by Peter Cox (Life Member)

In 1972, Austin Lee the Perth Airport Manager called a meeting of the growing number of golfers he knew with a view to revive the old Dunreath Golf Club fairways. (Perth Airport was built on resumed land in the war years which included the Dunreath Golf Club) Many working bee's later we commenced to play in 1973.

The clubhouse was the Henderson Hilton which members will remember was the old tractor shed at the Kalamunda Road site.

The membership (300) covered everybody from the Regional Director of Civil Aviation to the gardeners from the airport. Qantas captains and Qantas cleaners. The social side of this egalitarian group was fantastic - many dances and barbie's were held at the Henderson Hilton.

Captain Bill Rice (a great worker) and 20 odd energetic fellow workers set to and irrigated the golf course and we had barely completed the task when the Regional Director called a meeting of relevant people and told us that the department needed the golf course site for expansion requirements.

We were offered three alternate sites to build again. We chose the most remote corner of the airport directly under the 06-24 flight path as the least likely site to be resumed. How wrong we were!

By now our membership was 370 and 21 of this group commenced work on the Kalamunda Rd site . The area had not suffered a bush fire for 70 odd years and was covered by an almost impenetrable scrub bush and some very ancient jarrahs. Before we could run any survey lines we had to clear this bush, fence the site, survey the course and clear the bush from the fairways. We had windrowed the scrub and at this point a bush fire ripped though the site burning everything including our material stack.

Next we seeded the fairways and then had to do it again as the east winds blew the seed to the edge of the fairways leaving a strip of green down the edge. It took five years of Saturday busy bees, working from dawn to dusk, to do the earthmoving, excavate the dam, install the irrigation, build the shed and grow the grass.

We had our first day of play in 1987 with a much reduced membership and until 2005 the course was maintained by the voluntary work of a very dedicated group.

We kept the membership fees low and this group very busy and the course improved to a level that drew very favorable comment from visitors of other private clubs who remarked on the high standard of the course overall. The Saturday working bees continued in order to do maintenance and maintain the water supply which consisted of a massive dam and three bores to keep the dam full to water the fairways and greens - the birds loved the dam.

Thus these twenty odd people built and maintained this golf course for the use of it's members and the public - a wonderful example of self help by senior citizens.

One would have though the federal government would have supported us in our efforts.

Not so, in October 2005 we played our last game at our wonderful course as we had been evicted by the Federal Government so that a brickworks could be built on the site and so here we are today, still intact, registered with the AGA and playing at Hillview.

I am very conscious that this is a limited history of the Westaviat Golf club and the following subjects would require much more space to cover;

a. Civil Aviation Sports Carnivals b. Australia's Masters Games c. Committee history d. Political history e. Social history f. the saga of scrounging materials and machinery to build a golf course g. westaviat Wanderers