Interview Transcript from Illawarra Stories Wollongong city Libraries Oral History Project – Kate Balding
Interviewer: Edie Swift
Interview Date 17 April 2021
Edie Swift So I’ll just give a little introduction. It is April 17th, 2021, and I am Edie Swift interviewing Kate Balding, the President of the Coledale Surf Lifesaving Club for Wollongong Library Illawarra Stories Oral History Program. We will talk about Kate’s duties as President of Coledale Surf Lifesaving Club. So, we, you can start now.
Kate Baling I have been President of Coledale for two seasons now, so we run season to season rather than year to year. I’m the first female Club President in our Club’s over 100-year history and it was, um, an honour to be able to take on the role of leadership within our Club. I oversee a membership that runs a Coledale Camping Reserve.
As well as we run our Coledale Cuttlefish, which is our Nippers program, and our patrolling Club. Yeah.
Edie Swift So what are your duties then?
Kate Balding I am chairwoman of the committee, so I oversee all of the duties within the Club. So, we look at patrolling our beaches from September through to April. We have emergency call-out teams that run all year round. I, um, oversee the running of our Coledale Cuttlefish, so our junior or our Nipper program which is for ages five all the way up until fifteen-years-old.
Edie Swift And do you do that yourself or do you have someone come in and do the Nippers?
Kate Balding We run that in our, in-house. We run that ourselves so I’m one of the Age Managers. So, we have a Nipper President who I delegate most of the duties to, but I actually am on the ground helping run those programs. Yeah. So, I still patrol. I’ve patrolled for over fifteen years now.
Edie Swift Now go back to the Nippers because how, where are the Nippers from?
Kate Balding Our Nipper demographic isn’t necessarily locals. We get a lot of ours from across over the mountains, so Campbelltown. We’ve got, um, a few that come from like Point Piper, Revesby, throughout Sydney pockets. Um, our furthest travelled Nippers come from down in the Shoalhaven.
Edie Swift And what do you do with them, and how do you fund that program?
Kate Balding It’s all volunteer based, so we run a fortnightly Nipper program rather than a weekly program which some other clubs do. We, um, have a barbecue and that is our main way of fundraising for our Nipper program. They are there to learn their beach safety and their water safety and craft skills, so they learn the avenue of actually being able to run into the water safely and effectively. And they’re beginning to learn those basic skills that we would then add in later to become, um, lifesavers and to be able to do rescues.
Edie Swift And what equipment do you need for that?
Kate Balding For Nippers we, um, our youngest groups have bucket races, they’ll play with the football, they’ll practice their diving under waves and swimming. We have what’s called a wave rope, which is a rope which has little floats along it, and we’ll hold that out at different depths in the water, and the, um, children actually have to run around it and, um, practice, their running through water technique, which is different to running on land. We play sand-based activities like your beach sprints and a game called ‘flags’ where you have a little pipe that sits in the ground. They actually start on their stomach, facing away from the flags, and it’s your ability to get up and turn around and run and catch those flags. And then the older kids will progress onto like body boards and then to paddle boards and they’ll learn to actually negotiate the surf and get out and swim around what we call a chicane or a buoy around the surf. And, um, as they get older, um.
Edie Swift what is the older group, what are their ages then?
Kate Balding Our older of the Nipper groups are called Rookies and they’re our thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds and they are the foundational start of our surf lifesavers. So those, um, age groups can actually get a nationally recognised training, um, which we call a Surf Rescue Certificate or the Bronze for the older kids. And they’re actually, your on-the-beach, patrolling members by the time they’re thirteen. So, they then form part of our patrolling team and they’re able to perform the board rescues, tube rescues and actually work as part of a team within our Club.
Edie Swift And so the, who does that training for the Bronze?
Kate Balding I do the training as part of a training team. So, we have a team of four to five trainers within our Club, which is quite large for an Illawarra Club to have such a big training team and we actually train our candidates in house.
Edie Swift Ah, what do you do for that Bronze, what do you have to do?
Kate Balding Surf Lifesaving Australia in New South Wales actually, um, have written a registered training organisation run program called the Surf Rescue Certificate and a Bronze medallion and we actually are registered training trainers and deliver the content to get those CPR units and those rescue units.
Edie Swift So what do they actually do every time they come and then at the end..?
