Charlie Gibson and the Culture Clash

Part 20 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

Although the new structure fell short of the model Cowan had long advocated, it was seen at the time as a significant step forward.

Both Cowan and the board were pleased with the appointment of Charlie Gibson. He was part of rugby league’s inner circle¹, a close friend of Kevin Humphreys, and the man recommended by Mackie and the Super Six for the role of rugby league secretary at Penrith.

The ad appearing in the SMH in August 1980 produced a large number of applicants and resulted in the appointment of Charlie Gibson.

Gibson came with excellent credentials. He had been secretary of the South Sydney club for ten years and was there during the club’s winning streak of four premierships between 1967 and 1971. While the structure fell far short of the ultimate solution Cowan had been fighting to achieve for more than ten years, it was a huge step in the right direction. The Board and Cowan made an agreement that he would concentrate on the licensed club and take no further part in rugby league management. Cowan recalls;

We all thought – great! Charlie really knows his way around the rugby league world and that is what we need. We thought it could be the turning point in our rugby league fortunes.

I thought the board was making a mistake by having him report direct to the board, but I was willing to give it a go. I even agreed to have my contract changed to reflect that rugby league was no longer part of my responsibilities.

Charlie’s role was going to involve a lot of co-operation with the licensed club management in areas of accounting, ground maintenance, and in football-related marketing and promotions.

My vision for the club had always been a structure that united all the expertise available. For example, the club’s catering manager was far better qualified to manage rugby league functions than honorary committees or a rugby league manager. The club’s maintenance and cleaning managers could look after the ground. Financial management could come under the club’s finance manager. Making rugby league successful would require a united effort and a high degree of co-operation.

Problems began to emerge quite early.. They were used to working as a team with overlapping needs, and they felt there was a lack of co-operation that was making their jobs difficult.

The fact is that we were not ready for such a radical departure from the way football was managed in those days.

Although no one realised it at the time, we were again seeing culture at work. This time it was a clash of cultures. Charlie was new to the organisation and we probably should have done more to talk through the tensions that were building. Culture can be a building force but it can also be destructive.

Keith Rhind says that Charlie Gibson was very much a part of the old rugby league ethos. Penrith was developing a culture that was unique, and Gibson often found it hard to adapt. It started out well enough, but eventually the cracks began to appear as the management culture developing at Penrith came into conflict with the rugby league culture that had helped Gibson achieve success at South Sydney.

Tension between the club and rugby league was growing. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Gibson appointment would also create a bitter division within the board and ultimately destroy a long-standing friendship between the chairman and Cowan. It would also light the slow-burning fuse that culminated in Detective Sergeant Mick Howe’s raid on the club a few years later.

When the election was held in 1980 for the first joint board, John Hewett became chairman. He had held that position on the licensed club board for the previous ten years, and he and Cowan had become good friends and built a strong working relationship.

Rhind says that Gibson also developed a close relationship with Hewett, taking him to events and functions to meet the high-profile people in his rugby league circles. Hewett was enjoying the attention. Another director from those days describes him as ‘basking in the reflected glory’.

When a Kangaroo tour was coming up, Hewett told others on the board that Gibson was going to use his influence to take him on the tour. It seems likely that Hewett was pushing for this favour and Gibson was doing his best to accommodate him. But there was disquiet among other members of the board, and Gibson himself also appeared unhappy about it.

Looking back, it was a relatively minor issue. Yet it became one of those moments where personality, disappointment and misunderstanding combined to produce consequences far beyond the original dispute.

Hewett believed that he was about to be invited to join league heavyweights on a Kangaroo Tour², but that belief was against the designs of the heavyweights themselves. When it didn’t happen, Hewett was devastated and the conflict within the Board intensified. His disappointment, and the atmosphere of conflict on the board, caused him to resign as chairman in 1982. But his bitterness remained.

Deputy chairman Barry Hubbard, who was Hewett’s close friend, also resigned, leaving two vacancies on the board executive. Both men remained on the board. Keith Rhind, then deputy chairman, moved into the chairman’s role, which he held until the following AGM. At that meeting, Leo Armstrong was elected unopposed, and would become the club’s longest serving chairman.

Few could have known it at the time, but Armstrong would go on to become the longest-serving chairman in Panthers history and preside over some of the most significant years in the Club’s development.

Nevertheless the tensions that had been building were far from resolved — and the consequences were only just beginning to emerge.

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For more on Cowan’s experiences within the NSW Rugby League hierarchy, Removed Section in Beyond the Book – Rugby League’s Inner Circle. ↩︎
A Kangaroo Tour was regarded as a high honour and a prestigious experience for rugby league administrators during this era. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

A Solution — Of Sorts

Part 19 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Despite the promise shown in 1974, the underlying problems did not go away. Ashurst and Stephenson had settled in — the team had shown promise by reaching the finals of the Amco Cup and the budgeting and financial controls were in place. Cowan recommended that it was time for him to hand over to ex-player, Ron Workman.¹

The committee agreed and Cowan stepped aside to concentrate on the management of the licensed club.

The potential shown in 1974 was never realised. The first-grade team finished in the bottom four of the competition for most of the seventies.

Cowan’s growing frustration with a system that he considered wasteful, inefficient and noted only for a succession of failures fuelled his determination to convince both clubs of the advantages of a united effort.

If I analyse that history, I can see that the real cause of a lot of the internal problems through the seventies and early eighties was my unequivocal belief that Penrith would never achieve success as a rugby league competitor while it had separate administrations. I harped and nagged boards for ten years before I finally won the argument, and even then, the win was only because of the involvement of the NSWRL [New South Wales Rugby League] executive.

Later critics would portray Roger Cowan as a CEO surrounded by yes-men. The events of the 1970s suggest otherwise. They must have been either unaware of or had forgotten those years. It was an ongoing battle to achieve his ‘one board, one CEO’ ambition. He often thought he would never win. Neither side was willing to make the concessions necessary to bring the two together. Cowan laughs at the ‘yes-men’ tag.

For more than ten years, I did my very, very best – put my absolute best efforts into getting one board, one management. I kept going back, and going back, and it didn’t happen. So, no – they definitely weren’t yes-men.

