On Flagstaff Hill – A History of the City of Melbourne Bowls Club
$39.00
Founded in 1866, the City of Melbourne Bowls Club provides a unique vantage point onto the early years and subsequent life of Melbourne. Historian Alex McDermott has drawn on long-standing club members’ recollections and original minute books and other primary sources to explore the reasons for the club’s remarkable longevity.
7 in stock
Description
No lawn bowls club in Australia can boast of being so inextricably linked with the origins, fate and fortunes of one of the nation’s capital cities. Founded in 1866, a bare thirty-one years after Melbourne’s first settlement, the City of Melbourne Bowls Club was built by individuals whose names still feature on street signs and in early political records of the city.
Those who made Melbourne ‘Marvellous’ also made this Bowls Club. It endured the national vicissitudes of war and depression as well as sectarian and political strife to take advantage of the ‘golden era’ of Lawn Bowls in the 1950s and 60s, when participation rates made bowls one of the most popularly played sports in the country.
More recent decades have seen the Club rebuild itself physically (after the Clubhouse was burnt down in 1994) and organisationally, opening itself to increased membership by women and families in the twenty first century.
Written by historian Alex McDermott, with illustrations by Bernard Caleo, this book introduces readers to the individuals who made and sustained the club through multiple booms, crises and existential challenges across more than one hundred and fifty years. Nestled at the top of Flagstaff Gardens, the story of the Club provides a unique perspective on the immediate streets and surrounds, the city of Melbourne and the wider world.
Dimensions and weight:
21cm x 15cm
Spine 1.5cm
It weights 577g