Kate Balding Some days, some days they come in and they might do a pool swim and they’ll have to do that within a time frame. And then they’ll have to practice their tube rescues techniques, so how to rescue both an unconscious patient and a conscious patient, how to, um, navigate the surf with someone who’s in distress. They will do the same skills on their boards. They’ll have to do an unconscious and a conscious patient and to be able to actually, they’ve gone from a junior where they ride the board single to then being able to put another person onto a board and be able to handle that board and get them into the shore safely. We teach them basic first aid skills. We teach them resuscitation and CPR. And they have a module which is their radio communications, so they learn both our signals and our radio communication as well.
Edie Swift And then at the end, is there a big test?
Kate Balding We have gone away from the big test now. So in the last 12 months Surf Life Saving have introduced a new on-line learning component so they’ll actually go home and log onto their e-learning portfolio and they will complete their theory assessments on on-line now. We can still give you a written paper if you wish, but ma-, majority of the candidates like that blended learning. So they like to come to us for the face to face and then go home to do their on-line components.
Edie Swift And then when they start out, um, if, if one isn’t quite strong enough, what would you do then to complete it?
Kate Balding They will, in our Club, they get put with a peer group of mentors to help develop the skills and get that strength. So it’s not a one chance and you’re out, we actually work with them to ensure it. And being an on-patrol surf lifesaver you don’t have to have your Surf Rescue Certificate or your Bronze, you can be what’s called an award member.
So award members are normally people within our community who might not have that strength and ability, or even the want to have that main award, but they support us in other ways. So you could be your first aid officer, just a radio operator, rather than having the whole Bronze within the radio, you can just be a radio operator. I’ve got, um, UAV pilots, so drone pilots, within our Club and they’re what we call award members. So previously you’ve also been able to do your spinal management and there is another award which is called your advanced resuscitation techniques. So surf lifesaving’s very inclusive in the awards and, um, roles you can hold within the club or actually quite diverse. So any, a member of any age can come into the Club, and we’ll be able to offer them sort of a valued part of how they can help contribute to our community.
Edie Swift Well, if they want to do it and, and they have weaknesses, is it hard to tell them that they have to wait awhile? As a registered training organisation, we actually have rules that we follow to be able to communicate that with our candidates. So we do actually have that feedback avenue, so they provide us with feedback, and we do as well. And yes, sometimes you do have to have that conversation if your pool swimming skills are not up to the current standard. And but rather than just provide that feedback, we actually provide them with the avenue to actually develop and strengthen those skills. So it’s not, they’re just left to do it on their own, They can actually come to other Club members and like, okay, well, “Your board skills need a little bit more work, you know, do you wanna come out and you know, go in the ocean with me and we’ll work through some of those skills.” So they get plenty of opportunity and members that will practice and actually help them develop any skills that they might need additional work on.
Edie Swift And then when they get beyond seventeen what happens then?
Kate Balding You have plenty of choice within our Club, so you can be still a patrolling member. So we have members on our Club patrolling that are still in their sixties, seventies. So you can patrol as long as you’re physically capable of holding one of the award criteria. It doesn’t matter which award; you’re still allowed to patrol. Um, most of our seventeen-eighteen-year-olds they like to develop their skills even further. So they’ll go into our power craft, so they’ll go into the IRB’s, um, as a crew person first and then as an IRB, which is the inflatable boats. They’ll go in as a driver and then from that you can progress on to the jet skis, which are our rescue watercrafts as well. So there’s, um, entry level requirements and then you can actually expand your, your skill sets so they sort of add onto each other and then you get some very highly skilled operators and most of our awards you can hold by the time you’re eighteen.
Edie Swift Can you do, do they are go into those surf lifesaving contests?
Kate Balding They do. We do have competitors up at the Australian Championships at the moment. They run from all the way from local, local carnivals all the way through to the world carnivals. And we’ve had members compete at all of the levels. It’s completely voluntary, it’s up to you if you wish to compete. But to compete, you do have to have that Bronze medallion once you are over the age of fifteen and you have to have your Surf Rescue Certificate bef-, between thirteen- and fifteen-year-olds to be eligible to compete.
Edie Swift But then those older people, do they have to do a test before you’ll take them every year?
Kate Balding So we do run an annual skills maintenance. So it used to be called a proficiency and each year Surf Lifesaving will, um, release a list of the requirements required for the different awards. So your CPR is your CPR Refresher each year and then, um, your Bronze medallion will have a run, swim, run to it. It’ll have a rescue scenario part to it. It’ll have a bit of radio and it’ll have a bit of your, your basic, first aid care and your CPR. So and they’ll do that annually with us.
