The Brunswick Trugo Club

The sign on the gate says it all: Elderly Citizens. A recent article in the Age Good Weekend described Trugo as “Seniors Game on”, however it seems a great game for children. Certainly on the fine Sunday afternoon when I attended a social event at the Brunswick Trugo Club, the children were revelling in the lush green grass of the pitch and enjoying hitting the rubber wheel and generally making up their own rules. 

The origins of the game in the railway yards of Newport is well documented on several other websites. Mark Dapin in the Good Weekend wrote: Trugo was devised using whatever equipment lay at hand in Newport workshops. Its mallets were railway mallets, its wheels the discarded buffer washers of trains. The pitch was initially the length of a red rattler, but has been standardised at 27 metres.

 

I just want to record how the Trugo Club building itself captures a slice of time. It is in a beautiful corner of Brunswick, occupying a corner of Temple Park, not a block away from the Union Hotel, a great Sunday afternoon music venue.  Union Street, Barkly Street and Wilson Street are all very desirable addresses now, but the houses are small and must have been working people’s dwellings originally.

Inside the small brick clubhouse, the stacked chairs are definitely from the 1950s and the little kitchen looks out over a neglected vegetable patch. The walls are adorned with historic club photos and shields and there is a tiny little stage with old piano at one end.  There is a lovely lightness to the interior, as the north wall is almost all windows overlooking the green.  One feels as though people have had happy times here and I hope this will continue to be the case. I look forward to attending a game here, but only to talk to the players. I don’t feel qualified to join them, yet.