Wallerawang Sailing Club

Few Australian sailing clubs can claim a clubhouse literally raised by a service club working bee, but Wallerawang Sailing Club can. Its home on the shore of Lake Wallace, on the western fall of the Blue Mountains near Lithgow, was built as a community project of the Lithgow Apex Club — the sort of origin story that tells you almost everything about the club's character. This is a small, informal, volunteer-run outfit serving one of the few inland sailing communities west of the Great Dividing Range, and it wears that identity lightly and proudly.

The sailing is deliberately low-key. Rather than a packed calendar of pointscore series and championship events, the club runs two ten-week blocks of informal racing timed to the spring and summer school terms, using a handicap system that lets catamarans, dinghies and even sailboards share the same course. Races are long, lazy affairs of around two hours — sailing as a Sunday ritual rather than a results obsession. The one fixed point on the calendar is the annual regatta on the second weekend of November, which draws the district's sailors together and features in Lithgow's annual events listings.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Wallerawang is its open-door philosophy. The club has no dedicated website and no formal learn-to-sail machinery; instead, it extends a standing invitation, published through the local tourism channels, for anyone of any age to come down to Lake Wallace on a Sunday and be taken sailing free of charge. For a regional town better known for its railway heritage and its coal-fired power station, that's a quietly generous contribution — a club that exists less to win trophies than to make sure the lake gets used.

Wallerawang's entire approach to getting people on the water can be summed up in one gesture: free sailing experiences, offered to absolutely anyone who turns up at Lake Wallace on a Sunday. There's no enrolment form, no age cut-off, no fee — the club's stated aim is simply to encourage people of all ages to sail, and it meets that aim by putting newcomers in boats with experienced members and letting the lake do the persuading. It's the most informal entry pathway imaginable, and for a small country club it makes perfect sense: every newcomer welcomed on a Sunday is a potential member, and every member was once a newcomer.

Formal accredited training programs such as Tackers or a Discover Sailing Centre aren't part of the picture here — instruction happens the old way, one crew to a boat, knowledge passed hand to hand. What the club does offer in structured form is its racing: two ten-week series of informal races, run through the spring and summer school terms, culminating in the November regatta on the month's second weekend. New sailors who catch the bug through a free Sunday experience can graduate straight into that program, learning race craft in the least intimidating environment available.

The racing itself is built for accessibility. The club scores its fleet using the VSC — the Victorian Sailing Committee handicap system — a flexible yardstick that can accommodate most catamarans, racing dinghies and sailboards in a single mixed fleet. Races typically run for about two hours, giving everyone from a solo dinghy sailor to a family on a cat a proper afternoon on the water. Sailboards are explicitly welcome alongside conventional boats, a nod to the days when boardsailing was a mainstay of inland club racing. For sailors in the Lithgow district, it's the complete package: turn up, sail, race if you want to, and do it all again next Sunday.

Lake Wallace owes its existence to industry. The roughly 100-hectare water body, with capacity to hold some 4,300 megalitres, was created to supply cooling water to the Wallerawang Power Station, which generated electricity on this site from 1957 until its closure in 2014. What the power station left behind is a broad, placid lake just off the Great Western Highway at Wallerawang, 156 kilometres north-west of Sydney and about ten minutes' drive from Lithgow — one of the very few sailable inland waters on the western side of the Blue Mountains.

Ownership of the lake and its foreshores sits with Greenspot, the company redeveloping the former power station site, with public access maintained through a lease with Lithgow City Council. The sailing club shares its corner of the shore with a baseball field, public amenities and a boat ramp, while the broader recreation area offers picnic and barbecue facilities and a children's playground. On the far side, PJ Hall Park provides camping with showers, toilets, barbecues and a dump point, making the lake a genuine weekend destination.

Some parts of the water are reserved for sail and paddle craft only — which on a weekend effectively means the sailing beach in front of the clubhouse. Trout fishing, canoeing and sailing are the lake's principal recreations.

The future of the setting is changing. The 620-hectare power station site is being rezoned into an industrial hub with a planned residential community of around 1,200 homes and a tourism and recreation precinct adjoining the lake, complete with new walking and cycling trails. The lake itself may in time serve as a reservoir for Lithgow's municipal supply while continuing to support recreation. For the club, that could mean a growing population on its doorstep — and more people to take sailing on a Sunday.

Wallerawang's documented story begins, fittingly, with the town rather than the club. The name derives from the Wiradjuri language, translated variously as "plenty of water" or "place near wood or water" — an apt christening for a town that would one day acquire a lake. Wallerawang boomed in 1869 when the railway arrived; until the railway over the mountains to Bathurst opened in 1876, travellers left the train at Wallerawang and continued west by Cobb & Co coach. The power station followed in 1957, and its cooling-water dam created the lake that made sailing possible.

No founding year for the club itself is published, though it is an affiliated Australian Sailing club and a longstanding fixture in Lithgow's community directories, with regular events listed in the town's annual calendar. The clearest surviving chapter of its history is the building of its clubhouse: a community service scheme run through the Lithgow Apex Club, for which Gordon Gorton — an Apex member from 1979 to 1987 — is named as the scheme's co-initiator and the leader of its construction project team. Gorton's contribution to the region was recognised with an OAM in the 2025 King's Birthday Honours, and the clubhouse project stands among the achievements cited.

That Apex-built clubhouse captures the essence of the club: a facility that exists because local people organised, fundraised and swung hammers. The club's rhythm has remained steady ever since — spring and summer racing series, the annual November regatta, and the standing Sunday invitation to the public. With the former power station site now being redeveloped around the lake, the club finds itself on the cusp of a new chapter, its little patch of foreshore poised to become the recreation edge of a much larger lakeside community. The boats, one suspects, will keep going out regardless.