Edie Swift Now how, what do you do as far as organising the patrols for the weekends?
Kate Balding I have a right-hand man who is my Director of Life Saving. We coordinate our patrols at the start of a season, so at the moment we’re running five patrols of quite a weight in number, so we’ve got fifteen-sixteen members on our patrols. They are given a roster in August, early September and that roster goes all the way through to April and we provide a rostered patrol system Which you can, if you’re unavailable, we can swap you out and choose how we manage those patrols.
Edie Swift And what are the age groups in there?
Kate Balding From thirteen all the way through.
Edie Swift Oh, that’s wonderful.
Kate Balding Yeah.
Edie Swift So now the different other groups in the Club, what are they?
Kate Balding So at Coledale we have the Nippers which we’ve touched on. We have our patrolling members, which is that very diverse age group all the way from thirteen, we don’t have an upper age limit on those. We, they’re our main two groups because we do have our camping ground at Coledale we do have another sub-committee which is our camping committee.
Edie Swift Now, do you use the campground fees to support the Club?
Kate Balding Yes, so the campground is our main source of revenue for the surf lifesaving. And we don’t just support our Club with it, we support the neighbouring clubs and the Illawarra branch as well.
Edie Swift How, how do people get in there to camp, do they go on-line?
Kate Balding At the moment we have a website and we do have a phone number so you can actually ring up and book, um, with our camping caretakers.
Edie Swift And then, now to move to the actual building, what is the history of that building?
Kate Balding We’re on our third building. So our first building was in 1922. And then through, at that time it was then fundraised for the next building, which was built, um, in 1938. And then the current building that we’re in was it’s, we’ve modernised it over the years, so it was then a brick building. So our first two buildings were more of the timber variety, and we did go into a brick building. It’s still all in the same location on our beach, so we haven’t actually relocated, we’ve just sort of knocked down and rebuilt over the years. So our last renovation, um, so the Club we’re currently in was 1976 was when we officially opened it and then we rendered and modernised it in 2008.
Edie Swift So did you do that with private builders?
Kate Balding We did, yes.
Edie Swift Oh, uh-hm.
Kate Balding Yeah, so we’ve had support with Wollongong City Council, so it is a Wollongong City Council building that we lease, um, along with all the other surf clubs. So Wollongong City Council own the building, but we are responsible for the refurbishments, um, alongside them. So there’s, um, Coledale has a plan of management which we follow with and that’s not just for the building, that’s for the whole reserve. So within that plan of management, it sort of states whether it’s a Club responsibility or a Council responsibility for the upkeep and maintenance. Our boat shed is, um, funded by Coledale Surf Club, so that’s part of our maintenance schedule which we’ve added onto our building to allow us to actually have the room to store our…
Edie Swift Well, do you have to write grants or anything?
Kate Balding We do. Surf Life Saving’s very fortunate, they have what’s called a grant seeking unit within Surf Lifesaving. So there’s a team of three or four members who will actually help us apply and write for grants.
Edie Swift Now, do you see that, um, there’s been quite a change in the life, Surf Lifesaving scene? Since you were a little girl, do you see a change at all?
Kate Balding Absolutely. Um, I came in as a young girl and I’ve always been allowed to have my Bronze medallion. And then so in the 1980s was the first year that women were actually allowed to be fully, um, full surf lifesavers. Up until that point we were only a ladies auxiliary. So we’re only just celebrating 40 years of women actually being fully integrated within Surf Lifesaving across Australia. So for me I’ve noticed the change in that diversity and that inclusivity, so women have, in my generation, have been allowed to do any avenue and aspect of Surf Lifesaving. I’m also very aware that our membership is about a fifty-fifty ratio now. So we have fifty-fifty male to female members. But our leadership, there’s been a big push to get more women as leaders within Surf Lifesaving. So statistically, um, only 11% of clubs have a female president within all of Australia. And then only 13% have a female Director of Lifesaving or a Club Captain. So a lot of our leadership positions still are in a male role, but Surf Lifesaving is, they’ve introduced women mentoring programs and mentorees. And we’ve got a lot more master classes to help develop a stronger, more diverse group of leaders within the organisation.
Edie Swift Now, when you were a girl, what was your age when you came to the – was it Coledale?
Kate Balding I joined when I was a five-year-old.
Edie Swift Oh. [laughs]
Kate Balding Yeah. So I’ve been with Coledale for more than thirty years now.