One time in the late seventies, I was getting so frustrated, I thought I’m really going to make the effort here. I prepared a 19-page booklet for the next board meeting. It had graphs, and charts – every piece of information I could pull together to try and convince them. I was determined to make them see that “this is the only way this club is going to succeed”. I gave it to them a couple of weeks before the meeting to give them time to read it.

On the night of the board meeting, I made sure it was on the agenda. The item came up, and the deputy chairman, Murray Clarke, said: “I move that this document be received”. Somebody else said, “I second that”.

And that was it, there was no discussion, nothing – they just moved on to the next item! I blew my top, lost my temper completely.

It was really stupid putting a 19-page document before a board anyway – boards need concise documents. But I’d tried those for years and they hadn’t worked either.

It took me another couple of years, and a lot more frustrations to win that argument. And we haven’t looked back since. Many other clubs now operate the same way.

Cowan’s commitment to the cause was also used by his opponents to brand him as anti-rugby-league. This is one of the major Cowan myths, and it would be used against him many times by many people. It was also another factor that contributed to his appearance before Ian Temby in 2004. That one small trickle that began as a frustration with failure in rugby league in 1971 combined with some other small trickles along the way, became a raging torrent 33 years later.

Editor’s Note: Roger’s long campaign for “One Board, One CEO” was about far more than administrative structure. It reflected a deeply held belief about accountability, organisational unity and the future direction of Panthers. Readers seeking additional background may wish to read Why One Board, One CEO?

Barry Hubbard says that at one time, Cowan and the board executive even travelled down to the NSW rugby league office in Sydney to talk to Kevin Humphreys [then NSWRL president] to see if there was some way for the licensed club to take over the rugby league club. Hubbard was dead against the idea but still felt it should be explored. Humphreys told them in no uncertain terms that it was impossible. It was unconstitutional, and if they tried, they could be expelled from the game.

Local butcher and prominent cricketing identity, the late Trevor Wholohan OAM² interpreted Cowan’s trip to rugby league headquarters very differently. His opinion, expressed with his characteristic passion and vehemence, was aligned with those branding Cowan as anti-rugby-league. He declared with his characteristic passion and vehemence, that Cowan’s meeting with Humphreys was “to get rid of rugby league”.

Cowan’s reaction to this was disbelief. He wonders how any rational person could come to such a conclusion.

Imagine meeting with Kevin Humphreys to talk to him about getting rid of rugby league. Any sane, logical person would know that you wouldn’t do that. Humphries would chew you up and spit you out.

Hubbard said Cowan had returned from the meeting with Humphreys undaunted.

Roger was never one to take no for an answer. He had tunnel vision. He went back to the club and resolved to have a meeting with the football committee to decide on holding a joint election for a board that would have responsibility for both clubs.

In discussion, the football committee had agreed, in principle, to hold the election But when the actual motion was put to a vote, a division was called, and people were asked to vote by moving to opposite sides of the room. It was narrowly defeated. A couple of the committeemen who had agreed to an election now crossed the floor and voted against it.

The internal squabbling at Penrith – and the poor performance of the team – was becoming an embarrassment to rugby league administrators. The executive of the NSWRL offered to help, bringing in Alec Mackie, a highly respected rugby league administrator, who was chairman of St George and a vice president of the NSWRL. A committee – dubbed the Super Six³ – was set up to find a way forward, with three representatives from each board. Roger Cowan was also a part of the committee. Mackie chaired the meetings, which eventually concluded that there should only be one board at Penrith. The two committees, for the second time, came to an agreement.

When the joint election was held in 1980, the new board comprised all the directors of the licensed club. No-one from the football committee had been successful. It became the first board in rugby league history to handle the affairs of both a licensed club and a football club. However, it was only halfway towards the model that Cowan had been recommending.

I believed that a structure comprising one board employing two chief executives would be just as difficult as having two boards dealing with two chief executives.

In many ways it could even be worse. It missed the whole point of the recommendation.

When the boards came together, that is what they did. Rugby league was controlled through a newly appointed chief executive, Charlie Gibson, while I retained responsibility for the licensed club.

A promising coaching strategy for the 1974 season was derailed by a committee modifying it for the wrong reasons. It was years before its time and it might have been successful had it been given a chance. Here we were in 1980 and I had a feeling it was happening again. The system I had been advocating was being half introduced and again the modifications were for all the wrong reasons. You can’t half bake a cake.

And that was exactly the position the Club found itself in.

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Ron Workman is Panthers player number 13, a member of the 1967 foundation team, he retired as a player in 1973 after playing 93 1st Grade matches. In 1975 he was appointed as the Secretary of the Football Club, a role he held until 1978. ↩︎
Trevor Wholohan was a long-standing critic of Roger Cowan, with tensions between the two dating back to 1974 when Wholohan’s butchery supplied the Club. A dispute over an account led Wholohan to claim that Cowan had impugned his honesty. He later attended most sittings of the 2004 Temby Inquiry as an observer. ↩︎
The committee was in fact: Kevin Humphreys (NSWRL), Alec Mackie (NSWRL), John Jennings (Penrith Distric Club), Tom Ellis (Penrith District Club), John Hewett (Penrith Leagues Club) Rocky Davis (Penrith Leagues Club) — that’s the “Super Six” — and Roger Cowan. Keith Rhind (Penrith Legues Club) was on the bench for this team. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

A Solution Kept Quiet

Part 18 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Cowan continues with further thoughts on the bad decision to place Clare as head coach:

It was a ridiculous decision. Jack had some strange ideas about the strategies of the game and started clashing with the captain, Mick Stephenson. Mick was a passionate competitor and was quick to argue with Jack if he thought the coach was talking nonsense. Jack said he would take him out the back of the grandstand and sort him out.

My response was something like: “Jack, if you think the answer is to fight our captain, I want you to know that you will be doing it over my dead body”.

It was one of the many signs that we had made a bad decision.

This episode reinforced Cowan’s belief that Rugby League decision-making should be seated in one body, looking after the interests of the entire club.

Tom Wilson gives an example of the way the football committee worked at the time.

Les Boyd was a brilliant newcomer at the time, only a very young kid. The coaching committee had invited him and his father to come to the club to talk to us. His father was a little short stocky bloke. Les wasn’t much bigger, but he was a very strong looking, solid boy. And he had already started to make a name for himself.

We’re all standing around talking, and Pat Russell — who was on the football committee — is down at the end of the bar, holding court. He says to me, ‘Look Tom, look at the kid’s old man, the size of him. This kid will never grow up to be any decent sort of a footballer.

