The Shellharbour Club CEO Jason Petrolo with the new mural that celebrates the club’s 70th anniversary. Photo: Kellie O’Brien.
A club that once stood as a lone building in the middle of a cow paddock in Flinders is now marking 70 years of having grown alongside Shellharbour.
The Shellharbour Club is celebrating with a community-inspired hand-drawn mural and a focus on what the next chapter could look like.
“We’re here because of the community,” CEO Jason Petrolo said.
“Before Shellharbour was what it is now, this club was here, sitting by itself. It’s sort of been the pillar, to a degree, of what our community has been.”
Jason said the mural was live drawn and featured key Shellharbour landmarks to celebrate the connection between the club and community over its history.
“You can see different landmarks like the gravel loader that was down at Bass Point that is no longer there, to The Farm and Indigenous heritage items,” he said.
Jason said school captains from primary schools coloured in parts of the mural, which would now be permanently housed within the building.
Alongside the mural, this month staff will complete 70 volunteer hours at places such as Lifeline South Coast, Illawarra Multicultural Communities, and Wollongong Homeless Hub, plant 70 trees in the Shellharbour LGA, and give $70,000 worth of ClubGRANTS to not-for-profit organisations.
“We lent our support over the weekend to the Shellharbour Sharks,” he said.
“We ran the bars there and I was the water boy for the girls’ team.”
He said that community involvement, which ran alongside giving half a million dollars in grants to community groups each year, was helping staff to understand its purpose within the community.
“Yes, we’re a big building that sits on top of a hill that’s been here for 70 years, but we’re actually more than that,” he said.
Affectionately known as Shellys, Jason said The Shellharbour Workers’ Club started in a renovated house in Addison Street, Shellharbour Village in 1956, but grew to expand to its larger premises in Flinders in 1983.
While Jason only started with the company 14 years ago and stepped into the CEO role 18 months ago, he had heard plenty of stories from long-time club members about how huge the undertaking was.
“They had good foresight at the end of the day,” he said.
“When they built it, they probably had their regrets, and they did it really tough.
“Hence why they made the decision to make it entertainment based, and lucky they did because that obviously bought in a lot of people to see the rock bands.”
He said from the 1980s through to the early 2000s, the biggest acts of the day from Elvis Costello and Iron Maiden to Cold Chisel and INXS performed at the venue.
The view over Flinders to the Shellharbour Workers’ Club in 1986. Photo: Shellharbour City Council.
“When there was nothing around our business, they found a reason for people to travel to it,” he said.
“They had to get people to get in their cars and come to the business, so it definitely served its purpose.”
He said the introduction of drinking under the influences (DUI) charges and “severe risks” posed to its licence when staging music events resulted in it having to pivot.
“Because the family market started surrounding our business, we had to change with that,” he said.
“We had one dining outlet at the time where we couldn’t facilitate most people walking in the building, but we had an empty shell over here,” he said pointing to The Precinct area which once housed the bands.
“If it had just stayed as a rock venue, the business wouldn’t have survived.”
Jason said now it boasted multiple restaurants, a lounge and sports bar, a pool room, indoor playgrounds, community activities such as fitness classes, bingo and lawn bowls, and even a childcare centre on-site.
He said he believed the club had survived as long as it had because of that ability to adapt to what the market needed.
“From the start, they knew it was going to be tough to get people here and they had to find a way to have a point of difference,” he said.
“I think that’s something the club has always done, is find a point of difference and to make it still relevant to its market.
“And that’s what we continue to build on.”
He said now they were focusing on the club’s future and developing a masterplan to better use the large parcel of land it sat on.
“We’ve obviously got childcare which does extremely well for our business,” he said.
“It has a strong community impact and has a good synergy with our business, so it’s trying to find other things like that.”
Jason said previously it had looked at quick service restaurants, such as McDonalds and Guzman y Gomez, but had decided to move away from that and was now exploring ideas such as seniors living, indoor swim centres, fitness gyms, and health centres.
He said they were now working with council and hoped to present a framework to the community within 12 months, stressing it was important to bring the community along for the journey.
“We’re trying to ensure we’re not only relevant today but we’re relevant in 10, 20 and 30 years’ time,” he said.
“Not many establishments last 70 years.”
The Shellharbour Club is located at 1 Liddell St, Flinders, on the corner of Shellharbour and Wattle roads.
