Club clash over naming game

A PROPOSED renaming of the Elaine Recreation Reserve has proved contentious for some community members and local sporting clubs.

In 2021, the facility’s community asset committee put forward a proposal to Moorabool Shire to rename the site to the Ron Read Recreation Reserve.

The proposal is aimed at honouring the committee’s eponymous former chairperson who passed away in 2021 after serving in the role for 10 years and contributing to the site for about three decades.

Current committee chairperson Diane Cook said Mr Read is more than deserving of being the name behind the reserve.

“Everything you see he’s had input in,” she said. “He’d come and hand water all the trees during the five-year drought. He donated windows and doors to the club buildings.

“He organised a big working tree and got a lot of people to clear the unsafe pine trees and plant in new ones. He donated the windows and doors when they refurbished the cricket club.

“The bit of land where the pavilion and bit of tennis court is belonged to the railways so he and

Tom Sullivan, our councillor at the time, and purchased it.

“He was a bloke that was behind the scenes and a lot of younger people don’t know what he did to acquire this as it is today.”

The proposal received more than 100 signatures and a survey has since published by the municipality for community members to voice their opinion on the potential renaming.

Members of the Elaine Cricket Club, the primary sporting group for the site, have pushed back with their own petition of more than 100 signatures opposing the renaming.

A spokesperson for the club said the site’s name should reflect the entire community rather than the efforts of a single person.

“It’s a bit of a step too far to rename the facility,”

the spokesperson said. “We feel there’s a lot of people who’ve contributed to the recreation reserve and the clubs over multiple years.

“If you keep it as Elaine Recreation Reserve, it acknowledges the whole community. There’s other ways to acknowledge a person. Our old secretary for 34 years, Jimmy Connell, we named our new nets after.

“No one’s denying Ron Read did do a lot for the reserve but the committee have put up that he’d done all the work when he was part of a small army of people that did it all.”

The proposal has also been followed with an anonymous letter drop urging people to vote no on the matter.

Ms Cook said she’s disappointed at the “flak.”

“It was supposed to bring the town together in appreciation of someone that had loved this and put the hard work in for other people,” she said.

“If it doesn’t get named after him, we’ll do something else, but his memory’s definitely deserving of it.”

The survey closes at 11.55pm on Sunday and can be found at the Moorabool Shire website.