That’s what we were up against. Les Boyd did grow up, and he became an outstanding footballer — a mongrel, but a great footballer. It was only one man’s opinion, but that’s all it needed back then. It was like that all the time — how would the bloody schoolteachers know?

Appointing Jack Clare as head coach, the football committee cited Masters’ lack of first grade experience, saying he only had coached school football. In fact, his credentials were very similar to Jack Clare’s, but Masters had a far better CV.

So, the 1974 season began with Clare in the driving seat. Masters was to look after tactics, Harris coached the forwards, and Wilson the backs.

It soon became apparent that there was a problem, says Masters. The team lost its first four games and conceded a total of 107 points.

So on a wet Sunday at Warragamba, after a club family day up there, Roger gathered all four coaches in his car, and gave us an ultimatum. He said, “It’s obvious that this is not working, and I’m going to appoint Roy as head coach. You can accept it, or we go back to the board – who will no doubt go to the media, and wherever else it goes from there.

Cowan made it clear it was up to them — handle it quietly and confidentially or suffer the glare of media coverage and the uncertainty of how the committee would handle making a new decision.

For the remainder of the season, Harris became second grade coach, Wilson coached third grade and as far as the world knew, Clare was the head coach. None of us ever revealed to the press what the situation really was. We maintained that situation only to preserve Jack Clare’s dignity, but the reality was that I was first grade coach for that season.

The entire Penrith experience is one that Masters would prefer to forget. He felt very let down at the time.

My significant problem was that Roger … didn’t give me any support … I had to make my own arrangements … I just had to cop it sweet.

I thought that I had made a significant investment in a life change and ended up being dumped pretty much high and dry

In a recent exercise to select Penrith’s best team and coach of the past 40 years, Masters is named as the first-grade coach for 1974, but it’s taken 40 years to acknowledge it. Cowan told a meeting held in 2006 to discuss that 40-year team, that Panthers has treated Roy Masters abominably.

Masters speaks highly of Cowan,

I have a very great affection for Roger. But my admiration for him is based on what he’s done for the club since I left, not any problem that I had at the time with him.

See, you’ve got to be measured in this world – you just don’t define your personal history in terms of a couple of years you spent somewhere, and that forever influences your view of a person. You also make observations as you go down the track. And I can’t deny the fact that he, selflessly, with massive amounts of hard work, has built a vast empire.

Roger’s model introduced a revolutionary coaching plan It was a good model, but it was too far ahead of its time in terms of the politics that existed at the club in those times.

It didn’t matter what you tried to do with those people. If you came up with something new — like trying to develop match plans or produce videos — or had any kind of scientific training, you were completely alien. You belonged to a culture they didn’t like, and couldn’t accept. Yet look at the game now, it’s all scientific, all research and video analysis.

The politics during those days of two boards was treacherous … and it was very destructive and soul destroying. Merv Cartwright wasn’t on the committee at the time, but he was still a powerful force behind the scenes.

My experience at Penrith steeled me for the future.

In 1974, the year that Roy Masters came to Penrith, Mike Stephenson and Bill Ashurst also came — from England, to play with the team. Under the direction of Roy Masters, the team made the final of the new mid-week competition, the Amco Cup. They finished in ninth position in the first-grade competition, and had come close to making the semi-finals.

Although the team had its best yet success under Masters, he opted to remove himself from the politics and coach the Under 23 side the following year.

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Commentary and Contributions

Innovation Stumbles Over Prejudice

Part 17 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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From early in the 70s, Roger Cowan maintained an absolute commitment to the belief that rugby league would never succeed at Penrith while it was a separate entity. Cowan passionately believed that the secret of success was to integrate rugby league, uniting all the expertise within the management structure.

It took more than ten years to achieve that goal. Yet the struggle came with an unforeseen downside — the move to integrate had a negative impact on some relationships and reputations.

Cowan says there had been consistent failure under the two-committee system, and serious conflict.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had taken the easy path and simply kept out of rugby league. I am not sure that it would have been possible to do that and also protect the interests of the licensed club. In so many ways, the two are interdependent. But if I had found a way to do it, there is no chance whatsoever that the police would have walked through that door in 1985.

I know some very successful CEOs of large clubs who have kept right out of Rugby League. I think they were smarter than me. If Rugby League had been managed openly, honestly and effectively in the first few years there would have been no need for me to ever get involved. But I was never about to lead a team working for the success of the Registered Club and have it all blown away by irresponsible management of football.

As the club moved into the seventies, the licensed club continued its growth. But on the football side of things, the club was struggling

The results told the story.

The team’s best performance throughout the seventies was equal seventh in the 12-team competition, in 1971. It was second-last twice and had collected its first wooden spoon in 1973.

Something had to be done to improve performance and Cowan formed a small strategic sub-committee to focus on new strategies. The group included Cowan, Tom Wilson – who would become the club’s director of coaching the following year, Dave Podmore, a local businessman and Frank Ley, a schoolteacher who was also heavily involved in school rugby league. Podmore, Wilson and Ley were on the football committee.

The group devised a whole new concept of coaching.

The plan was to appoint a panel of coaches. The head coach would lead a team of specialist coaches – one for backs, one for forwards, and one skilled in tactics and strategy. The panel would oversee all three grades of football, and each would train the players in their specialty.

This was a new concept for Australian sport and structurally very different. There were similar systems used at the time in American football. Balmain coach Jack Gibson¹ had also spoken in support of such a coaching system, although he never actually used it. It is now in common use in all football codes.

The system was introduced in time for the 1974 season.

Roy Masters, who would become a prominent Sydney sports journalist², was part of that 1974 coaching panel. Barry Harris – a former state representative – was to be the forwards coach, and Wilson, already established as a coach, would oversee the backs. The fourth member of the team was Jack Clare. Clare was popular in the world of rugby league and seen as a ‘nice bloke’. He had been chairman of selectors with the Balmain club but had no experience coaching at grade level. He had coached high school teams and had only ever played five first grade matches.

Cowan and the strategy team wanted Masters as head coach. He had coached a number of successful school teams, notably the Australian schoolboys’ team that returned unbeaten from a tour of England in 1973.

Tom Wilson remembers that some of the group travelled to Tamworth to meet with Masters, who was teaching high school there at the time.

