The Women of Portsea

Early Years

Since even before Portsea Golf Club formally existed, the contribution of women has been immense. Known as ladies in the beginning and Associates until 1986, whatever the moniker of choice they have played a vital part in shaping the identity of their beloved club through its first 100 years.

Indeed, if not for the generosity and enthusiasm of the Misses Cain – sisters Kathleen and Mabel who ran the Nepean Hotel – Portsea GC might never have existed. Arthur Relph’s vision for a golf course (which coincided with his famous encounter with a bull) soon led him to the Cains. Community-minded, they offered to sell the land to the fledgling club, took out shares in The Portsea Lands Company Pty Ltd that funded the enterprise, helped clear 96 acres that would include the course, and were among those who helped membership numbers surge into triple figures within months of the 1926 opening.

There have been exceptional golfers, from Barbara Gallagher with her eight club championships in a row to 12-time winner Jenny Jeffreys. Others, like Olga Hill and Grace Phillingham, left such a mark that trophies are contested in their name. Always, there has been a commitment by the women of Portsea to use golf as a vehicle to help others through fundraising for community and charitable groups.

As enduring as their willingness to roll their sleeves up and get things done has been the pure, unbridled fun they bring to and derive from their club, often tinged with an absurdity sitcom writers would be proud to pen.

Of 29 inaugural members elected to the club at the first meeting on December 31, 1925, 10 were women. By the following September, 32 women were members. Their standing within the club continued to rise, most significantly in 1950, when a resolution was passed “concerning the proposed formation of an associates’ committee”.

The Bull’s Roar records that the women celebrated this landmark moment by immediately arranging for the installation in the original clubhouse of a secure cupboard with a power point, and the purchase of an electric jug and an urn in order to better cater for guest and charity fundraising days. The formation of the Mornington Peninsula District Golf Associates’ Association Pennant competition the following year gave them the perfect stage to showcase their love of a get-together, establishing a reputation as hosts with the most that has only grown over the years.

“Bringing everything from home, they served scones and pikelets with morning tea before going out to play,” the Bull’s Roar reported of early women’s Pennant days. “For lunch, after matches were completed, they provided home-made casseroles and sponge cakes.”

The women “rapidly created a lively presence in the rather austere surroundings of the old clubhouse”. By 1954 they were harassing the committee for clubhouse improvements, which resulted in the installation of a stainless steel sink in the ladies room. This helped with washing up, while a BYO ethos was ingrained that would be the foundation of many convivial golf club gatherings for decades to come.

“Everything had to be provided – food, cutlery, crockery, vases, flowers, even the washing up materials were brought in washing baskets. The Portsea associates became renowned for their hospitality and their home-made specialities. Their basic menu included cold meat and salads, trifle, fruit salad and pavlova, all prepared and carried to the clubhouse for midweek guest and charity events. For open days, when the clubhouse was too small, the associates were given the use of the Nepean Hotel. They would still arrange everything and bring the food themselves!”

Toil for greater good has been a constant, with women ever-willing to step up and get things done. Like Min Wright-Smith, who in 1957 made shelves and hung curtains in the clubhouse, built a padded bench for the ladies’ room and ensured the captain had a desk from which to carry out her duties. The original practice fairway was funded by the women, Grace Phillingham and Joan Murphy making and raffling cakes and providing meals for men’s Pennant.

Alterations to the clubhouse in the 1960s were boosted by an interest-free loan from Min Wright-Smith and a range of fundraising dinners, including a spaghetti night at the Nepean Hotel. The women made tablecloths for the occasion.

Their knack for making things happen, through persistence and no little sweat, is evident in the arrival in 1988 – after almost eight years of petitioning the committee – of Portsea’s first on-course toilet, near the seventh tee. The Bull’s Roar reports that the women paid the more than $3000 cost, “and considered they were pennies well-spent!” Four years earlier they provided $1000 for two new practice nets, and in 1986 they purchased carpet tiles for the clubhouse. In just 18 months at the beginning of the 1980s, they handed over to the committee $11,000 in money raised.

Food was supplied for film nights and dinner dances, and special crayfish and wine and cheese nights were the work of Portsea’s women. The veritable catering miracles they routinely performed were more fully appreciated after an outside caterer was trialled for the 1986 Portsea Open amateur. In the wash-up the committee noted, “The expertise our ladies have in catering should be recognised in future.”

Among a host of tireless contributors (recognised with Honorary Memberships) were Nin Watson and Betty Canning. Nin, who held posts of ladies President and secretary and was a good representative golfer, was said to “always be found up to her elbows in the fruit salad”. Betty’s organisational skills – and the high standards to which she held her band of kitchen helpers – were legendary.

