Kalymaro_2000-2009_Narrative.md

Kalymaro Lodge, 2000–2009: A Decade of Rebuilding

A changing of the guard

The decade opens with the 38th Annual General Meeting, held at the White City Tennis Club in Paddington on 26 August 2000. It was, by the record, a modest gathering — "a small but dedicated band," as the newsletter put it — but a significant one for the Board. Barry and Janet McFadzean, long-serving figures in the club's leadership through the 1990s, stood down. Barry chaired that AGM as the outgoing President; shortly afterward, the Board elected Mark Cahill to take over the role for 2000–2001, a position he would go on to hold continuously for the rest of the decade and beyond. Jean Lynch and Andrew McFadzean joined the Board at the same meeting, alongside Peter Shea — not a newcomer, but a return: Peter had served as a Director in the mid-1990s before stepping down around 1998, and came back to the Board at this meeting.

Gerald Lynch continued as Secretary, a role he had taken on the previous year and would hold for roughly the next decade. It was Gerald's voice — warm, self-deprecating, and fond of a pun — that would give the newsletters of this era their distinctive character. Peter Carlisle remained Treasurer into 2001, before deciding not to continue in the role (no reason is recorded); Peter Shea took over as Treasurer from the December 2001 AGM and stayed in the post for years afterward — still, by 2009, described in the newsletter as "the current long suffering Treasurer."

Michael Clifford continued as the club's auditor throughout, reappointed at every AGM in this batch of records.

A club that needed money spent on it

The season immediately following that changeover was not an easy one. The Sydney Olympics drew visitors away from the mountains that September, and Kalymaro's accommodation income for the year came in well down on the year before. At the same AGM, the outgoing President had already flagged a more serious, longer-running problem: stonework on the 1980s extension was failing, water was getting into places it shouldn't, and a fair amount of money was going to be needed to put things right.

That problem had, in fact, already started to bite. Earlier in 2000, Bellevarde Constructions had quoted $13,000–$15,000 to fix the failing stone cladding — stones were coming loose near where people walked. The Board could only afford to do the safety-critical part straight away, which came in at around $6,260. In the course of that work, the builder found a support beam under the verandah rotted through by water penetration, with no damp course ever having been installed. It was shored up with steel props to get through the 2000 season, and the newsletter was candid with members that this was very much a stopgap rather than a fix.

By the end of 2000, the Board was telling members plainly that a serious injection of funds was needed — potentially $1,500 to $2,000 per member — and flagged a meeting early in the new year to discuss how to raise it.

The March 2001 Special General Meeting

That meeting was held on 3 March 2001. The Board's own explanatory paper to members, prepared for the occasion, is worth pausing on, because it lays out — for the first time in the records reviewed for this era — how the club had funded its big projects in the past. The original 1963 construction had been funded partly by a compulsory loan of £125 per member, which converted to $250 when Australia moved to decimal currency in February 1966. The 1980s extension had been funded by a further $1,000 compulsory loan, plus the sale of ten new memberships at an $8,000 premium each.

Members at the 2001 meeting approved a similar approach for the present problem: a $500 building levy on every existing member, a $2,000 non-refundable entrance fee for new members, and an expansion of the membership ceiling from 116 to 130. One member, Peter Ball, put forward an alternative proposal — a larger expansion to 136 members, funded through higher premiums rather than a levy — which the Board did not support, believing it would end up costing members more overall. Both proposals went to the meeting; the records reviewed here don't show how members actually voted on the alternative.

Peter Ball had earlier held the club's presidency, stepping down from that role in 1998 in favour of Barry McFadzean. He remained an ordinary member for some years after that, submitting this funding proposal in 2001, before retiring from the club later the same year along with a number of other long-time members — among them Graham and Louise Ball, Campbell and Richard Capel, Yvonne and Robert Clemesha, and Mac Halliday. The newsletter thanked them warmly for their contribution over the years, singling out Peter Ball's and his brother Graham's service on the Board in particular.