We spoke to Roy for 40 minutes on the sideline of a training session. We watched the session, and Masters didn’t say a thing to the team the whole time. They went through 43 moves – and dropped the ball once. What an efficient team!

Roy had developed a completely different way of doing things. It was a real management concept. We convinced him to leave Tamworth and come to Penrith to head up the new coaching panel.

But it would not prove that easy! Wilson continues,

When they got back and started to work on the new strategy, the old brigade came out fighting, “What would some schoolteachers and a couple of businessmen know about football?” The committee was prepared to go along with the new coaching concept but personality clashes within the committee caused a poor decision that derailed the strategy. The decision was later corrected by Cowan in quite extraordinary circumstances, but the strategy did not recover.

Masters says there were problems from the start.

The pervading culture on the football committee at that time was anti-intellectual. If you were a schoolteacher, you were gone from the start. There was one particular person on the board who really had it in for me. He was very vocal and wielded a lot of power.

There was something like 16 men on that committee, and most of them were the same.

It was never going to work. Frank Ley – who was a teacher – signed me. Roger, the club secretary, had also been a teacher, and here was I, another one. They just would not accept me. And it was all down to the prejudices of this unbelievably insidious committee.

It was even worse than that, says Cowan.

Frank Ley was unpopular with the committee, and he was seen by the committee as the driving force behind the appointment of Roy Masters, so the vote to appoint Jack Clare as the head coach was really a vote against Frank Ley. Personal prejudices easily won the battle over logical argument.

Headline SMH Herald 11 October 1973 – click image to read the article

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Jack Gibson did not coach Balmain. In 1973 he coached Newtown and in 1974, he was in his second stint as coach of Eastern Suburbs. ↩︎
Roy Masters later became a prominent journalist and columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald and is now based in Melbourne. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

The Think Tank Culture

Part 16 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 6: Building a Culture — By Accident and Design

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Focus groups — later formalised as Strategic Planning Groups — became a part of everyday life at Panthers. Glenn Matthews says the involvement of staff remains essential when Panthers considers major changes or redevelopment

Back in the early 70s, with a full-time staff numbering only 30, it already worked the same way. Kevin McGrath who started at Penrith Leagues a little after Roger Cowan, describes how it was then.

We used to have what they called think-ins or think-tanks. They started out once or twice a year, but pretty soon they were every three months. They would get groups of employees – someone from the bars, poker machines, a cleaner, an office person, one of the catering staff, and one of the directors – and put us all in a room together for a day. We had to sit there and come up with ideas that we thought could benefit the club. The ideas could be as weird and wonderful as we liked. Roger used to tell us the more way out, the better.

We had to work as a group, write the ideas down, throw them around, and come up with a list of a final few. Then they would pass the lists on to another similar group, to be discussed and modified again.

That’s an interesting comment, but is it true?

McGrath once jokingly told Cowan he was the biggest plagiarist of all time, because many of those ideas helped make the place what it is today. ‘But he was able to take those ideas and make them become reality.’

For example, one of McGrath’s suggestions was to make the front doors of the club a big open panther mouth – a la Luna Park. This went through the process and ended up as the scoreboard at Penrith Stadium.¹

Penrith Stadium’s iconic “Panther” Scoreboard – this was a later modified version.

Keith Rhind says,

Roger was always working on ways to stay ahead of what other clubs were doing. I’m sure he used to stay awake at night thinking up new ideas. He once bet me that one of the groups could come up with more than 200 suggestions in a day. I didn’t believe it was possible, but I lost the bet.

Cowan used to take people out of their comfort zones, Rhind says,

The main purpose of the think-tanks was to give the staff confidence in themselves. When Roger first started, there were a lot of problems, and staff morale was very low. We had a lot of internal pilfering and other bad practices, and there was no real structure or systems. These groups got the staff involved, they began to work as a team, and feel they were a part of something when they came to work. And we were getting all these ideas as well.

Kevin McGrath says it made him feel good to be part of those groups. ‘I was only a cellarman, but in those think-ins, I was equal to any of those blokes.’

In the 70s, Random Breath Testing was introduced to NSW. There was great apprehension about the effects it would have on businesses selling alcohol.

At Panthers, however, the legislation had positive effects. The Club’s “think tank” culture enabled it to come up with strategies that would take it to another level of growth.

Two managers went to Victoria, where RBT had been introduced five years earlier. They researched its effects in Victoria and what hotels had done about it. On their returned a think tank involving a number of key staff. It lasted several hours, and about 150 suggestions were listed. Once the list was complete, the more crazy ones were eliminated. The remainder were grouped and analysed.

Because of this one piece of legislation, the seeds were sown for Panthers to broaden its marketing focus. Now it would include family activities, tourism, and greater emphasis on food. The session was probably one of the two most valuable think tanks ever held by the Club.

The other, in 1983, drove the transformation of rugby league in Penrith from its lowest point to an era of success.

What began as informal ‘think-ins’ had become one of the defining engines of Panthers’ growth.

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The scoreboard became an iconic and much-loved feature of Penrith Stadium. It was removed in the early 2010s. For further context, see: https://pantherspassionpolitics.com/2026/06/02/the-iconic-panthers-scoreboard/. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

Culture — Pivotal to this Story … and the Club

Part 15 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 6: Building a Culture — By Accident and Design

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Evidence given by some of the Footy Five at the Temby Inquiry – and carried through in newspaper stories at the time – suggested that Roger Cowan had a dictatorship mentality. Some Cowan critics interviewed for this book echo that view.

‘Cowan always had yes-men on the boards’, they said. ‘He was used to getting his own way and resented anyone who questioned his proposals or ideas’.

That’s an interesting comment, but is it true?

It was April 1984 when the Club finally moved to its new home. It walked out the doors of Station Street as the Penrith Leagues Club, and into Mulgoa Road as Panthers. It had taken almost thirteen years to create the physical part of the vision, but other foundations of the Panthers world were being laid all the time.

As soon as a new CEO takes over, a transition begins from the old culture to a new one. A lot of the culture of an organisation develops naturally from the interactions between people. Some of it is driven as a part of the strategic planning. Culture is the unique combination of stories, beliefs, myths and experiences within an organisation that influence how people treat each other and how they expect to be treated.

Every organisation has a culture.