Life Member Pauline Powell is another dearly departed woman of Portsea, who left such a mark on the region that Mornington Peninsula Shire Council marked her passing in 2021, aged 88, by declaring: “It is no exaggeration to say the list of organisations and community projects Pauline was involved in is too long to read out.”

Pauline and husband Jim ran the Rye pharmacy for 36 years, providing care and advice for their customers in a manner that echoed an old-fashioned, caring Australia. She came to Portsea in 1962, and four decades later co-wrote (with Syd Thomson) The Bull’s Roar, the history of her club’s first 75 years. She was awarded an OAM in 2005 for services to the Rye community, which included volunteer roles with Peninsula Health, Rye Community Group Alliance and Rye Primary School.

“Pauline was an imposing person who didn’t tolerate any nonsense,” says former President Maree Smith. “But she was kind – if you spoke to her, she’d listen. She had quite strong views, but didn’t come across as forceful. You knew what she thought, but she wasn’t dominating.”

From the Misses Cain to Pauline Powell to today’s members, the care and philanthropy of its women has been one of Portsea’s most enduring assets. The sheer time and effort that has been expended to benefit so many charitable causes – from the local state school mother’s club in the 1950s to Southern Peninsula Search and Rescue Squad to cancer and MND research to community support for the homeless – speaks volumes.

As they celebrate their club’s 100th birthday (no doubt in style), Portsea’s women are acutely aware of those who came before them, and their duty to carry the torch into the next century. 

The Women of Portsea Today

A sense of duty and self-help, philanthropy, inventiveness and comradeship – always wrapped in mirth and mischief – continue to drive Portsea’s women as they laugh their way into a second century.

Glenda Edmond, a member for 24 years, cites the recent fundraising day for children’s brain cancer, in which women played the weekly Wednesday competition dressed as pirates. Chef Dwayne, having not experienced this phenomenon before, had imagined a couple of pirates might make an appearance. 

When he stepped out of the kitchen to behold a clubhouse full of women wearing loose shirts restrained with sashes and belts, big boots, elaborate earrings, tricorn hats and eye patches, all snarling “ahhh, me hearties!” while brandishing plastic cutlases, he was taken aback to say the least.

“He said to (General Manager) John Burbergs, ‘Look at them, I can’t believe it!” Glenda recalls.

To which John replied, “Just wait until their Christmas breakup – it goes right off!”

Indeed it does. Women have been at the forefront of the annual Christmas party luncheon since the 1950s. Traditionally it was a day when members entertained the ladies’ committee, essentially their ‘Appreciation Day’. Since 1998, the annual meeting, presentation of trophies and Christmas celebration have been held as one function, catered by the club and decorated with typical pizzazz by the ladies.

A grand tradition built around Peg Fletcher’s cream sponge kisses, Ann Dowd’s ginger fluff sponge, June McDonald’s savoury quiches and Grace Phillingham’s “special punch” has evolved into a day of cosplay and mayhem. Women have come dressed as Christmas Puddings, bon-bons, dinosaurs, nuns with babies. “You try playing golf as a plum pudding!” laughs Gilly Sharp-Paul. “Or a Christmas cracker!”

One recent year, the weather was so inclement that an alternative putting competition had to be held inside – on the same day new furniture was being delivered to the clubhouse. Mid-competition, with workmen ferrying chairs and tables all around them, the fire alarm went off and everyone was sent outside – but only as far as the concourse due to the threat of lightning.

“We couldn’t be out and we couldn’t be in,” one member recalls, noting that the regulation jelly shots and champagne already consumed only added to the hilarious farce.

Having no restrictions on when women can play has given Portsea a refreshingly egalitarian vibe. Wendy Luddington, a member for a quarter of the club’s existence and former women’s captain, regards the vast cross-section of members – “locals and visitors from all walks of life” – as an enormous Portsea strength. “The course is first class, it is affordable, there are no restrictions – particularly at the weekends when men and women have equal rights,” Wendy says. “I believe that is not the case in all clubs.”

Lynne Campbell, a member since 2001, loves the opportunity this presents. “It’s all one competition on Thursday, I like that – taking a ball off the boys is great. Or a chook.”

 

Saturday evenings in the clubhouse have been another weekly highlight, not least back when the spinning wheel was king and post-round gatherings could become raucous affairs. Dot Pinnell was the star ticket-seller and would sweet-talk everyone in the room to chip in and buy a ticket. Glenda remembers the clubhouse being “chock-a-block, steaming up with the smell of dim sims and sweaty blokes. It was a barrel of laughs, always a great Saturday night.”

The president’s weekly turn at the microphone took on a risque air during Liz Seward’s stint. When Liz and husband Alan moved from Melbourne in the early 2000s she’d never played golf, but soon found herself on committee and then president. “My friends who were golfers at Eltham said just tell them a joke,” Liz says. “So every week I’d have this list of shocking jokes. I’d be taken out of the club now. I was nursing at the Austin at the time – the doctors all had great jokes.”

