The Bungool Picnic and Unpaid Players

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Penrith in the 60s was, in many ways, still a country town. Some of the trains were still steam hauled, and holidaymakers would pass through on their way to the Blue Mountains – or stop off and catch the Bales’ bus out to one of the many guesthouses at Wallacia, some ten miles out of town.

Through 1963-64, Roger Cowan continued teaching while acting as honorary treasurer of the football committee. What started out as an amicable relationship with Merv Cartwright gradually deteriorated into frequent clashes.

The registered club’s main function in those days was to finance rugby league.

In 1964, the registered club committee had agreed to a football budget of £10,000 and player contracts were agreed within that budget. Payday for the players was planned for the traditional end of season picnic on the banks of the Hawkesbury River — Bungool¹.

When Cowan went to the club administration to organise the cheques for the players, he was informed that they didn’t have the money. He had no warning of the problem. Merv Cartwright who sat on the registered club committee and was also secretary of the football club, would known much earlier that the Club was in financial trouble — yet the football club had been allowed to proceed on its merry way without any warning.²

Before this Cowan had never thought about getting into club politics. It was this failure — the inability to meet its obligations to the players — that first motivated him to stand for election onto the committee of the licensed club – ‘to understand how £10,000 could be promised and not paid’.

He was elected, and soon after asked to take on the role of treasurer. It quickly became apparent that the club had virtually no systems of control. Dishonesty was widespread, enabled by the absence of basic procedures.

I started to look into why the club wasn’t making any money. We were losing money hand over fist. The bank was threatening to take action. One of the first things I did was to install control systems for poker machines.  This included a monthly analysis of each of the 26 machines to ensure they were operating within carded percentages.

I also put as much time as I could into getting some systems operating. There was no system for stock control, no cash systems, there was nothing. I began with cash systems. We started to count the money, and balance it against the cash register tapes, and so on. Basic stuff, but it had never been done.

 Cash control was a simple system before then. When trading finished for a shift, the cash would be taken to the vault and tipped into a large container with all the cash from other cash registers. Nobody checked the cash register tapes to see if there was a balance. Each morning the money in the container would be counted and banked.

Rumour has it that one employee boasted that he never bothered taking less than a twenty pound note when he wanted some cash. He bought a new car in less than 12 months working as a bar steward.  After getting a system started, I came in one Sunday morning and discovered a £1,700 discrepancy between the cash register tapes and the money we had. That was a lot of money in those days for such a small club.’

At a special meeting, the board decided that the Secretary-Manager Rocky Davis wasn’t managing things properly, and asked for his resignation. There was no suggestion of dishonesty, only mismanagement.

The Club immediately advertised for a replacement. But the small size and low profile of the Club meant that the quality of candidates was not very high. After three months of advertising, they had still found nobody suitable. In the meantime, Cowan continued holding things together in his spare time – evenings and weekends – and continued to improve the systems.

I was doing the job anyway, as well as teaching. I was convinced in my own mind that I could put systems in place to make the place work. So I just said to the committee one night, “I’m prepared to resign from teaching. I’ll take the job for a trial period if you want to give it to me. And I’ll give you a guarantee that if I’m not making a profit within three months, I’ll resign and you can keep looking”. I agreed to commence on a very low salary.

That was October 1965. The Board agreed, and Cowan remained in the position continuously for almost 40 years.

There is a logical question here, of course. Here is a young man – 29 years old, married, four young kids. He’s a schoolteacher, which is a reasonably secure job for life. He suddenly decides to turn his whole life upside down. There is no contract, no security of tenure – just ‘give me three months to make a success of it. If not, I’ll go’.

Phyllis Cowan says it was the challenge.

He loved school teaching, he was an excellent teacher, but he didn’t like the system. I don’t think he wanted to be doing that for the rest of his life. Many people advised him against it at the time. But he always could have gone back to teaching, she said –- it was easier back then.

It was the challenge that attracted him, and kept him there, she said. He was being successful, the club was making money, it was growing, and he was introducing all these new measures. She spoke of a couple of nights in the early days when he took a blanket and pillow and sat on a roof where he could watch for the people that he knew were stealing stores from the club.

Under Cowan’s stewardship, the club began to more stable financially. The systems he implemented, some while acting as treasurer and others when he took the management role, had already begun to have an impact on the profitability of the business.

Within a year, the club had moved out of the red. For the first time, it had the financial stability needed to think beyond survival.

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1. Bungool’s location was at Cattai on the Hawkesbury River where Riverside Oaks Golf Resort is today. ↩︎
2. This failure became evident at the end-of-season Bungool picnic, when players could not be paid in full.
   See Beyond the Book: The Bungool Picnic. ↩︎

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