From the time Brother’s Football Club was formed in Murwillumbah in the late 1950s, it’s members chose to serve at Bogangar Beach, as it was then known. It is likely that the idea of a Surf Club was first hatched within that group. One of the ‘brothers’ was Morris Craddock, licensee of the Australia Hotel who would become president and then patron of the Cabarita Beach SLSC. John Booker, who opened the Cabarita Country Club Hotel in December, 1960, took a keen interest in the surf club. He donated the first surf reel, made available a small garage for a clubhouse, and the hotel’s staff showers for use after patrol duties. Cabarita Beach’s first surfboat had been donated by another club (some think it was Narrabeen) and christened, according to one report, by popular singer, Kamal
Peter Smith, formally a member of the Greenmount Surf Club, joined Cabarita Beach in 1961, the club’s second year. He was given the job of applying to the Lands Department for a half-acre allotment adjacent to the hotel where it was intended to build a clubhouse. The application was granted but later declined by the club when it became evident the site was impractical. It was inaccessible during extreme tides. Some time later the building across from the hotel in Pandanus Parade was mortgage to a Brisbane company which was prepared to sell it for $30,000. The surf club had raised $3000 mainly by pub raffles and hardly enough to invest in real estate. The club approached the Tweed Shire Council which was willing to grant half the purchase price and the CBA bank agreed to lend the other half.
The Cabarita Beach Surf Club was at last able to quit the cramped space it had occupied on the hotel grounds and move across the road to the relatively spacious upper floor of its newly acquired premises. The ground floor cafe was rented to Jim Fisher. Some basic renovations to the clubhouse were needed and local builder, Ken Hanson was hired to work on toilets, showers and kitchen. A glaring deficiency remained. There was no shelter for the surf boat which was simply left out in the open in all weathers between weekly patrols. The thought occurs that a valuable craft remaining similarly unattended today would very likely suffer from rampant vandalism, but the community’s social behaviour was rather different. 60 years ago. A strip of land on the beach side of the clubhouse was owned by Gwen Bugler, a daughter of the Bogangar pioneer, Jim Cooley. Gwen and her husband had planned to one day erect a beachfront shop and live in premises above it. They lost interest in the project when the council built public toilets distressingly close to their boundary and they sold their land to the far-sighted surf club for $3300. It may have been a bargain and sensible investment too, for the club was now able to build a boat shed a stone’s throw from the beach, but the outlay placed a heavy strain on the cash-strapped club’s meagre resources and repaying the bank loan began to look impossible. The club, through its trustees Don Johansen, Harry Smith and Ken Hanson, offered the two-story building to the Tweed Shire Council if it would take over the loan and allow the club tenancy until the clubhouse could be built on the land acquired for the boat shed. The council agreed to the proposition and the lifesavers remained until the building was demolished soon after the turn of the century. The boatshed too was pulled down and replaced with a modern purpose-built clubhouse and cafe on the club’s own land purchased with remarkable vision all those years ago.
Extracted from The Concise Guide to Tweed History, The Tweed Coast and Hinterland 2019 by David Rae