The Williamstown community has vowed to keep its RSL sub-branch alive.
Hundreds fronted a community meeting at the Williamstown RSL club on Monday night, where financial members voted unanimously to keep an active RSL sub-branch in Williamstown.
Star Weekly has revealed that Williamstown RSL Club will close on January 3 due to a multi-million debt. Monday’s meeting heard that the club’s trading arm owed $1.77 million, while the sub-branch owed a further $1.738 million.
RSL Victoria chief operations officer Brian Cairns told the meeting that the sub-branch must repay $1.77 million of its debt before it can re-establish.
The meeting was told that the debt resulted from “bad trading practices” by the former committee of management, which resigned in October 2013.
Williamstown MP Wade Noonan told the meeting that he could not imagine Williamstown without an RSL.
“We as a community I think have to resolve to fight to retain the Williamstown RSL here in Williamstown, and that is something that I’m prepared to put my hand up for,” he said.
Hobsons Bay councillor Peter Hemphill, who attended with fellow Strand ward councillor Jonathon Marsden, said the land had been gifted to the community in 1919, saying the community has “some sort of ownership to some degree of this particular land”.
He said the council would do everything in its power to keep the RSL sub-branch in Williamstown and ensure it “not only functions as a club, but also has a place to call home … and we hope that it’s still here on this site”.
Past Legacy president 99-year-old Ella Bambery said the club’s closure was very upsetting.
“I look at this glorious room with that beautiful window and our husbands’ photos on the wall, and I could cry.”
Williamstown RSL vice-president Rob Rowe promised there would be no surrender.
“My uncle’s up on that wall there too,” he said. “My father came back from the second world war and drank himself to death, and he was aged 52. We know how important the RSL is to this place.
“I promise you, we will fight to keep the RSL in Williamstown – if it’s not on this site, it will be somewhere else, but rest assured that there will be a Williamstown RSL in Williamstown.”
The meeting heard that RSL Victoria had been working with Grocon to develop the club site, car park and adjacent house – jointly valued at $4.5 million – into a five-storey apartment block, with the sub-branch at ground level, to pay off the debt.
However, the meeting was told the project fell through when the house was found to have a heritage overlay, which would have made it financially unviable.
