By Callum Ludwig
Past and present members of the Warburton Tennis Club, as well as Tennis Victoria CEO Kim Kachel, came together on Saturday 16 November for a celebration of the club’s history.
In one of the most tumultuous years in its history, the Warburton Tennis Club marked 120 years in 2024 with an eye to the future.
Warburton Tennis Club President John Champion the night was wonderful and had a really warm feeling about it.
“It was wonderful that there were people that were probably older, in their 70s or 80s or something like that, and were really happy to be there and relive some parts of their lives,” he said.
“Later on in the night we called up groups of players from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s and 90s, not just players, but also office-bearers and members and as they came up in groups they all told some individual stories which was really nice; some of those were tennis-related and some of them were stories about horses or dogs eating cakes.”
The Warburton Tennis Club spent the start of this year fighting for their club to remain at it’s historic riverside site, with Yarra Ranges Council’s Warburton Place Plan and Urban Design Framework initially floating the idea of a move of the courts to the Warburton Recreation Reserve and away from their traditional clubrooms.
Mr Champion said he believes the club is well-placed now to host more regular community events and gatherings.
“I asked some of the older people if they get together much still or see each other often and they said ‘Probably not apart from funerals’ and I just reflected that there’s so much history and so many people have been through that club, but we don’t actually do things like this regularly enough,” he said.
“We’ve tried over many years different kinds of fundraising or different events to get people, and this has probably been our most successful getting together of people, it was not a fundraiser, but just the amount of people that we got there.,” he said.
“I would really like to think that maybe every couple of years we could do it, the format we had was people got there at 5.30pm and then they were kind of free to leave between 8 and 9pm,”
“I think definitely we will run more of these things, and it’s lovely to have different generations, from the current girls team who are in their teens, up to people that are 70 and 80 together.”
The Warburton Tennis Courts and Club House, as well as the nearby Swing Bridge and Rotunda, are on the Yarra Ranges Heritage Database.
The Club was established by Elijah and Clementia Story in 1904, with Clementia later leaving gifting the club 25 pounds in her will, as part of various donations to community groups. This money was put towards the building of the clubhouse.
According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Pre-Decimal Inflation Calculator, 25 Australian pounds in 1926 would be worth about $2374.93 in today’s dollars.