By the late 80s the culture of Panthers became a management project as they searched for better ways to manage the dramatic growth that had occurred.

The words “corporate culture” came to many people’s notice in New South Wales at the time of the Police Royal Commission in 1994. Justice James Wood found that the NSW police culture had been carried through from the senior level to new recruits in an ever-spinning wheel over many years. Because of this, it had been almost impossible to wipe it out, though many had tried.

The Panthers story proves that the theory also works on the other side of that equation. Once the basic elements of a strong, positive culture exist, it too spreads through all levels of the organisation – from the board through management to new employees. The culture at Panthers was resilient and protected by everyone — it has also spread into the broader world of club-land with those who left Panthers.

Bryn Miller is now the CEO of Merrylands RSL Club in Sydney’s west. He worked at the Penrith club through the seventies and eighties, moving up through the structure. His responsibilities included poker machine promotions, entertainment, duty management and managing the new water ski park.

After 14 years in the job, he believed he was ready for another opportunity, but still looks back fondly on his experience at Panthers.

At Panthers we had a very strong team culture. In this ongoing environment of team bonding, you start to believe that there’s nothing outside Panthers. Other people who have moved on have said the same. For a long time afterwards, when you’re talking about Panthers, you still say ‘we’.

There was none of that feeling at other clubs where I worked. You went to work and you collected your pay. If you tried to be creative or do things differently, there was always somebody white-anting you, including the bosses above you. There was none of the structure or discipline that was normal practice at Panthers.

And it wasn’t that Roger went around ranting and raving. He trod quietly. I found some of the situations in those other clubs absolutely abhorrent. But it also taught me a lot.

People who come through Panthers are usually greeted with open arms when they apply for positions with other employers. The discipline that Miller spoke of, the ability to work as part of a team, the creativity, and the leadership skills make them an asset to any organisation.

Panthers’ amalgamations have been an extension of the whole process. Steve Van Zwieten is the General Manager of the Penrith site.¹ He said amalgamations have allowed the company to retain many good people they may well have lost.

When top management positions are limited, and people have that drive and ambition, they will move on. Amalgamations allowed us to hang on to those people. We can move them out into our smaller clubs, where they can continue their growth – realise their potential.

‘It worked the other way too. When we went into those new clubs, we found a lot of good people out there, but often they had had no leadership. As we started to work with them and educate them to our systems and culture, we found many that began to flourish. We had stars rising from all over the place.

‘Growing people is certainly one of our strengths’, says Glenn Matthews. ‘You’ve only got to look at the number of club general managers out there that came through this organisation.’

Around 25 CEOs of clubs in NSW spent their ‘formative’ career years at Panthers. One example is Thomas Paynter, who progressed from bar staff at Penrith to CEO of Port Macquarie Panthers. His story is explored in a companion Beyond the Book article.

That culture had its roots in the early days, when employees were encouraged to believe in the importance of their own contribution to success. Some of the earliest examples can be seen in a removed section from the original manuscript, Culture — An Early Instance at Panthers.

Cowan says there was a strong spirit of helping each other, with less emphasis on seniority or status.

Kevin McGrath tells the story of the first big Sunday night show in the auditorium.

‘It was Col Joye, and the staff was just not prepared for the numbers. People came from everywhere. There were no tickets, it was first come, first served, and total chaos. We sent down for more staff, but it was still not enough, so we called Roger. He raced down and said, “OK, what do you want me to do?” We put him behind the bar working the till. We were his boss that night.’

McGrath says he’s worked in a lot of places, and the boss always says to you, ‘My door is always open’. But when it comes to the crunch, he said, it seldom is.

Roger’s door was always open. I had eight kids, and all you got back then was your wages and endowment. I was always getting into financial trouble. Every time I needed bailing out till payday – or help to pay a bill – Roger would help me out.

Glenn Matthews joined the organisation in 1984, and he confirms that the ‘open door’ really always was an open door. And he says as group GM, he continues that policy. ‘Although it’s not really policy’, he says. ’It’s more than that – it’s a culture, a philosophy that seems to have always been there.’

Matthews says not everybody is going to be successful working for Cowan.

If you’re the sort of person who can give yourself your own pats on the back, you’re fine. But if you expected that Roger was going to pat you on the back, well, that just wasn’t going to happen. He supported and encouraged you and showed his faith in you by letting you go off on tangents, and try new things, so you knew you were OK. But that doesn’t work for everybody.

I thrived in that environment anyway; I always knew if I was doing a good job. If I gave something to Roger that he thought needed more work, or wasn’t quite right, he would give it back to me. He was always constructive, never really critical. And I took on board what he said for the next time.

Bryn Miller agrees that there were few actual ‘pats on the back’ from Cowan, but he says they weren’t really needed.

When we started bringing in the big acts, and it was all going so well, he would present the latest figures at a meeting and make the comparisons. We didn’t need him to come out and say, “good job, guys” because we knew. I now have quite a big staff of my own, and I know that some people do need that kind of reinforcement in their work, but it was never really Roger’s style.

Recognition, at Panthers, was often implicit — built into results, trust, and responsibility.

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Steven van Zwieten left Panthers in September 2007. ↩︎

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Maintaining Momentum — Beyond the Clubhouse

Part 14 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 5: Building the Basics – Business Principles and Property

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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With Mulgoa Road established, the focus shifted to sustaining momentum and extending Panthers’ presence beyond the club itself.

After the blaze of publicity that followed the 1984 opening of the Mulgoa Road premises, Cowan and the management team were looking for ways to keep up the momentum of the Panthers brand.

Around the same time as Mulgoa Road opened its doors, a new water-ski concept had been developed in a Perth suburb. A man-made lake had been created for water-skiing with a novel twist. There was no need for boats. Water skiers queued and were given instructions as they waited their turn. As they neared the top of the queue, they were handed a ski rope. The operator would pull a lever, the rope would become attached to the moving cable and the skier would take off for two or three circuits of the lake.

When the managers of the Perth enterprise heard of Panthers, they made contact. They approached the Club to explore whether such a park might be feasible for Penrith. Representatives of the Club inspected the WA operation and carried out studies to determine whether it could be a worthwhile investment.

Here was a unique and interesting way to build the Panthers brand and generate publicity.