When her successor as ladies’ President didn’t continue the tradition, Liz wondered if perhaps she’d overstepped the mark. “One girl, who has since died – probably from my jokes! – I saw her face and her lips were just about sucked inside her mouth. I thought, ‘Maybe that one went a little bit too far!’ I had to temper it after a while.”

The women have earned Portsea a well-deserved reputation on the Pennant and Peninsula Matchplay circuit for having the best debriefs, generally with a different member putting their hand up to host. It might be, “Debrief back at Jennifer’s today – bring your own nibbles and wine.” Other clubs, doubtless in awe, have chided the Portsea girls for seemingly having drinks every day.

As one notes, that’s clearly not the case. “Not everyone gets sozzled – some of us drive home. And some of us organise Ubers and husbands accordingly.”

Pennant successes, like 2013’s first Division One victory in a quarter of a century, have invariably turned up the celebration dial. Jenny Roberts ran women’s Pennant for six years; the format has produced her favourite Portsea memories, anchored in camaraderie and a good time. 

In her early Pennant-playing days, Jenny was blessed to have Grace Phillingham as her caddy, and treasures a photo on her phone of Grace presenting her the Grace Bowl. “Exactly as her name suggests – she personified grace.” An elegant woman with a cheeky streak, Grace is at the centre of many anecdotes, both respectful and hilarious. Her question to Jenny one day, enquiring after her opponent’s shot towards the green, is so enshrined in Portsea women’s legend it inspired a run of greeting cards.

“I might get struck by lightning by Grace for saying this, but she quietly leant in and said, ‘I can’t quite see – is the darling in the bunker, or is the bitch on the green?’ And she’d be smiling beatifically. She was gorgeous.”

Lynne Campbell loved her too. A self-confessed golf orphan, as a girl Lynne would come home from school in Horsham to an empty house so often she still remembers the local golf club number that she’d phone looking for her Mum (821652). She is grateful to Jeanette McComb for mentoring her during early Portsea days (“showed me where the locker room was, how to enter competitions, how things happened”), and to Grace for leaving her with the most delightful memories.

Grace was the club’s first female Life Member, and Lynne is one of many women she ceremonially pinned a badge on after being elected to committee or other positions. “She presented me with my Captain’s badge in 2015, and died within a couple of years. I won a Grace Bowl with Marjorie Kellaway, a white cheese platter donated by Grace. It’s one of my prized things – because it was from Grace. I adore it.”

Lynne, who thanks Portsea for awakening her to golf’s charms, was the first woman to get her name on the father-son trophy, subsequently known as the parent-child trophy. She won it twice with her Dad, a knockout with her Mum (“Super Marg”), and another event with sister Annette. Her Mum no longer plays, but still comes for lunch each week, always dressed to fit in with the theme of the day.

Friday night ‘Nine and Dine’ was another hit, a self-explanatory get-together to toast the arrival of the weekend, which invariably presented another chance to dress up and be silly. Everyone wore kilts (some home-made) for a Scottish night that featured a bagpiper on-course who later piped the arrival of a haggis into the clubrooms. “We had mirrors on our shoes to look up the boys’ kilts,” Liz Seward laughs. 

There was an Irish night too, and a night of ‘Mystery and Mayhem’ where Liz collected old wooden clubs from op shops and everyone had to play two holes with them, or opposite-handed. The booby prize for last place was a pair of magnificent fake bosoms. Theo Fatouros, now in his mid-90s, was the winner. “I still ask him if he puts his hand in the cupboard every now and then and gives them a little squeeze,” Liz laughs.

When new members join they are invariably told, “We really don’t take ourselves too seriously.” Supporting evidence abounds, like the day Jenny Roberts made a hole-in-one at the second. Everyone on course knew as soon as she found her ball in the hole. Then Jenny took 13 on the third. “I got to the seventh and started having beers.”

Glenda Edmond’s abiding memory is simply lying on the grass somewhere on the course, crying with laughter. 

Amidst the mirth a serious contribution continues to be made. New members are told at induction that the board encourages women to be involved in the decision-making processes of the club at all levels. Not all golf clubs are structured such that women can chair the board, as Maree Smith did in 2019 when she became the club’s first female President in its 93rd year.

Maree had been secretary of Sorrento Football Club for seven years (“something I also knew nothing about”, she laughs), and in the early 1970s was a computer operator and programmer at Associated Pulp and Paper Mills in Collins St, where she was the first woman to work the night shift. Male-dominated environments were nothing new to her.

“I think the club was ready,” Maree says, noting it helped that Portsea is “a President’s club and not a Captain’s club”, setting it apart from the norm and making her historic election possible. 

