Concept art unveiled of one of Australia's oldest surf club in desperate need of rebuild 06:00

Now, I want to hear from you if you're a Manly local. If you live on the northern beaches, give us a call 131873. Not only if you're a Manly local, but if you go to Manly at all, you surely would have been confronted with the Manly Surf Club there. It's right in the guts of Manly Beach. But the proposed demolition of Manly Surf Club is sparking a bit of a debate, especially amongst locals.

So the plan is tear down the old clubhouse and replace it with a brand new $15 million surf club. Not everyone's happy about it, though, because you've seen some locals voice their concerns. They don't want to see the existing club bulldozed. And their main complaint is that the new concept design, we'll put it on our website, 2GB.com, but the new design is ugly and is a case of overdevelopment.

Now, it is a concept, this new design, but we can do better than that. It's not much to look at. Nevertheless, Manly Surf Club is one of Australia's oldest surf clubs, established all the way back in 1911.

The current clubhouse has been open since 1982 and it's only had a handful of renovations in 42 years. And whichever way you're going to want to go, it needs some work done to it and some money spent on it. Shane is a life member of the Manly Surf Club and he joins me on the line. G'day, Shane.

Good afternoon. Chris, how are you? I'm really well, mate. Thank you for coming on. So are you for or against this new club? Oh, I'm definitely for the club, the four-year-old club. It's falling down. We can have... You could try and refurbish it.

But I'm a plumber in the industry of building, and sometimes that sort of thing costs a lot more than it does to just knock it down. And if you actually walk around, you'll see the joints of cement, joints are falling apart and all sorts of things. So we really do need a... We're technically the oldest surf life-saving club in Australia.

And we have, for example, 1,800 members, 953 of those are male, 852 are female. We've got 590 nippers. So we just need a new club because the club, when it was built back in those years, wasn't designed for that many people. And we're not actually taking up any more of the footprint when it's all said and done.

Just giving ourselves a whole new building. It's not in good nick at the moment, is it? It's not in very good nick at all, no. We have a lot of repairs here all the time. You know, here, there and everywhere. And at some stage, you just can't keep doing that. You know, you've just got to... It's like a house.

If your house starts to fall apart, people seem to just knock the houses down now because it's quicker and cheaper and easier to build a new one than it is to try and put the other one back together. But also, Shane, it's Manly Beach. This is one of Australia's most iconic pieces of coastline. And every time I've been down there for as long as I've been alive, I've looked at Manly Surf Club and thought, we can do better than that.

Yeah, yeah. And look, let me say too, we have something like nearly just over 11,000 hours of patrolling during the season. This is all by volunteers. We have rescues, preventative actions, all sorts of things. We have a lot of instructing of volunteers where they go on and they do their first, their bronze, and then they go on and they'll do advanced first aid and advanced resuscitation and then they go into the boats. Our job is all volunteers. Remember, this is all volunteers.

And it's fantastic. And we compete a lot too. We're very well known as a very competitive club. Okay, so why the opposition? Why are people opposing it?

Look, I don't know. It's just like a lot of things, I suppose. A lot of people don't like change. And look, I'm not a youngster myself, so I don't like to change a lot, but some things just have to change sometimes. On the whole Northern Beaches, we're pretty much the only club that's never been rebuilt properly, you know, from the ground up. And yes, maybe they could make a few adjustments to the facade of the building. There's a few concrete sections. I'm not sure. That's not my...

place to order against. So that's for the architects and the committees to work those sorts of things out. But in general, it's on the same footprint. So where is it at at the moment? In terms of the development process, where is it at? Well, the council have put the thing on their website. So the council, the state government, federal government, they're all going to put some funds in for this. And it's just now got to go through that de-investigation

DA level, I suppose, you know, the next level of getting through and see who's going to whinge and scream too much about it. Who's whinging the worst? Oh, who knows? I suppose it's local people. I don't know. But some of them may think they're going to lose some of their views, but that would be very, very few and very, very small loss of view, I would have thought.

But we're not trying to intrude on anyone. We're just trying to give us a building so that we can have this many members and continue to patrol the beaches and keep everyone safe. That's what we like to do. Anyone still alive in and around Manly, Shane, who predates the surf club given it was established in 1911? No.

No, but the first president was Tony... Do you remember Tony Bonner from Skippy? Yeah. The first president and life member was his grandfather, and then his father was president, and then Tony's been a president about four or five times, and he's a life member. What I'm saying, Shane, is there's nobody who lives around there. They've all... They bought in there knowing the surf club was there. Yeah. Yes. Exactly.

Exactly. It's been their own apartment. It's like Luna Park, isn't it, where they built the buildings behind Luna Park? Yeah, of course. It's like people buying next to a pub and complaining that there's beer, you know? Come on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we'll get a lot of that, don't we? Yeah, we do. All right, Shane. Well, all the best with it. Look, it'll be a process, but given the state of the Manly Surf Club, given where it is, surely you'll get some sort of outcome and it'll be a negotiated one, hopefully. So all the best with it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. No, you're very welcome. That's Shane.