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Just over twenty years after the First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson, the first land grant in the Penrith district was awarded to Captain Daniel Woodriffe. As the colony grew, the town, with its strategic location on the Nepean River, became an important stop on the Western Road over the mountains, and later on the rail route to Katoomba and beyond.

Some readers may even remember taking the steam train to the Blue Mountains and having a cuppa or a snack while the train paused for ten minutes at Penrith, midway through the journey.

Rugby League came to Penrith around 1912, following the code’s breakaway from the traditional rugby union game. A regular competition was in operation by 1913 but there was reportedly friction in town between the two codes.

The first Penrith team was called the Waratahs, but for much of its history the Club simply played under the name of Penrith. The name ‘Panthers’ was adopted in 1964, after a public competition.

During the First World War times were sometimes tough for the club. One year, when the club was unable to buy shorts for the players, they ran onto the field in cut-down trousers.

Like many country clubs of the period, Penrith rugby league survived largely through the enthusiasm of local volunteers and the loyalty of its players and supporters.

The struggles continued through the 1920s, and in 1926 the club was reformed as the Penrith Rugby League Club. It was at this time that it applied for entry into the Western Division [Country] League, although there was some local opposition due to the travel demands involved.

Rugby League continued to grow in Penrith through the 1940s and 50s — and was, by all accounts, not a game for the faint-hearted. These were hard, tough men, and there was plenty of ‘biff’.  They were paid little, or nothing and played for the honour of their town — and also because they obviously enjoyed it.

Max Connors was first a committeeman, and later a director at the club, in the years between 1956 and 1981. He says football games used to be played on a paddock just out of town.

They moved to the showground around ’42-43. Cricket was played there in the summer, and the pitch had to be broken up each year so rugby league could be played. It eventually got to be a problem between the two groups.

Connors speaks of his boyhood in Penrith when the guesthouses at Wallacia were a popular holiday destination for city people. When the steam trains would pull in, he and his friends would descend on them and offer to carry the travelers’ bags to the bus to earn some money.

In the early 1950s, Penrith was still a small town on the outer fringes of suburbia. Its one department store was Western Stores — later to become Myer¹. The largest other business in town was Max Young’s produce business, which supplied feed, saddlery and other farming essentials to the district’s many rural properties.

In 1955, the first electric train service came to Penrith². and former player Merv Cartwright became secretary of the football club. Two other players came onto the scene around the same time — Leo “Trapper” Trevena and Reginald Ronald “Rocky” Davis. Both would have an impact on the growth of the club.

The mid-50s also saw the advent of the ‘district club’. Penrith was part of the Parramatta District and competed in the Parramatta A Grade Competition against clubs from Parramatta, Guildford, Merrylands, Liverpool, Richmond and other teams from a huge geographical area. This large area would later be broken up when Penrith became a District Club in its own right in 1967. Today Penrith and Parramatta have the largest rugby league districts of any Sydney team.

Even in 1956, the Penrith club was already showing its potential as an innovator. It was the first junior rugby league club to be granted a liquor license, and its first licensed club building was completed the same year. It was located in a back street of Penrith.³ It had two regular rooms, and a larger function room that was used for Saturday night dances and presentations, etc. 

For almost 20 years, the club also doubled as a boys’ club, and the club funded boxing and gymnastics activities for local youngsters. Its activities were transferred when the club agreed in the early seventies to jointly fund, with Penrith City Council, the Police Citizens Boys Club.

Connors remembers the first club as pretty much just a large garage in Station Street. He says they also bought the house next door, and that was where they held their meetings. The house had previously been a riding school — perhaps an indication of just how ‘country’ Penrith was in those days.

In an ironic twist, the first club building was financed by a gambling venture. Josie Haining — the wife of Bill Haining, a former player – won £100,00 in the Tasmanian Golden Casket, and the club was built using voluntary labour and a loan from Mrs Haining.

Don Feltis has a long history with the Club. He has been a player, football committeeman, football CEO, and is now junior league boss and a director on Panthers’ group board.

He remembers the day that a group of volunteers met to start digging the foundations for the new club:

We decided that the fairest way to work out who would have the honour of turning the first sod was to draw straws. So there we are, standing around organising the straws and sorting out lengths when we hear a ruckus behind us. We turn around and here’s one of the group — a fellow called Nobby Hunter — throwing a pick on the ground and very proudly showing us a hole the size of a bucket he’s just dug.