Edie Swift And what was it like, what did you do?
Kate Balding I was a Nipper, so I competed in, I preferred the sand events than the ocean events. I didn’t have a great deal of ocean confidence as a five-year-old, so I liked playing the beach flags and the sprints and you used to play tug of wars and a whole heap of other games. It’s very, it’s always been a game, like a play-based learning type of environment, the Nippers. It’s still is. And I’ve worked through the Nippers, gone into that, um, Surf Rescue Certificate, Bronze, and worked my way through. The majority of my, um, teenage and young adult years I’ve been in more in the education of our Coledale members and our greater members. So I stepped into that training role quite early. And I’ve had, um, some beautiful mentors along the way who’ve helped me develop that skill set to be able to teach those lifesaving skills that we need to instil throughout the Nippers from the start. So as soon as they come in as five-year-olds, they are starting to learn those water safety skills that we need to be able to pass along.
Edie Swift So you had to go and do that Bronze medallion and go way out in that surf and everything.
Kate Balding Yeah.
Edie Swift That must have been hard. How old were you?
Kate Balding I was fifteen. Yeah, so I, um, progressed through. So I did my Surf Rescue at thirteen and then I did my Bronze at fifteen years old. I’ve then progressed into the power craft, and I was an IRB crew person throughout the way. And if you come through from the Nippers program, you, you already have a lot of the skills that you need to be able to do that training because you get them from your age managers as a Nipper. So they help you and they’re your support and your confidence builders to be able to go through. So at the moment I teach the under-eights and I’m working on that ability to go under a wave, catch a wave and starting to do those board riding skills, to have that confidence to navigate that surf out. And know how to handle if they come off and things as well. So to be able to have that ability to read that surf as an eight-year-old.
Edie Swift Gee, that’s a lot for an eight-year-old ‘cos those rips, that’s the thing that’s very difficult.
Kate Balding Yes. So our under-fives learn how to identify rips. We start that identification and that surf reading and that surf awareness skills from the moment they enter our Nipper program. So that’s part of our water safety and our survival side of it is we’re not just giving them the skills to handle the craft and that. It’s having that ability to read the ocean and the surf, and to be able to understand your limitations in yourself, to be able to be confident in the ocean.
Edie Swift So going back to the building is there a kitchen in there? Do you have events in there?
Kate Balding We do have a function centre up on the top floor which has a kitchen and a bar area and some beautiful ocean views. We don’t hold too many functions these days. We don’t have a Function Manager at the moment, so we mainly hold member events. So if you as a member were to come to us, you would be able to utilise our hall for events. In the past we have had weddings and functions in there too.
Edie Swift And what’s in the, in the building exactly?
Kate Balding So top floor is our function centre, so you’ve got bathrooms, fully equipped kitchen, and a bar area, and it’s all, um, connected up, so you’ve got your TV and your sound and everything. So we run the majority of our training courses upstairs. Downstairs we have our, um, patrol environment. So we’ve got a patrol room with a small kitchenette, our first aid area and our storage area for all of our equipment. So we run the IRB’s and, um, a side-by-side vehicle. So to meet our WHS requirements we run a small little – they often call them a buggy – vehicle which tows all of our equipment out onto the sand. So that’s all stored within our main area. We’ve got our bathroom facilities for our male and our female patrolling members and we have a small gym as well.
Edie Swift So I would imagine that you would have had to go in the ocean when you were getting this Bronze and swim and swim a long time.
Kate Balding So the Bronze requirements are, um, a pool swim first, so you do your pool swim and you’ve got to do four hundred metres in under nine minutes is the standard to, um, like be able to then allow to be trained in the water for your Bronze medallion, which has then got, um, what’s called a run, swim, run. So that’s a 200-metre run, a 200-metre swim, and a 200-metre run, and that’s timed as well.
Edie Swift Are you doing anything with the championships, the surf championships right now?
Kate Balding I have members who compete, but I choose not to compete.
Edie Swift And you’re, I suppose you’re working full time as well on top of all this.
Kate Balding I do. So Surf Life Saving is a volunteer thing for me. I have two other roles, with the Council and another role with Austswim. So my main passion in life is actually teaching those survival skills and water safety skills. So I do that both in my volunteer world and in my paid world.
Edie Swift Is there one rescue that you remember this year that was pretty dramatic?
Kate Balding I’m actually quite proud that me as a surf lifesaver, I’ve only had one rescue this year.
