A removed section from the original Chapter 5: Building the Basics — Business Principles and Property. This examines the challenges faced in negotiating with Council over the Station Street site.
Roger reflected that certain individuals within Council held the view — and perhaps the expectation — that he would eventually be taken down a notch or two. To this day one aspect of this attitude irks Cowan, describing it as one of his worst memories.
While others involved in the negotiations may have viewed the issues differently, Roger believed the Club received little recognition for its contribution to the community. In his view, the charges and conditions imposed during the sale and development process reflected a lack of support for what Panthers was attempting to achieve.
I think the Club was treated very unfairly by Council. Before we could start building on Mulgoa Road, we had to sell the Station Street site. Council made it extraordinarily difficult. One of the conflicts related to two roads on the Station Street property. One of them was no more than a line on a map. It had never been a road. But the only way we were going to be able to sell that property was to negotiate with Council. The price Council sought was $850,000 — around a quarter of the total amount the Club expected to receive for the entire property.
I tried everything to get a better deal. I told them of a similar case where a club had been able to negotiate an agreement with its local council to close a road for the nominal sum of $1, as a sign of support for the club.
Our involvement in our community was far greater than that of the other club. For instance, we had previously agreed to a joint venture with Council to build a Police Citizen’s Boys Club in Penrith. It was the first boys club ever built without the need to raise funds from the public. We were sponsoring most sports in the area. On top of this the Club’s work to get Penrith to the elite level of rugby League had dramatically increased the city’s profile. I thought we had earned the right to support from Council, rather than obstruction. The city was benefiting on a number of levels from the work we had done, and it was giving nothing back. In fact it was profiteering from our planning.
I told them what we were planning to do would be a tremendous boost for Penrith. But all they saw were the problems, rather than the advantages.
The roads incident was not the only problem imposed on us by Council over that property sale. Another episode contributed to a very nasty police investigation a few years later.
One of the key issues underlying these negotiations related to what are known as paper roads. Paper roads are sections of land set aside by councils for roads in the future. According to Pat Sheehy:
Council planners had discovered the paper road in earlier negotiations for the property. It meant that Panthers did not own the whole site, with the result that Council said “OK, if you want to buy that land back from us, this is what we’re going to charge. All this happened before I was on council, but as far as Panthers was concerned it was absolutely exorbitant.
Robinsons 1957 Street Directory showing Frederick St ( a “paper road”) between Station & Wooddriff Sts. The other street in the negotiation was Park St.
Cowan said the problems extended beyond the property sale and continued into the approval process for the new site:
Council imposed a per hectare sewerage fee on the property based on the total area of land we owned. We were planning to build the club on an area of about 8 hectares. Most of the land was flood-prone, so you couldn’t build on it anyway. But we were hit with this huge bill, based on 86 hectares.
We had to negotiate to defer the payment, but this also became an issue. Even though we eventually came to an agreement, there are still people on Council who believe that Panthers ripped off the Council over that sewerage fee. Under the circumstances, that’s quite laughable
These issues illustrate the complexity of the negotiations and the differing perspectives that would continue to shape relations between the Club and Council.
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.
Penrith Rugby League Club 1973 Annual Report – middle page spread. Main image shows the Mulgoa Rd property with various points of interest. The smaller images are an early aerial shot of Penrith Park and an artsis impression of a club design. Click image to enlarge.
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 seeBeyond 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. ↩︎
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 