The council has effectively offered an extremely poorly-thought alternative: the use of the
proposed multipurpose hall for indoor archery.
Anyone who has even seen archery can pick up how ridiculous this sounds. We know that
the Council has searched up indoor archery and has decided that it’s a thing that we
can simply switch to. Same thing, right? Anyone familiar with the sport knows that archery
is an outdoor sport. The standard format of archery, including competitive archery and
Olympic archery, is outdoor. Indoor is done as an alternative during what other sports
consider as the off-season, allowing a club to run events all year round.
It is brainless to think that you can shove an archery club into an indoor hall, that
we’re supposed to share with other clubs.
They have also provided the option of working with the local high school to use their grounds.
I know for a fact that the Council have not taken the step to see how feasible this would
be, and this is an empty offer. I know, because I work at that high school, and I’ve had
that discussion already years ago.
That is, unfortunately, all that the Council have offered.
What that means is that the master plan has no provision for the existence of the club,
and the Council has, up to this point, not committed to providing a suitable location
for the continual operations of the club. This threatens the existence of the club,
as the Council does not see the value of having the only archery club in this part of Melbourne
and have no indicated a serious commitment to keep it going.
The master plan is in its final stages of its draft, and we are doing what we can on
our side to gather community support to show that it isn’t just a private club of a dozen
members that the Council have led themselves to believe, but a community club that serves
hundreds of locals, appeals to a much wider base of support and has planted the seed of
a support network and resource bank that has grown the sport worldwide.
For those who are interested in sharing their positive experiences of the sport, especially
how it would help the community, Maribyrnong City Council has a public survey online. While
most of you are not based in our area or have visited Pennell Reserve, we need to show the
Council that the sport is relevant everywhere.
This is my club. Whether or not I am able to continue with my sport and what I do for
the global community hinges on the whether we see this one through to the end.