With the levy approved, Bellevarde Constructions went back to work over the following months. Continuous underground drainage was installed around the lodge for the first time, addressing a damp, musty smell in the basement that members had apparently long assumed was just part of the lodge's character. The verandah roof was rebuilt with proper flashing. The load-bearing wall at the western end of the verandah — found to have no waterproofing at all — was demolished and rebuilt, after the Secretary discovered a supporting timber so rotten that a table knife could be pushed straight through it to touch the Gyprock on the other side. The balustrade was replaced with a taller stainless-steel-wire railing to meet building code, and wall insulation went in for the first time as the cladding was replaced. The work was finished in time for the June 2001 season, and the newsletter's account of it — candid about how bad the underlying problems had turned out to be — is one of the liveliest pieces of writing in the whole decade's newsletters.

Kaly's story, told in full

It was also in these early-2000s newsletters that the club's long-standing mounted stag head — known to generations of members as "Kaly" — got his fullest telling. According to the account published in the newsletters of 2000 and 2001, the mount was bought by foundation President Don Hendry at the closing-down sale of a small restaurant in Asquith, north of Hornsby, "nearly forty winters ago" — that is, around the time of the lodge's founding, which other club records place at 1963. Don is said to have wedged the mounted head into the passenger seat of his Vauxhall Velox for the drive home to Vaucluse, to the visible astonishment of other motorists along the way. An inscription on the back of the mount — "Hardcastle – 1922 – Rotorua" — was traced, by a chance social encounter, to a Mrs Hardcastle, whose late husband had shot the animal on a hunting trip to New Zealand. A companion piece has Kaly himself writing in to object, with some indignation, to being nicknamed "Oscar" by less respectful younger members. It's the kind of story that could easily have been embellished in the retelling — but this is simply how it was recorded in the club's own newsletters at the time.

Settling into a rhythm — and a refurbishment plan takes shape

By December 2001, with the drainage and verandah work behind them, the Board turned its attention to the upstairs of the lodge. Architects Daryl Jackson Robin Dyke (working through Vince Myson) were commissioned to draw up three alternative refurbishment schemes for the kitchen, bathrooms, entry and stairwell, with indicative budgets ranging from around $60,750 to $122,162. These were shown to members at the AGM for comment; no particular scheme was committed to at this point; the club would spend the next few years working out exactly what it could afford.

In the meantime, ordinary club life continued. In 2002, the Board adopted a smoke-free policy across the whole lodge, including the basement — a decision the newsletter noted had been well accepted by members. The January 2003 bushfires, which burnt some 468,000 hectares of Kosciuszko National Park, brought temporary NPWS access restrictions to fire-affected areas around the resort. Later that year the Board added a formal by-law on illegal drug use, prompted partly by the patchwork of different marijuana laws between the ACT and NSW at the time, and keen to remove any ambiguity for members and guests.

The 2003 Annual General Meeting

At the 40th AGM, held 29 March 2003, members passed a Special Resolution expelling Andrew O'Brien from membership, under the club's rules governing failure to meet financial obligations. Mr O'Brien had not paid his annual subscription for two years, nor the 2001 levy; correspondence sent to his last known address, including a registered notice of intention to expel, had gone unclaimed. The Registrar of Co-operatives subsequently registered the expulsion. It's recorded here as what it was in the minutes — an administrative matter arising from unresolved non-payment — rather than any kind of dramatic falling-out.

The same AGM saw Nicole Harris and Tony Mallis elected to the Board. Tony Mallis would go on to serve continuously through the rest of the decade and well beyond; a reference in a later newsletter to his "election" in 2008 reflects the normal two-yearly director-retirement-and-re-election cycle rather than any gap in his service.

The long road to a new roof and bathrooms

By 2003 and 2004, the newsletters were candidly listing an accumulating backlog of jobs: new upstairs bathrooms and kitchen improvements, a wider and safer staircase, a rebuilt entry to replace the rotting back verandah, and re-roofing — "much of the roof," the Board told members in 2003, "is at the point of rusting through." A modest change made in 2004 — moving the weekly booking changeover from Saturday to Sunday — sits alongside these bigger concerns as a small, practical adjustment to how the lodge was used. That same year, "Big Bertha," the original basement water heater installed when the lodge was built in the 1960s, finally gave up after around forty years of service and was replaced.