The building at first had six poker machines — three sixpenny and three one-shilling machines⁴.

Through the early sixties the club industry was just beginning to show its potential. St George Leagues Club was known as the Taj Mahal, and clubs like Easts Leagues and Souths Juniors were already an established part of the Sydney entertainment scene.

The Penrith Leagues Club, on the other hand, was a very small player. It had a couple of hundred members. It had never really been the mythical ‘tin shed’, but Max Connors, a director between 1956 and 1981, provided some insight into how the story came about.

The tin shed that people talk about was actually a kiosk on the showground where they used to play. It was run by the ladies, and the players used to get three free tickets each, and the supporters could buy three tickets for two shillings.

The kiosk doubled as a dressing-shed for players.

As the 1960s arrived, the club committee began pushing to join the league’s new inter-district competition — later to become Second Division. There was strong opposition from the club’s junior league. It was around this time, Trevena and Davis, along with Cartwright were joined on the football committee by a young high school teacher and player named Roger Cowan.

In 1962, the club joined the new competition, along with nine other Sydney clubs, including two much larger clubs, Ryde Eastwood and Wentworthville. Five years later, Penrith would leapfrog both these clubs to take a spot in the First Division competition.

The following year the licensed club underwent a major refurbishment, at a cost of £150,000. The new club had 26 poker machines. The 27 year old Cowan retired from playing football, but became football club treasurer. It was a move that would change his life.

It was the responsibility of the licensed club to fund rugby league, but at the end of the 1964 season Cowan was astounded to discover there were insufficient funds to pay the players. That year he stood for election for the licensed club committee, and became club treasurer, while still working as a teacher. He immediately began to implement controls and measures to improve the club’s finances. The club had embarked on an association with the man who would define its future.

What were the influences that made Panthers’ future CEO the person he turned out to be? What were the drivers behind the culture he encouraged at Panthers? And why much later did he allow conflict to escalate rather than backing away when the odds were stacking against him?

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1. The store referred to was Fletcher’s, which opened in 1941 as a gentleman’s outfitter. By the late 1950s and early 1960s it had become the largest department store in Penrith, employing more than 100 people. Fletcher’s became part of the Myer group in 1962.
   (Source: John Carvan, Standing Under the Weir: Penrith Memories.)
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2. The electrification of the railway line to Penrith in 1955 was a major local event. Prior to this, services had been operated by steam trains. The town formed an “Electrification Committee” to organise celebrations for the arrival of the first electric service. Dave Fitzgerald, President of Penrith Rugby League, served on that committee.
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3. Although described as a “back street” at the time, the club was located on the corner of Park and Station Streets. Park Street branched off Station Street roughly opposite the southern end of the swimming pool (near the showground). The area now forms part of the Nepean Village precinct.
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4. Other accounts place the initial poker machine fleet at ten machines, split evenly between sixpenny and one-shilling machines. See Bound for Glory (Greg Prichard and Gary Lester, p.30). ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

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Because of Cowan’s deep involvement in the licensed club industry, the history of Panthers cannot be separated from the broader history of the NSW club movement..

Phil Bennett¹ was an officer with the Liquor Administration Board² for many years. He remembers some of the interesting episodes. He had first encountered Cowan in the early 1980s. When Treasury was pushing to use turnover as the basis for taxing poker machine revenue, it was Bennett’s job to sell the concept to the clubs. Until then, only gross revenue had been taxed. Bennett said:

The idea was to tax the money being spent by the gamblers — a turnover tax³ — taking it off the top. Roger had a great moral difficulty with this, and he was very vocal.

I wrote a whole lot of papers and reports, and had to present them to the industry. By then I was in the policy section of the Chief Secretary’s department. We used the analogy of liquor . . . Clubs were paying a tax on the purchase of their liquor — which is like a turnover tax. And I also brought out other examples. So, we were trotting out all these arguments, and Roger would come back to me and say ‘that’s completely ridiculous, and a false analogy’. And proceed to explain in detail why it was, and shoot all my arguments down in flames. There was one day I distinctly remember. I had put together this paper and sent it to him, and then we met to discuss it. We were sitting opposite each other in his office, talking about the issues.

