Norm Mallett’s impact on Portsea Golf Club is all the more staggering when you consider he only started playing golf at 50, after staff at his manufacturing business gave him a set of clubs for his milestone birthday. Within six weeks of joining Portsea he was on the committee.
At odds with this midlife blooming Norm’s golf credentials go way back. His father was Caddy Master at Royal Melbourne and gave him a memorable introduction to carrying a bag when he was “just a little tacker” – sending him off to the pro shop to ask for Ivo Whitton’s clubs.
“You’ll have noticed I’m not exactly tall,” Norm says. “This huge bag of clubs came out that was bigger than me. That was my first exposure to golf.”
Not having clubs of his own restricted Norm to teenage caddying duties, but spending time at such a salubrious club left a mark that will surprise no-one who has met this true gentleman. “I always said I couldn’t play golf but I had a good set of manners.”
Norm and wife Loretta ran a manufacturing business for almost 40 years that was the first to bring Cabot’s wood stains into the country. “So we can be blamed for introducing Mission Brown to Australia – that was our colour!”
Norm and Loretta
When a friend who had a warehousing business retired they took it over and for 15 years oversaw three “pick, pack and despatch” sites in Dandenong. That friend was a Portsea member. With the Malletts buying a holiday house in Sorrento around the time they bought his business, Norm sold his birthday clubs and bought a good set and joined him at the golf club.
Always seeking to better himself, he studied business at Harvard in the early 1980s and joined then-President Gerry Kivlighon’s committee. With a focus on finance he helped raise the money to build the new clubhouse that opened in 1993.
“There was an abundance of golf knowledge at the club when I joined, but not so much managerial. That fitted me, I just happened to be there at the right time.”
His nomination for life membership noted Norm’s “can-do” approach upon becoming president in 1995, his business nous and the “strong sense of service, integrity and a capacity to work with others” that ensured he oversaw a successful period for Portsea in which finances were strengthened and club structures streamlined.
Presentation Night, 1996 – Captain Haywood Richards (left), Lady Champion Jenny Jeffreys, Club President Norm Mallett, Club Champion Ben Hayes and Lady Captain Margot Bullen.
“Fair, firm and consistent” categorised his tenure. Norm is a good a listener with a lovely gentle sense of humour. There are countless examples of the latter, including chairing an AGM in the “old clubhouse” when a member with ongoing issues with the building’s acoustics asked what was going to be done about it. Norm responded that he couldn’t hear the question because the room had lousy acoustics. Cue great merriment.
A deep understanding of the power of relationship-building has underpinned Norm’s life, and to Portsea’s great benefit. His chairmanship over many years of the Portsea Pro-Am helped make it the premier event of its kind in Victoria; his knowledge and bespoke Pro-Am strategic plan were foundational to its resurrection in 2023. He has chaired the course Master Plan working group, having first contributed in this vital space in the 1990s, and has fulfilled a bequest made by Jack Carr through involvement with the Paths Project group.
Norm likes to give things a moniker and refers to Portsea as “a first-names club”. It’s a telling window on a place he found welcoming from the outset where the sea breeze carries a casual air that contrasts with the strict formality of city clubs.
“You could be here and be a very wealthy person as there always has been. But you took your turn on the tee, you were called by your first name and nobody gave tuppence what you did for work. That hasn’t changed.”
The simple ritual of presenting golf balls after weekend or midweek competition is emblematic for Norm of the culture of a club he describes as friendly, sociable, not socially conscious, just good people having good fun. And never posh or exclusive.
“The presentation became a specific club tradition and that has been so important to the culture of the club. Because people wanted to win a golf ball, they were happy to just win a golf ball. Having it presented, everybody knew you’d had a good round.”
Norm says culture has effectively become a form of conscience. “Companies and clubs have a culture and at Portsea it was tangible. As soon as you walked into the place people said hello no matter who you were.”
He played most of his golf off around 12-14, and laughs that he’d love to see a competition where you play the first and second holes nine times because “it’s the other 16 that do my head in!” He recalls a friend urging him to improve enough to play even just one game off nine, so for the rest of his days he could call himself a single-figure golfer. “But I couldn’t make it. No matter, you just simply enjoyed the camaraderie, enjoyed the game, you applied yourself.”
Asked who he most enjoys spending a round with, Norm’s answer is instructive: “Absolutely anybody, because you learn something about people instantly.” In latter years he’s been happy to hit it straight and stay out of trouble but reflects that even all of those bad shots and rounds had an upside, embedding an intimate knowledge in the course and all of its terrain.
Norm receiving life membership
Norm has always loved poetry and often reads to older residents in the retirement home in which he and Loretta live. He’s particularly taken with Henry Newbolt’s ode to Sir Francis Drake that includes the stanza:
Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drumm’d them long ago.
Norm added a verse of his own, and dubbed the ode to his beloved golf club “Old Portsea Dogs”:
Take my clubs to Portsea, an’
Put ‘em by “the first”.
Call me, if you need to make a four.
An’ if the weather is permit’en,
I’ll quit the Course in Heaven,
And drive right up the middle,
As I could drive it once before.