In December 2004, the club lodged a Development Application for combined roof re-sheeting, upstairs bathroom reconstruction, and a new entry/airlock. A Special General Meeting that same month approved the funding for it: annual subscriptions rose from $25 to $100, and members agreed to a further $1,000-per-head levy, intended to raise about $100,000 toward a project the Board itself estimated would cost around $130,000 in total — the gap to be bridged from reserves and the coming seasons' takings.

What followed was not a quick job. Through 2005 and into 2006, the roof component of the project ran into serious engineering complications once building-code compliance was properly assessed. One structural engineer proposed underpinning the entire building with steel girders to support a new roof designed to withstand a 150-year snow event — a specification that, as the newsletter dryly pointed out, assumed a flat roof the lodge didn't actually have — at an estimated cost of around $90,000 on its own. A second engineer was brought in to look for a more workable and affordable solution, and three separate builders were asked to quote, with wildly different results (one estimate came in roughly $100,000 above the original budget). The newsletters covering this period are unusually candid about how frustrating and drawn-out the process was, without ever suggesting the club's viability was actually in doubt.

Construction finally proceeded through 2006 and into 2007, managed by Fairidge Construction Management, with Vince Myson continuing as architect and Murtagh Bond engaged for the structural engineering sign-off against current NPWS and Building Code requirements. Bellevarde Constructions, by now a familiar name in the club's maintenance history, carried out further related works.

The refurbishment, finished

The newsletter of 18 June 2007 announced that the long project was, at last, complete. What members found on their return: two new upstairs bathrooms, with heated flooring, sensor lighting and double glazing — one fully accessible, one fitted with a small bath for children — plus a third toilet kept separate from the upstairs bedrooms; a new entry airlock to keep the draughts out; a new access ramp bringing guests almost level from the road; a completely new roof; a wider upstairs hallway; a bedroom suitable for disabled use; new energy-efficient lighting throughout; resealed dining-room flooring; a full repaint; a new double-glazed front door and window; and — a smaller but well-remembered touch — a new gas barbecue on the verandah. The newsletter credited President Mark Cahill by name for having driven the project through to completion, alongside thanks to Heath Davies for his painting and renovation know-how, and to the Bessell, Mallis and Murray families for turning out to help with a working bee (fed, the record notes, on pizza from the Bredbo Pizzeria).

Smaller finishing touches — cupboards and coat hooks for the new airlock, improvements to the downstairs showers and taps — were left for future working bees, held at Easter and over January in the seasons that followed. In 2009, the club continued the improvement programme downstairs: bedrooms and bathrooms were repainted, and new carpet went into two upstairs bedrooms, the downstairs bedroom area, and the lounge.

Money in and money out

Financially, the decade tells a story of a club funding its own renewal almost entirely through its own members. Subscriptions rose from $25 a year at the start of the decade to $100 (from the December 2004 SGM) and then $150 (from the 2008 AGM), while weekly accommodation rates for members crept from $200 to $240 over the same period. The FY2002 accounts show a net loss of $54,312 for that year, driven mostly by $48,140 in repairs — the verandah reconstruction — plus a one-off NPWS sewerage levy. Members' loans, the legacy of the 1980s extension, fell from around $52,000 in 2000 to under $3,000 by 2003/04, steadily repaid, waived as gifts by some members, or offset against new joining fees and levies. The Capital Reserve, built almost entirely from levies, entrance fees and share premiums, grew from $19,000 in 2001 to over $100,000 by 2004/05 — the fund that, together with members' direct contributions, ultimately paid for the 2005–2007 refurbishment.

Relations with the Park

Throughout the decade, Kalymaro's dealings with its landlord, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and with the resort operator Perisher Blue, ran along fairly consistent lines, mostly conducted through the lodges' own representative body, SLOPES. The Board was a steady opponent of Perisher Blue's periodic push to have the resort's internal roads cleared of snow in winter, regarding it as contrary to the character of a snowbound valley. An IPART review in 2004–05 brought increases to NPWS rent and community-service charges, tied to CPI plus a margin. In 2006, NPWS offered lodges an extended lease to 2027 (with further renewal options) in exchange for a premium payment; the Board judged the terms too onerous and declined, noting the existing lease already ran to 2025. A separate 2006 proposal from NPWS to reclassify the access road serving Kalymaro, Sydney Ski Club and Lampada as a private track requiring a licence and shared maintenance contribution was not accepted by the three lodges, and appears to have quietly lapsed.