Further, there was a large area of land that had been earmarked for future use, but it was too low-lying for any development – it needed to be filled. Excavating two large lakes would provide the hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of fill for this low area. They would not be paying to dump the excavated fill, nor would they need to buy any to raise the land.

One important point was overlooked in assessing the financial feasibility of this venture – the climates of Perth and Penrith are similar, except that Perth gets most of its rainfall in winter, whereas Penrith is wettest in summer.

In 1987-88, its first year, the park – named Cable’s Ski Park -made a profit, generated enormous publicity and provided all the fill needed for the lower areas of property. It was a win all round.

In the second year, it started to rain in December and continued through most of January – the summer school holiday period, and the most important revenue generating part of the year. The following year the weather pattern was repeated.

It turned out that a dry December-January period was the difference between profit and loss for the entire year. When the novelty died away after a few years, so did the publicity, and the park struggled to break even. For a while it was a great attraction, helping to raise the city’s profile, along with Panthers. Eventually repeated losses could not be justified, and Cable’s was closed in 2002.¹

The ski park decision has been criticised by some, but Cowan later reflected that factoring in the fill requirements for other parts of the property meant the real cost of building the park was quite low. He says:.

On the one hand, the fact that it had to be closed down says very clearly that it was a failure. There is another perspective. If we were able to go back and I was faced with the same situation, I would have no hesitation in making the same decision. The gains far exceeded the losses. The ski park did more to boost the Panthers name throughout Australia than anything else we did, apart from moving to Mulgoa Road.

Another ‘outside the square’ decision for Panthers was the purchase, in 1993, of Nepean Shores. It was an upmarket mobile home village located close to the Nepean River. It had more than 80 cabins, all fully occupied, and several function rooms. The developers had overspent on it and been forced to appoint an administrator, so it came on the market for much less than its cost.

Management inspected the site. They discovered that the current income was less than the holding costs of interest, rates and maintenance – but not much less.

The conference rooms were a strong attraction. They had been tastefully constructed and were practical and functional. The Club’s conference market was growing, and business was often limited by availability of rooms. Nepean Shores could open up new opportunities.

Cowan says Nepean Shores had been finished to a high standard, in fact it was probably overdone for the income it could generate. The infrastructure, although a bit run-down, could be revitalised at a relatively small cost. The purchase price was $3 million. To the Board and management, it seemed an excellent investment with the potential to be further developed for a good cash flow.

Nepean Shores enhanced the status of Panthers as a provider of a range of conference facilities. It became a venue of choice for Panthers’ management and Board conferences. It remained part of the Panthers portfolio for many years and proved to be one of the Club’s most successful commercial investments.

Roger Cowan believes that the physical side of building a business – the buildings, infrastructure, equipment and systems – make up only a very small part of the whole when compared with the other side – the people.

It’s the people who make it work, the relationships and networks, the supporters and the critics. The culture of a company develops automatically as the various influences take dominance for periods. The philosophies, values, beliefs, tall stories and historical landmarks combine to affect decision making and strategy in a dramatic way.

Strange to say, culture was an important concept at Panthers even before the word became a recognised part of the management language.

Behind each of these decisions was a consistent thread — the belief that while buildings and assets matter, it is people, relationships and culture that ultimately determine success – a theme that would continue to shape the Club in years ahead.

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Cables reopened in 2009 as Cables Wake Park and continues operate under a lease from Penrith Rugby League Club Ltd. ↩︎

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Building the Future, A Block at a Time

Part 13 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 5: Building the Basics – Business Principles and Property

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Long before Mulgoa Road, the Club had already begun to adopt a deliberate approach to property.

From the time that Cowan took on the job, the Club’s philosophy was to invest in property that could support future development – even if it meant increasing debt.

In 1965 the Penrith Rugby League Club was boxed in on all sides. The main parking area for its customers was the Council Swimming Pool on the opposite side of Station Street, or on the streets nearby. The old clubhouse had been built in 1955 and provided facilities for a Boy’s Club. In 1963, a new clubhouse was completed next door, and the old building was dedicated to Boys Club Facilities.

By 1970, the Club needed a major extension, and the Boys Club building had to be demolished. It was replaced by the Police Youth Club, further North on Station Street, in a project funded, uniquely at the time, jointly by the Club and Penrith City Council.

From the time the Club had overcome its financial problems and secured a position in the first division rugby league competition, Cowan and the committee looked for solutions to a parking problem that could only become worse as business grew. The Club quietly began to buy the houses surrounding the site. When the strategy became known, two of the closest residents decided to dig their heels in and hold out for some absolutely extraordinary prices.

As the Club’s fortunes improved, management increasingly found itself paying premium prices for properties it wished to acquire. One five-acre property on the opposite side of Reserve Street would make an ideal car parking area. This and an adjacent property were on the market, but the owners were adamant they would not sell to the Club.

By this time Cowan had established the private family company, Phyro Holdings Pty Ltd.¹ When that company made a lower — but still very reasonable — offer to the owners they happily accepted. After settlement, the properties were transferred to the Club at the same cost. Gradually, the Club acquired all the properties around it and on both sides of Reserve Street. Some houses along Station Street were also purchased and rented out until the land would be needed.²

In the late 60s, the Club had also purchased some holiday cabins at Bendalong, south of Nowra, for $25,000. The club sponsored an active fishing club at that time, and it was a popular venue for members looking for a subsidised holiday. A ballot was held each year to see who the lucky tenants over the Christmas holidays would be. That property was sold in the 1990s for $900,000.

Mulgoa Road was added to the property portfolio in 1971.

Even with the properties it had purchased, the Club was still boxed in and very limited in its potential for growth. Parking would always be a nightmare on this site and the use of the swimming pool carpark by the Club’s customers was causing conflict. It was in the middle of a residential area and noise complaints were building momentum. Long-term planning for this site would be difficult.

However, if all the properties were consolidated, it would be an ideal site for a shopping centre, and around 1978 there was interest from a developer. A price of $3.25 million was negotiated subject to council approval of a shopping centre and the consolidation of all the properties including some roads.³ That caused difficulties, lengthy delays, unforeseen charges and a lot of bitterness but it was finally achieved. At that time, the book value of the properties was less than $1 million and it was a good profit for the club.

But it all hinged on Council approval of a shopping centre. Cowan says the first response was an almost blunt: “no chance”.

More work, feasibilities, and growth forecasts eventually led to agreement for a major retailer — but no specialty shops.