Taffy Richards initially reached out to Maree on the back of her newsletter and website work for Sorrento FC, enlisting her to rejuvenate Portsea’s ‘Links’ newsletter. Soon, President John Norris and Captain John Huddle invited her to fill a board vacancy, putting her corporate skills to work chairing membership and doing some marketing.

Paul Cannon, President in 2017, asked Maree to be his vice. “I was happy to support, didn’t aspire to be president. But it didn’t work like that.”

Her two-year president’s stint coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic and a push from neighbour Sorrento Golf Club to merge. Closing the club eight times through lockdowns was never in her game-plan. But her footy club colleagues who told her “you keep us in line over winter, you might as well keep going over summer” knew she had the mettle to lead the club through uncharted waters.

Maree is proud to have done her bit. “I suspect that the Misses Cain would be pleased,” she says on reflection, “but surprised it took almost 100 years to have a female president.”

Lynn Bassett made history of her own more than 20 years earlier when, as Vice-President, she chaired a board meeting in the absence of the President. Lynn was also chair of membership, and is another long-time member who has worn many hats with gusto, including involvement with the house committee and a lead role in the social and administrative side of Saturday presentations in particular and women’s golf at Portsea in general.

Women’s membership has consistently tracked higher than female participation figures cited by Golf Australia, which averaged just above 20 percent for much of the past 20 years and rose to 28 percent after Covid. Clinics have long been held to encourage new newcomers. Wendy Dragojlo, who worked in the pro shop for a time (and as manager), would run them at Moonah Links then bring the novices to Portsea to become members. More recently a wide range of mentors have happily taught golfing basics along with course etiquette and general tips on how to get the most enjoyment out of the game.

“I think our stronger women’s membership is due to the clinics the boys run, the mentoring of new members, the encouragement to be part of it all,” Jenny Roberts says. Leah Day, who joined around 2010, adds: “The women say they feel so welcome and already part of the club within a couple of sessions.”

Corenna Rogers speaks warmly of Portsea’s embrace of newcomers, and embodies visions of a vibrant future. Husband Wayne is a member at Rosebud, and a couple of years ago encouraged her to try a ‘Get Into Golf’ program. The only one available locally on her Wednesdays off was at Portsea, and in no time she’d become a member. “My husband was a bit upset, wondering why I hadn’t joined Rosebud. But I just wanted to have my own tribe. And the ladies’ tribe at Portsea are really cool.”

Like every new member she was mentored by “everyone really”, all full of advice and encouragement. In 2025 Corenna joined the ladies’ committee, keen to help other “freshies” fit in as seamlessly as she had. She even returned to the ‘9-holers’, where newcomers get a taste of the course on Mondays and Wednesdays, as a mentor. “On Wednesday it runs together with the 18-hole comp, and we encourage the 9-holers to stay back and mix afterwards, so it’s not so scary.”

In her early 50s, Corenna is in the vanguard of a new wave of members and easy to spot on the course. “I always wear long socks, that’s my thing.” She also dresses for the occasion, with matching outfits laid out the night before. Her golf attire even has its own wardrobe.

“I love it so much,” Corenna says of a day at Portsea. “Sometimes I get to the 16th hole and think, ‘Oh no! Nearly finished! I want to go again!’ The first time I parachuted, you’re scared, but then your feet hit the ground and you’re like, ‘Again! Again! Again!’ It’s just like that.”

Vicki Colliver first experienced Portsea as a girl, chewing PK gum as she walked the course with her father, who was born the year before the golf club was formed. Vicki and husband Andrew would grab their parents’ clubs “and go and hack around golf courses all over the place”. Then in the 1990s they joined Portsea.

Joan McGill took Vicki under her wing; informally, mentoring newcomers has been part of the club’s DNA. “She was an old traditionalist – she taught me a lot about tradition and a lot about etiquette,” Vicki says of Joan. “She didn’t teach me how to play the game, she taught me how to manage the game.”

Like so many over the years, golf has been a shared pursuit for the Collivers, for which Vicki is immensely grateful. When their daughters were infants, Andrew would play Saturday competition in the morning, “then I’d turn up at lunchtime, push the pram in and say, ‘There you go’, and walk out the other door and go and play golf”.

The bond she also shares with her fellow women members goes far beyond the golf course. “If somebody is down in the dumps, somebody will find out, and somebody will make a phone call. If somebody’s husband or child is not well, some flowers will turn up, or a meal. We band together and look out for each other.”

Long may the care for each other, and for those in need, continue. And of course, the laughs.

The Bull’s Roar devoted a dozen of its 156 pages to ‘The Associates’. Their chapter concludes with a line that resonates as Portsea’s second century begins:

“Most importantly, despite their many different personalities, skills and abilities, the associates developed a strong comradeship and took pleasure in working for the betterment of the club, the course and the community while also thoroughly enjoying their golf.”