The next generation

The decade closes on a warm note. The 2008 and 2009 newsletters report, with evident pride, on the ski and snowboard achievements of two junior members, Henry Bessell and Madeline Mallis (the newsletters themselves spell it "Madeleine") — placings at the Redlands Cup, the Scots Cup, state and national Interschools competitions, and, for Henry, a training camp at Mammoth Mountain in California and a result at the New Zealand Nationals. It's a small but telling sign of a club whose membership, and its next generation, were still very much active.

And in March 2009, the Board bid farewell to Gerald Lynch, who had served as Secretary for roughly a decade — through, as the newsletter put it, "the re-writing of the Constitution" and the upstairs renovations, among much else. Heath Davies took over as Secretary, and David Ferguson joined the Board, carrying the club's leadership on into the next decade.

End of Kalymaro_2000-2009_Narrative.md

A President who stayed, and a Secretary who wore two hats

Mark Cahill was President right through this era, his name at the top of every AGM notice from 2015 to 2018. Around him, the Board changed only gently. Peter Shea signed on as Secretary from 2015, taking over from David Ferguson — and, as the Board's own minutes show plainly in their meeting headers, he was quietly the Treasurer too, for the whole of this era and a little beyond. It's not something the AGM minutes ever spelled out; members reporting each year simply heard from "the Treasurer" without necessarily knowing it was the same person taking the minutes. But the Board's own paperwork is unambiguous: "Secretary / Treasurer: Peter Shea" appears at the top of meeting after meeting, from March 2015 onward.

Tony Mallis held maintenance duties throughout, matching the "Mr Maintenance" nickname the 2015 Newsletter gave him. Adrienne Isbister looked after environmental matters. Jean Lynch — who also went by her married name, Rollings — ran bookings through the first half of this era, handing the role to Tony Mallis in April 2017, who then carried it alongside maintenance. Kim Bessell and, from 2015, Peter Murray rounded out the Board, with Peter Murray taking on the alpine sports portfolio in 2017.

The one real change at the top of the Board came at the 2015 AGM, where David Ferguson stood down after several years as Secretary and Director. Members thanked him — and his family — warmly, for what the minutes call "his initiative in streamlining the management practices of the Club," and Peter Murray joined the Board unopposed in his place. The 2015 Newsletter added its own note of thanks to "David Ferguson (and Oli)," and signed off, in a nice bit of club shorthand, with "Ski Heil!" — a phrase it credited to "our most esteemed former secretary."

New members, old paperwork

Nine new members joined in the 2014–15 year, and — unusually for a club history built mostly from minutes and newsletters — their own signed application forms have survived and made it into these records. They tell a fuller story than the AGM minutes alone.

The Callard family — Justin, Ruth, Bryn and Connor — applied together from Curl Curl, their forms all stamped as received on 24 February 2015. Toby McFadzean, son of Andrew, applied from Watson in the ACT, his form giving his full name for the first time as Toby Alexander Drennan McFadzean. Jae D. Pike applied from North Narrabeen — from an address that, tellingly, is the same one later given for Sally McFadzean when she joined the Board in 2019, which fits neatly with the Newsletter's own note that Jae is her son. And three members of the Halliday-Shand family — Isabelle, Lisa and Rachael — all applied from East Lindfield on 26 February 2015, joining Fiona's side of a family that had been part of Kalymaro for years.

All nine were approved at the Board's March 2015 meeting, taking membership to 130. A tenth piece of family business closed out around the same time: Chaska Halliday's earlier resignation, handled by her mother Melissa, was formally accepted by the Board with her small share capital returned to her.

Renewing the lease

The biggest piece of unfinished business Kalymaro carried into this era was its lease with National Parks and Wildlife, and it took most of the era to see through. The Board had been talking about a new lease since at least 2014, and by March 2015 the shape of the deal was clear: an upfront cost of a little over $21,000 plus GST, a base rent for the first year of $11,450 plus a small per-bed environmental levy, and rent that would rise with CPI or a share of turnover through to a market review in 2028 — with the right, at no extra cost, to take up three further ten-year terms after that. The Board judged the terms sound and resolved to go ahead.