Edie Swift And what was that?
Edie Swift That was, um, a person swimming not in our patrolled, flagged area. They made an unwise choice to actually go swimming out in our rip and we did go out and rescue them. Edie Swift And where were they from?
Kate Balding They were, um, they are Australian, but they were born overseas.
Edie Swift They were born overseas?
Kate Balding They were.
Edie Swift Oh. But you got, got them.
Kate Balding We did, yeah.
Edie Swift Did you go out with the little boat?
Kate Balding No, um, one of our members took the rescue tube and another member then followed in support with the rescue board. So depending on your location within your surf and your break depends on what rescue device you choose.
Edie Swift Did they need an ambulance afterward?
Kate Balding No.
Edie Swift They were okay.
Kate Balding He was okay, yeah.
Edie Swift Now what’s the worst part of the beach there?
Kate Balding At Coledale?
Edie Swift Yeah.
Kate Balding Our worst part would be that southern rip. So we have a almost permanent rip off our southern headland which can be quite deceptive. So some days it looks beautiful out there and it will just start, and it will take a lot of people out in a long time. We do have some nice sandbanks along our beach, but compared to some of the other beaches in the Illawarra we are quite a hazardous beach in terms of our conditions.
Edie Swift Do they have problems with noise like in a campground, you know, how, how do you regulate that?
Kate Balding We follow the Wollongong City Council noise regulations throughout, so we’re not a caravan park as such. We do mainly do the camping, so we don’t have a great amount of noise. And because we don’t run functions in our clubhouse as well, our noise is actually quite, quite subdued compared to a lot of other places, yeah.
Edie Swift Oh, that’s good. And you don’t allow alcohol in the campground?
Kate Balding No. So that’s part of our plan of management, yeah.
Edie Swift And the dogs,
Kate Balding That’s part of the plan of management.
Edie Swift they don’t come in.
Kate Balding So dogs are not allowed to camp.
Edie Swift Not allowed, yeah.
Kate Balding Unless they’re a service dog, yeah. But across from the camping ground on the public access part of the beach, that’s not under our ‘No Dog’ rule, that then comes under Wollongong City Council and the dogs are allowed on the grass on that part.
Edie Swift Now what do you do about sharks?
Kate Balding We have had a few at Coledale. We do have the history of a couple of sharks. We’re one of the netted beaches so we do have a net. Our procedures are as soon as we see them, we actually send our boat out to sort of scare them back out to sea and we actually close our beach, and we monitor until we’re allowed to reopen following our standard operating procedures.
Edie Swift What do you usually have, what type of a shark?
Kate Balding We haven’t had a great many lately. I know we’ve had a reef shark in the last sort of twelve months or so, but they are rare. We do have our UAV pilots who fly the drones up, and that’s, um, in partnership with Department of Primary Industries, so they’re there purely to do the shark spotting and things like that. So they have captured image of some. Um, I was at a neighbouring beach, and they had image out near their reef as well. But, um, it’s, we’re very proactive, so we would prefer to be proactive in our beach, than have to do a multiple number of rescues and incidents. We prefer to be able to give you the directions to be safe without having to actually, you know, put you at risk beforehand.
Edie Swift And where does the clothing come from for the little Nippers and for the life savers too?
Kate Balding So as an individual club, Nippers get to choose where we source all of our uniforms from so we try and stick with local businesses and Australian businesses within our Club. So our swimwear is Rival. Most of our Club merchandise comes from a Wollongong supplier. And then we have our new high-vis vests which have come from a company called Ohana, so they’re all Australian owned companies. Surf Lifesaving provide us, um, they do the red and yellow uniforms that you see on our patrolling members. And each year we get what’s called a uniform credit. So for each bronze member I put through the following season, I will get the equivalent in credit to purchase them a uniform for the next season. So we run those, and they’re sponsored. So each year Surf Lifesaving Australia and NSW have set sponsors and those shirts will have the sponsors logos on them. So some of our sponsors at the moment are DHL and we’ve just changed to Isuzu for the Club ones and then our Illawarra branch are sponsored by our camping reserve and BlueScope as some of our major partners.
Edie Swift Well, would you like to say anything else? You did a very good job.
Kate Balding No, I think I’m right thanks Edie.
Edie Swift All right. Would you like to donate this to the Illawarra Stories Oral History Program?
Kate Balding Yeah, that’s fine.
Edie Swift All right.