Society > Community Groups > Pyrmont Heritage Boating Club
Pyrmont Heritage Boating Club
The Pyrmont Heritage Boating Club is a community group like no other. Zealous in protecting the marine environment, and in mentoring youngsters, its members are professional and playful, serious and sociable. Michael Bolton-Hall and Orion Alderton founded the Club in 2005, to revive community boating, engage youth in maritime heritage, and provide community access to harbour culture. Their passion is boat building and restoration.
At their base on Blackwattle Bay, they restored a replica of a Viking long-ship, and have supplied boats and volunteer instructors for youth, concentrating on sailing and boat restoration with long-term unemployed people, youth at risk, people with disabilities and marginalised members of the community. Programs rely on support from TAFE NSW, the Salvation Army, Department of Education and Training and local government councils. Orion Alderton, shipwright and Club Secretary, observed that "we are the only organisation that engages people from lower socio-economic parts of Sydney to come down and learn how to sail, learn how to do some work on the boats."
Their most striking feat was achieved in 2015, when they restored, crewed and sailed Aegir, a 23 metre full-scale replica of the Golstad, an 800AD Viking long-ship. Alderton and Toby Mairgaard, experts in timber boat-building, then worked on new ribs to make the vessel seaworthy.
Equally arresting and valuable is the ‘Pirates of Plastic’ program which expressed the Club’s environmental enthusiasm. The training vessel, a 7 metre replica long boat, would patrol waterways around Pyrmont, collecting plastic and other refuse blown here from the rest of the harbour.
Pirates of Plastic Shanty
Pirates of plastic
think it's tragic
oceans are acidic
Join the plunder
ships of thunder
world is asunder
Forget the tragic
join the magic
into the cosmic
A savage blow was struck in 2016 when the State Government decided to evict the Club from its Bank Street premises, to make room for the redevelopment of the Sydney Fish Market and Blackwattle Bay– the Bays Precinct Project. As Jacob Saulwick reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (14 February 2016), the Club only months before had won a $25,000 government grant to sustain its work with at-risk youth and the unemployed.
The Club enjoys bipartisan support. In Parliament, former planning minister Brad Hazzard in 2012 praised the club's ‘extraordinary work’ with people with health and mental health issues, and with the unemployed.
Despite this political and popular support, the Club is still threatened with eviction, whenever the State Government proceeds with the Bays Precinct Project.
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