Mark Cahill and Peter Murray signed the new lease on the club's behalf in 2016. Alongside it came a new bank guarantee arrangement — a Macquarie Bank guarantee sitting next to the existing Westpac one for a time, while the club waited for National Parks to confirm the older guarantees could be released. The costs of the whole exercise — registration and permit fees, leasing costs, a GST premium on the lease itself — landed in the 2016–17 financial year, adding up to just over $36,000 in one-off expenses that the club's own year-end notes were careful to explain as non-recurring, once the ordinary running of the lodge was looked at on its own.

Keeping the lodge in good repair

By 2015, the long-running project of double-glazing every window in the lodge was essentially complete — only one window, in the large downstairs bedroom, was still left to do — and new curtains went up throughout the bedrooms that same year.

The next big piece of building work was the downstairs bathrooms, and it had its roots in a smaller repair the year before. In April 2016, Wilbild Pty Ltd of Jindabyne patched a damaged shower wall — at the time, a straightforward fix. But when the club's builder, Geoff Wilkinson, wrote up his findings in January 2017, the picture was more serious: the timber frame behind the wall was rotted and saturated, and the shower recess had likely been letting water through for some time. His patch, he noted, had only ever been a temporary measure.

That report led, a few weeks later, to a formal Notice from the NSW Department of Planning and Environment, proposing an order requiring the club to carry out repairs in line with Wilkinson's findings and a builder's scope of works drawn up by Myson+Berkery Architects, with the job to be finished by 30 May 2017. The Board reviewed the notice, agreed with the approach it set out, and accepted it. Wilbild then carried out the renovation through April and June that year: both downstairs bathrooms stripped back and rebuilt, new waterproof membranes and tiling, a new instantaneous gas hot water system, underfloor heating, and a garbage enclosure added to the balcony. Two progress payments to Wilbild — one in April, one in June — added up to just over $61,000 for the plumbing work alone, with the architects and a structural engineer paid separately for their part in getting the design right.

It's worth being plain about how this one unfolded: it wasn't purely a discretionary upgrade the Board chose to do in its own time, but a piece of work the club was formally required to carry out, arising from a straightforward maintenance issue that turned out to be more serious once properly investigated. The Board's own response — reviewing the notice, agreeing with its terms, and getting the job done inside the required timeframe — reads as an ordinary, competent piece of building management, nothing more dramatic than that.

Other, smaller projects moved along in parallel. A kitchen upgrade was discussed at length through 2016 — the Board asked for more design options, agreed the northern-corner dining seat had to stay whatever else changed, but ultimately deferred a decision, and it doesn't appear to have gone ahead within this era. The lodge's lockers were replaced in 2016 and 2017, timed around a changeover weekend in April so members could move their gear across before the old ones came out — and by 2018 the new lockers were already full, with more planned for the following summer. The balustrade on the valley-side deck was also attended to in 2017, paid for out of the Sinking Fund alongside the bathroom work.

Modernising how members booked

Alongside the building work, the club modernised how it took bookings, moving to a new online booking system through 2016 aimed at being ready for that year's winter season — the same "revamped booking process" Tony Mallis reported on at that year's AGM. It's a small thing next to a bathroom renovation or a lease renewal, but it's part of the same pattern: a club steadily updating its everyday systems alongside its bigger, more visible projects.

A change of Treasurer

Peter Shea had held the Treasurer's role alongside Secretary for some years by the time, in April 2017, he told the Board plainly that he wanted to step back from it — citing, in his own words to the Board, "his very limited accounting knowledge and background," and that he felt "very uncomfortable continuing" in the role past that year's AGM. He stayed on as Secretary and Director. The Board agreed to look for a suitable replacement, and by October that year Peter Shea had, in the Board's own words, "effectively resigned" the Treasurer's role, circulating a summary of its duties to help find someone to take it on. At the 2017 AGM, members were told the Treasurer would not be continuing beyond the 2017–18 financial year.