However, shopping centres depend on specialty shops. Further negotiations led to a revised proposal, but the permitted mix remained too limited to be viable, and time was passing.

In the meantime, the developer was spending more money on buying neighbouring properties and updating plans and information for Council.Finally, the development application was approved, and the Club was paid. Within a few days the developer sold the site to another developer for $7 million. The other properties purchased by the developer would allow for a shopping centre quite a bit better than the one we had approved. Nearly four years had elapsed from the time the deal had been agreed. A relatively small annual appreciation would have added well over a million to the value of the Club’s portion. Long delays cost money. And we did not have the experience of developers who could see other ways of doing things for a better result.

The first developer certainly made a nice profit and, eventually, so did Panthers. However, the sequence of events gave rise to one of the enduring myths surrounding Cowan and later became one of the matters that prompted a police investigation.⁴

This willingness to think beyond conventional boundaries would continue to shape decisions — not just in land, but in how the Panthers brand evolved.

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Phyro Holdings Pty Ltd becomes very important in this narrative. Phyro is derived from the names Phyllis and Roger. ↩︎
One of these houses was 138 Station St, where the Cowan family lived from 1968-1972 ↩︎
See Beyond the Book — Negotiation with Council — The Station St Road Closures. ↩︎
This is explored in later Parts of the narrative. ↩︎

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The Cow Paddock Purchase

Part 12 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 5: Building the Basics – Business Principles and Property

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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There was one more monumental event for the Penrith Leagues Club in the seventies.

In 1971, the club became aware of a property on Mulgoa Road that was for sale for around $2 million. It was nearly 100 hectares, with large sections of swampy dairy farmland. Parts of it extended all the way to the Nepean River.

In Cowan’s eyes, Mulgoa Road was destined to be a major link in the future. The part of the property fronting Mulgoa Road, about 10 hectares, had already been zoned for residential development. Because of the residential zoning, he saw the purchase as a low-risk strategy, although it would be a massive investment for such a small club. The land would provide enormous development options for both the registered club and the football club. He became a passionate advocate of acquiring the property.

When he first floated the idea of buying the Mulgoa Road property, most people thought he was crazy. The price on the property was $2.25 million, not an amount that could be shrugged off easily. It had to be financed and the Club’s bankers refused. Undaunted, Cowan negotiated to transfer financial dealings to another bank where the management could see that the Club was going places and was worthy of support.

The criticism came from many quarters. One local newspaper ran the headline, “Roger’s Pipe Dream”.

‘People called it Frog Hollow’, says Don Ellks, one of the senior managers at the time. He says people were either laughing or sceptical. ‘It was very difficult to convince the Board, but Roger persisted and eventually won out. It showed enormous vision when he was being ridiculed from every quarter.’

Don Feltis, later a director at Panthers, was at the time a member of the police force in Penrith. He remembers a police inspector friend telling him the purchase was the worst decision the Club ever made. ‘It’s too far out of town. No-one is going to go that far to go to a club.’

Anyone who has ever visited Panthers’ Penrith club, exiting the M4 and travelling along Mulgoa Road, will know that the club is the focal point of a thriving commercial centre outside the city’s CBD.

But in 1971, once it left Penrith’s main street, Mulgoa Road was little more than a country road. It paralleled the Nepean River, heading out in the direction of Warragamba Dam. Along the way it passed through Wallacia, with its impressive Tudor-style hotel, seen by some at the time as an alternative to Medlow Bath’s Hydro Majestic for honeymoons and romantic trysts.

Former director Tom Wilson agreed that many people thought Roger was mad when he proposed the purchase.

But they thought he was mad about a lot of things. At one time we went and had a look at Australiana Village, out along the Hawkesbury near Windsor, when it came up for sale. We looked at buying other land in Penrith too, but at the time we thought it might be overextending. But Roger could see how that whole area was going to go ahead.

Phyllis Cowan remembers that Jamison Park — now one of Penrith’s major parklands with playing fields and recreational areas — was also considered by Cowan as a possibility to expand the club. It was covered in thick scrub and even further out of town.¹

There was a lot of discussion about the land purchase, Max Connors recalls.

Many people in town were against it and some on the Board were not sure. But Roger was very persuasive, he saw it as a great opportunity.

Barry Hubbard said the criticism came from locals, club members and from Council. People were saying,

Why on Earth would they want to buy that swamp? You’ll never be able to build anything on it.

The view from corner of Mulgoa & Jamison Rds looking west. (Unknown source.)

After about four months of deliberations, the Board finally agreed to the purchase.

Hubbard’s first visit to the property did not go well. He had seen the property from the road, but once the decision was made, he and another director, Murray Clarke, decided they wanted a closer look.

We were in Murray’s four-wheel drive. We drove in about 100 metres, and the car was up to its axles in mud. “You’d better get out and have a look”, Murray said. I stepped down, and I was up to my knees. We eventually got the car out, and I went back to the club to clean myself up before I went home.

The boardroom had its own bathroom, so Hubbard decided to wash his trousers in the basin. It was the classic scenario of ‘one of these days, you’re going to get caught …’ . When sprung by the chairman, in his boxers, doing his laundry in the washbasin, he explained that he had just inspected the club’s new site.

Phyllis Cowan says she could never have imagined in 1971 what the Club would become. She could see the drive her husband had, though.

I think that Roger knew, right from the start. And I think if he was still there, he’d still have the same dreams and visions. He was always very conscious of what it was doing for Penrith, that it was putting the area on the map. His sense of community was very strong. Even in the early days he often talked about Penrith becoming a major centre in the state, and how the Club could help.

Pat Sheehy has been on Penrith Council since 1987², he says:

Panthers has been an asset to the city of Penrith for the very simple reason that people found out where we were. So, we benefited as a community by that exposure – and that advertising didn’t cost us anything.

The relationship between Panthers and Council has at times been symbiotic, and at others almost parasitic, says Sheehy.

What stage it was at depended on where you were standing. Often Panthers thought that we were the greatest mongrels on Earth, and just as often council thought the same about Panthers.

But the two have worked together on many community projects and are always ready to forget their differences in times of local crisis, such as bushfires and floods.

