60 Years of Rugby & Community

A Potted History of Our Club

Wakehurst Rugby Club began in 1966, when a group of Belrose and Frenchs Forest fathers decided their children needed somewhere to play. They formed the Belrose Junior Rugby Football Club — three teams, a $2 season fee, and borrowed fields at Lionel Watts and Bambara Ovals, shared with the rugby league club next door. Within a year they renamed it Wakehurst Rugby Club: "Junior" was dropped so senior teams could one day follow, and "Belrose" so the club could belong to the whole Northern Beaches. By the second season, 130 boys had signed on.

But borrowed grounds were never the dream. In 1970, President John Mackaness wrote to Warringah Shire Council asking to lease six acres of Crown Land on the corner of Forest Way and Waldon Road — an overgrown, weed-choked hillside, soaked by run-off from two creeks, set aside for recreation in 1950 and never touched. What followed was a five-year battle of letters, rejections and revised plans. The lease was finally signed on 1 August 1975.

Then came the truly extraordinary part. Over the next decade, club volunteers turned that hillside into a rugby field by hand — more than 140,000 cubic yards of fill, drained, levelled and seeded weekend after weekend. When the contractor went into liquidation, the club carried on. When the neighbouring school objected, they worked it through. The first ground was seeded in 1982, and Wakehurst Rugby Park opened in 1983 — built entirely by the community, at no cost to Council or ratepayers.

A clubhouse followed, against the odds. After four rejected grant applications, the State Government finally approved $27,630, and five committee members put up their own homes as bank guarantees to fund the rest. The clubhouse opened on 13 October 1985, unveiled by Sir Nicholas Shehadie, President of the Australian Rugby Union. The upstairs bar still carries the name of Mike Harley, who managed the build.

The improvements never stopped. In 1999, after a proposed advertising sign was voted down by a single Council vote, the club's great ally Cr Julie Sutton secured $70,000 in grants instead. Life member and plumber Maurice Robinson laid five kilometres of drainage pipe himself, and Don Miller designed the floodlights that brought Friday-night football to Belrose.

Sixty years on, the ground off Forest Way is one of the finest community sporting facilities on the Northern Beaches — and every blade of it is the work of volunteers. Thousands of children have pulled on the sky-blue jersey, watched by parents and grandparents calling "forward pass!" from the sideline in all weather. That spirit — families building something lasting for the next generation — is the real history of Wakehurst Rugby Club.

Noel Martin's complete history, with all 128 original documents, photographs and a 60-year timeline.