In practice, it took rather longer than that. Colin House offered his help ahead of the 2018 AGM and joined the Board as a Director in 2019, but Peter Shea in fact carried on as Treasurer until 31 March 2020 — nearly three years after first raising it — with Colin House formally taking the role on 1 April 2020. It's a small illustration of how a volunteer club actually works: a job gets done by whoever is already doing it until someone is genuinely ready to take it on.

Honouring Barry McFadzean

At the 2016 AGM, members voted unanimously to make Barry McFadzean an honorary life member — a non-active, non-voting recognition of what the minutes call his "long and dedicated service to the co-operative." His health had been a matter the Board was asked to consider the year before, and the life membership, when it came, was carried with thanks to the whole McFadzean family for his "exemplary service" to the club over the years.

The rhythm of running the club

Subscriptions rose gently across the era, tracking the CPI figure the Board reviewed each February: $175 in 2014, $180 through 2015 and 2016, up to $183 in 2017 and $186 in 2018 — the Board, in 2018, noting they'd rather "stick with round numbers" than chase the CPI figure to the cent. AGMs moved around Sydney each year — Strata Plus's own offices in Surry Hills in 2015, the Crows Nest Centre in 2016 and 2017, Manly Library in 2018 — with members generally heading off to dinner together afterwards; the 2015 notice alone canvasses three different Sydney restaurants before settling on a venue. By 2018, one member was joining the AGM by Skype rather than travelling in — a small but telling sign of how meetings were changing, given board meetings themselves had already been run remotely for years, first over Skype and then, from late 2016, over Zoom.

Membership numbers held fairly steady through the era, and a handful of long-inactive memberships were formally cancelled by the Board in October 2018 under the club's usual constitutional process — an ordinary piece of housekeeping rather than anything out of the ordinary for a club of Kalymaro's age. Kelly and Partners continued as auditors throughout, and the club's accounts were prepared, as they had been for some years by this point, through Strata Plus.

Part of a bigger valley

Kalymaro's members weren't only occupied with their own lodge. The 2015 Newsletter points members toward two events that brought the whole Perisher Valley together each year: the "Back to Perisher Weekend" each April, with its fun run to Charlotte Pass, a duck race on Perisher Creek raising money for the volunteer ski patrol, and an evening barbecue in aid of the Burns Unit at Westmead Hospital; and the Perisher Peak Festival each June, opening the winter season with folk and roots music. Kalymaro also lodged its own annual report each year with the Perisher Range Resorts Environmental Management System — a quiet, ongoing piece of the Environmental Coordinator's work that doesn't get much space in the minutes but ran steadily throughout the era all the same.

And the club held onto its own small domestic notes along the way — a Board meeting in March 2015 that opened not with an agenda item but with congratulations to Jean and Andrew Rollings on an expected baby, and a members' website in 2015 that sat, endearingly, behind the password "themoose."

Looking ahead

By the time this era closed, a new group was stepping onto the Board. At the AGM held at Manly Library on 18 May 2019, Julia Isbister, Colin House and Sally McFadzean all joined as Directors — their appointments recorded as taking effect from the first of June — with Adrienne Isbister, Julia's mother, stepping down after some years of service. The lease was settled for years to come, the downstairs bathrooms were done, and the club's administration continued to run through Strata Plus much as it had for most of the decade. It's the kind of quiet handover that doesn't make for a dramatic ending, but it's very much how Kalymaro seems to have always worked: one steady Board passing things on to the next.

End of Kalymaro_2015-2019_Narrative.md

Kalymaro_2020-2025_Narrative.md

Kalymaro Lodge, 2020–2025: The Pandemic Years and After

An ordinary February

The era opens with a Board meeting that reads, in hindsight, like a postcard from another world. In February 2020 the directors gathered to do what they did every summer: they set the annual subscription (up by CPI to $193, after briefly considering $195), settled the winter rates and season dates, and heard Mark Cahill's report on the summer works then underway. A contractor named Goaland was partway through a substantial program — the first progress claim of $14,541 had landed, with the full job expected to come in somewhere near $70,000 — and the drying room had already been cleaned of mould, water-sealed and repainted. The Board approved new doona covers and four new lockers, decided against refurbishing the dining room chairs at $300 apiece, and confirmed one genuine change of personnel: Colin House would take over as Treasurer from 1 April 2020, with Peter Shea closing out the 2019/20 books and filing the paperwork after many years in the role.