Council was particularly opposed to the development of a club on Mulgoa Road. One of the reasons given was the land’s proximity to the Jamison Hospital and the noise that a new club might generate. But the current club was quite close to the town, in what was essentially a residential area. Ellks says the neighbours were already starting to complain about the noise, and there were some problems with young people hanging around in the street. The Club was growing, so the complaints could only increase.

Although he wasn’t on council at the time of the purchase, Sheehy was living and working in Penrith, and has heard much of the history from council colleagues.

Roger had the vision for that land long before anyone else ever saw it. All the pundits around town were saying, “What do they want to move there for? It’s on the edge of bloody town, no-one’s going to go there”.

He was able to cut through a lot of the wowserism that was current in council in those days. I would think that most councillors were middle-aged men in grey suits, who were not really into the whole club scene.

And he had no background in clubs – it was quite brave. What he was seeing was enormous potential, where most of us were still seeing the country town where we’d grown up. He had this whole concept of what Panthers could become, which I don’t believe was shared by many people. He certainly had to convince the board – and he didn’t get a lot of support from the people on council at the time.

Yes, he was definitely seen as an upstart. Especially wanting to set up this huge expanse of club-land. They thought he was biting off more than he can chew, driving too far, too quickly. To some extent, I think the belief – and hope – in council was that this bloke will end up being put in his place.

That thinking was to continue, at least in some quarters, over the entire Cowan years at Panthers. One particular aspect irked Cowan for the rest of his life — how Council managed the disposal of two roads on the Station Street property. For further background see Beyond the Book — Negotiating with Council: The Station Street Road Closures.

With the purchase of the Mulgoa Road property going ahead, Roger Cowan faced the prospect of raising the money to develop the site. Cowan came up with some unusual ideas about how to do it, says Tom Wilson.

Anyone who knows Penrith knows that there’s vast deposits of sand and gravel under the land all along the river, right through to Castlereagh. The quarries on the northern side of the city have been operating for many years. One of Roger’s early concepts to finance the development was to mine some of the blue metal under the new site. The idea was to sub-contract the work out to BMG, who would take it over the river to Emu Plains and process it.

The concept did not get very far. There was no way it would ever be approved, given the position and the need for thousands of noisy trucks plying back and forth on the edge of town, holding up traffic on the narrow bridge across the river. But he said it was typical of Cowan’s style, to look beyond what’s in front of your face and see what could be.

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Jamison Park already included playing fields, the scrub referred to here was at the southern end of the Park.
↩︎
Pat Sheehy retired from Penrith City Council in 2008. He passed away in 2025. ↩︎

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Entertainment, Experience & Prestige

Part 11 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 5: Building the Basics – Business Principles and Property

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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With a broader audience now emerging, attention turned to what would bring people in — and keep them coming back.

Another early innovation was an in-house band, fully employed by the club. Rhind believes it was one of the first in the industry — and unheard of for such a small club. At the time, the Board was resisting putting poker machines in the upstairs auditorium area.

Roger persisted, finally convincing them to trial half a dozen machines upstairs for four hours on a Saturday night — between 6 and 10pm. He and a couple of the assistant managers would carry them upstairs and bring them back down again later.

The trial was successful; the figures increased, and the machines went upstairs permanently.

Rhind says he and Cowan were both in their thirties but most of the Board at the time were older men who sometimes found it a bit more difficult to cope with all the change being promoted by management.

However, they all shared a quality that would help overcome obstacles. They had a strong sense of ownership of the club they had helped build, and they wanted it to be secure for the future.

There were no hidden agendas and no ambitions of personal gain. It was about loyalty to a common cause. It was their club, and they would do whatever was necessary to protect it.

In the early 1970s the club began to put on prawn nights, other special nights, Sunday afternoon concerts and talent quests. Max Connors recalls,

Mum and Dad would come in for whatever was on, and they would always put a few bucks in the pokies. Roger was doing surveys all the time. He told the board that we had to start to give a little back to people to encourage them to come to the club, even though we might lose a little money on the prawn nights.

Bringing in the couples meant that women were starting to come to the club. It was changing the whole social scene. Back then, there were not many places that women could go, especially if they were on their own. They could come in either with a partner, or a girlfriend, and enjoy a regular night out.

The final shift away from the club’s traditional male bastion came with the launch of what became known as the “purple passion pit”, one of the new extensions to the club. Kevin McGrath remembers,

The room was quite stunning, with beautiful décor, purple furniture and fittings and large fish-tanks along one wall. It had poker machines, comfortable lounges and a full bar and it very quickly became the most popular area in the club.

Also, to attract the mixed market, the club began to focus on entertainment. This was an extraordinary time for the Penrith Leagues Club, says Bryn Miller, who was part of the club’s entertainment team in the seventies.

The first auditorium only held 580 people, so by today’s standards, it was not a big room. Don Ellks was the entertainment manager at the time, and he and Cowan formed an association with an agent, John Hansen. The Board approved their recommendation that the club set up its own entertainment agency as a joint venture with Hansen.

Through the new company, Prestige Attractions¹, the club set out to bring in major overseas acts — performers who were appearing at leading Sydney nightclubs such as Chequers², as well as venues like St George Leagues and Souths Juniors — artists such as Roy Orbison, Rolf Harris, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Hollies, and the Mamas and the Papas.

But we would get them on Tuesday nights — traditionally a dead night in the entertainment industry. Most artists didn’t get bookings for Tuesdays, so we could get them at a good rate. We would put on prawn nights, and beef and burgundy nights, and still charge reasonable prices. These shows were every second Tuesday, and the response was phenomenal. People came from all over Sydney.

We needed to find a way to get more people in, and at the time, there was a fountain in the middle of the auditorium. We ripped that out, and the room was able to hold 800.

We started to advertise in Sydney newspapers, which was our first real exposure out of Penrith. Here we were, this little hick country town, and we were really getting known out there.

Miller adds,

Sundays were another big night. It was Australian rock night, with bands such as Skyhooks, Sherbert, the Little River Band and INXS appearing in the auditorium.

But the building of success inside the club was creating pressures that could not be resolved within its existing footprint.

1982 Advertisement for the week’s rock entertainment.

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Prestige Attractions was a joint entertainment venture involving Penrith Leagues Club and entertainment promoter John Hansen during the 1970s.
↩︎
Chequers was one of Sydney’s best-known nightclub venues during the 1960s and 1970s, regularly hosting major Australian and international entertainers ↩︎

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