Illawarra’s first clubs: A history of the registered club movement

  By MICK ROBERTS ©  REGISTERED clubs, with their assortment of restaurants, cafes, gymnasiums, and ‘mini-casinos’, have come along way from the timber cottages, offering dominoes and newspaper libraries, that first appeared throughout colonial New South Wales during the 1890s. Prior to the 1890s, membership of colonial clubs was confined to the elite. The premises…