There was even a date pencilled in for the 2020 AGM: 16 May, in Manly. The meeting closed at 9:35pm with nothing under general business.

By the time the summer works wrapped up, the club had spent about $66,500 — most of it on the outside of the building. All the wood panelling and the stonework were repaired and the exterior repainted; the power board was replaced along with a run of electrical repairs; a new light went into the dining room; doors were re-hung and windows made to shut properly. The club had built up its cash reserves precisely so it could take on this kind of program, and the design for a new kitchen was well advanced. Then, in mid-March 2020, the Board stopped all improvement work. Everything else about that decision belongs to the story of what came next.

Winter 2020

When COVID-19 arrived, the club's records show a small volunteer Board working through a problem no one had a template for. Industry guidance circulating through SLOPES in May 2020 was blunt about lodges like Kalymaro: "Accommodation with shared cooking and shared bathrooms, it will be tough to operate that for the foreseeable future." Much of the official material assumed lodges with full-time managers on site; Kalymaro had none.

The Board met and worked through fifteen reopening proposals one by one. The result, communicated to members in July 2020, was a winter unlike any other: the lodge capped at eight people instead of thirteen; four bedrooms in use, each with its own allocated bathroom; bookings running Tuesday to Monday morning only, so a professional cleaner could do a full clean of the empty lodge every Monday; all the lodge's pillows, doonas and blankets removed, with everyone bringing their own bedding; low-season rates charged for the whole season in recognition of the impost; and a signed acknowledgement of the risks required with every booking. A written COVID Safe Plan covered the rest, down to removing the tea towels and closing communal cupboards.

The Secretary's email opening bookings on 21 July 2020 caught the mood of the moment — genuinely pleased to be opening at all, and under no illusions: "this winter season is not even remotely like anything we have seen before... I hope that things change for the better soon and that 2021 will be the bumper snow season we all dream about."

The numbers tell the rest. Of 944 available bed-nights that winter, 37 were booked — four per cent occupancy, about $2,400 in revenue against a normal winter's $50,000 or so. Members whose bookings were cancelled by lockdowns were given credits to use in later seasons rather than refund cheques the club could ill afford. And at the same time, the cost of insurance jumped from about $9,000 to over $20,000 — the beginning of a pressure that would shape the club's finances for the rest of the era.

Two AGMs in one afternoon

With no AGM possible in 2020, the club held two in a row at the Manly Library on Saturday 5 June 2021, dealing with the 2019/20 and 2020/21 years in a single afternoon. Mark Cahill was frank with members about where things had stood at the end of March: the year's loss came to $36,000, on top of the previous year's planned $51,000 deficit from the exterior works. But the club was solvent, its cashflow forecast through to the following March, and the Board had spent the year quietly shoring things up — chasing long-outstanding arrears (most of those members chose to pay up and stay), lifting the annual levy to $250, and negotiating rent relief with National Parks through SLOPES, which yielded about $5,000 off and some deferral against the roughly $14,000 annual rent. A member's vote of thanks put the year's real achievement simply: by stopping the non-essential work in March 2020, the Board had "basically saved the boat."

The missed year produced one constitutional curiosity: because the directors due to retire in 2020 had been acting in the meantime, the whole Board had to vacate, and the whole Board was re-elected. "The Constitution doesn't think of COVID, did it?" someone observed. It was also the point at which Kim Bessell's long involvement formally ended — he had not been active for some time and did not stand again. Pete Shea, re-elected along with the rest, flagged that he, Mark Cahill and Tony Mallis had each given the Board somewhere around two decades, and asked members to start thinking about the next generation of directors.

The meetings paused to record the passing in 2019 of Don Hendry, Life Member and Founding Member: "We are forever indebted to the vision of Don and the other members of that time."

There were lighter notes too. The Murray boys, just back from the lodge, reported the exterior "all schmick in terms of the paint and the stone"; an inspection of the lockers turned up a stash of wine belonging to David and Olivera Ferguson ("is this your wine?" — "Yes. Don't touch."); and the meeting adjourned to a booked table at the Ivanhoe, with instructions to follow the red jumper. The 2021 season was already looking like a different story — 52 per cent occupancy booked before the season had properly begun, and August effectively full.