Roger presented a different analogy. ‘Look, this is different to a liquor tax. If you go and buy a beer, you pay tax on it at that point. But then you go into the toilet, and you piss it up against the wall, and it goes down the drain — and it’s all over. With gaming machines, if you put on a turnover tax, you’re taxing me when I spend it now, and then I get my money back when I get a payout. But then, if I bet it again you’ll make me pay another lot of tax, and when I win again you’ll tax it again, and again, and again.’

He was right, but we were saying that’s the way all gambling is taxed. At the races, the punter is taxed out of the turnover tax. But it was very funny. He sat there, looked across at me and said, ‘well, the person who wrote this paper obviously has no understanding of the club industry.’ He knew very well that I wrote it.

Cowan does not remember being so tactless:

When Phil asked me to discuss turnover tax I was appalled, and my body language was probably negative. I was convinced that one day we would have higher denomination machines and a turnover tax would restrict the return that we could offer the customers. The turnover tax they were proposing was only 3% and that sounded small enough to get acceptance from the industry. But I was concerned it would stifle the growth and eventually it would be unfair to players. I believed that higher denominations would eventually be part of the gaming market — and that should mean offering higher returns to the player. I knew for example that there were machines in the casinos in Las Vegas paying the player 99% — not many to be sure, but it would be impossible to do that under a turnover tax.

A turnover tax would force clubs to have machines set to the lowest possible return to players, and yet, it would be highway robbery to introduce high denomination machines at less than say, 94% return to players.

So, what I was trying to convey to Phil was that they were not looking at the future potential of the industry.

I was so concerned that I called a special meeting of several of the larger clubs and made a presentation to them of the dangers of a turnover tax. It was a long battle and finally the government saw the point and withdrew the proposal. Even though I was probably seen as the leader of the push to have it withdrawn, I never felt any sense of resentment from the government or the department officers . . .

If it had been a Carr/Egan government, I might have been facing a Royal Commission inquiry much sooner.

Bennett says:

You always knew that Roger would speak out if he believed that something was wrong. And he did his research, so he always knew what he was talking about.

Researching this book, I heard many words used to describe Roger Cowan, both positive and negative.

In recent years some have sought to attach another label to Cowan — dishonest.

Barrister Terrence Lynch⁴ says that from the start, he never believed that the inquiry would find any type of dishonesty in Cowan’s behavior.

I really was very relaxed about the inquiry. If a man is a crook, you don’t get staff five and six years in retirement still volunteering their time to assist him.

Dishonesty was just not consistent with any part of my exposure to what that place was like. My impression of Panthers is of a very internally open organisation. There never seemed to be the sense that if you disagree with Roger, there was going to be any discomfort or risk in doing that. You can’t operate dishonestly in such an open environment. And then, that flowed down through the organisation. I got the impression that he expected those people to be equally open with their own teams.

The events of 2004 have left permanent scars on Roger Cowan. There is no doubt that he sees Panthers as his life’s work, something that he could take pride in on his retirement. In his mind, the Inquiry, and the attendant headlines and publicity, altered that. That Inquiry, and the circumstances surrounding the events leading up to it, is a story that certainly needs telling.

The real story here is the growth of Panthers from a near-bankrupt suburban club into a significant force within the NSW club movement — and how that success eventually drew it into complex and contested political terrain.

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1. Phil Bennett worked in gaming-related departments within the NSW public service, including Treasury, the Liquor Administration Board, Casino Control and as Senior Policy Adviser in the Chief Secretary’s Department. In 1989 he established Phil Bennett Consulting, advising organisations in the gaming and liquor industries.
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2. The Liquor Administration Board (LAB) has since undergone structural and naming changes. Its current successor body is the Independent Liquor & Gaming Authority (ILGA) of NSW.
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3. A turnover tax is calculated on the total amount wagered rather than net loss. For example, if $10 is gambled and returns $100, and $40 of those winnings is wagered again, the tax applies to the total $50 wagered. For a fuller explanation, see The Impact of A Turnover Tax in Beyond the Book.
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4. Terrence Lynch was a member of the legal team engaged to represent Panthers during the Inquiry. Senior Counsel for the Panthers legal team was Bernie Coles KC.
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Commentary and Contributions