Recovery

The 2022 season repaid the club's patience. "Good snow that came good in June and stayed until late in September," as the March 2023 newsletter put it, and a wave of members and guests keen to be back on snow: lodge revenue reached $83,692, the strongest year in this era's records. The two COVID-delayed AGMs were caught up in the same fashion as before — two meetings back to back at Manly Library on 23 September 2023 — where the Treasurer's figures put the combined COVID loss for 2021 and 2022 at $47,000, softened by a $15,000 State Government grant that Colin House was warmly thanked for pursuing, $14,500 in new joining fees, and the levy increase.

The September 2023 meetings also recorded two passings of the baton. Pete Shea had handed the Secretary's role to Jean Rollings — the end of a long run in the club's offices that had begun in the era of MYOB on a home computer — and members formally thanked David and Oli Ferguson, whose firm StrataPlus continued to run the club's accounts, payments and trust banking at no charge, as it had since 2012. The club's auditors, Kelly + Partners, came at mates' rates through the same relationship, a point the President was careful to remind members of whenever the reappointment came up.

The March 2023 newsletter carried a farewell of a different order: a Vale for Gerald Lynch, long-serving Secretary, SLOPES stalwart and — in Mark Cahill's words at the AGM — "a pillar of the lodge." The newsletter remembered him the way members knew him: "One always knew it was going to be an extra special stay at Kaly when Jan and Gerald were 'in the house'; and it always was!" His sayings outlived him in the club's own newsletters — "Book Early! Book Often!" and "Ski Heil."

Keeping the lodge in good repair

Maintenance in this era falls into three chapters: the big exterior program of 2019-20, the enforced pause, and the catch-up.

The pause ended gently in the summer of 2022-23 with roof repairs — including a leak over the kitchen — new bedside lights in the downstairs bedrooms, and surgery on the kitchen stove: new hinges for the main oven door, a new thermostat for the smaller oven. The stove, like the original lounge heater upstairs, sits in a category of its own in the club's records. Berridale Appliances had advised never to replace it, because "they don't make them like that anymore"; the old heater, similarly, puts out roughly double the heat of anything quoted to replace it. Both are maintained rather than replaced. A new dishwasher — first approved back in February 2020 — was finally installed before the 2023 season.

Behind these jobs sits a change of builder that the 2024 AGM told as a story in itself. After the era of Bellevarde Constructions — "one of the best construction companies in the country," the firm that had served the club following the major renovation that added the front deck — and after the years of a local carpenter who spent his winters as a ski patroller, "skiing past our lodge every day to make sure that it was safe," the club had drifted for a while. (The precise sequence and the ski patroller's name are being confirmed with Mark Cahill.) One meeting with a prospective builder ended with "really bad vibes." Then Andy Burfitt, the bootfitter and himself a skilled carpenter, recommended a builder newly arrived from Sydney: Mitchell Tate. The club's records treat him as a find. Rung about a possible storm-damaged roof, he put the cork back in his bottle of red in Jindabyne, drove up, photographed the roof and reported "your roof's good" — then had to be begged to send an invoice. Asked in 2025 whether he'd bill for another drive-by inspection: "No, I like driving."

His summer 2023-24 program was the era's most visible: new timber decking on the front deck, the old metal lockers removed from the entrance, new low-voltage bedside lighting upstairs and in the locker room, every internal door checked and repaired, the drying room door re-hung with a proper hold-open latch after someone — "the Hulk," the meeting suggested — had somehow torn its welded steel hinges out, a non-slip safety step at the back door, bathroom repairs, window winders fixed, and the sauna given a full electrical safety check, a rewired control board, a new LED light (its brightness the subject of genuine AGM debate) and freshly sanded and oiled timber. The Cortis family donated a new leather rug for the lounge. That same year the Board ordered a defibrillator for the lodge — a single-use, subscription-based unit that the supplier replaces after use or expiry — installed with a new first aid kit and registered with the valley's list of AED-equipped lodges.

Why not something more ambitious — the new kitchen, say, designed and ready in early 2020? The 60th AGM heard the answer at length. Dealing with Planning inside a national park is slow and unforgiving; a neighbouring lodge that removed a small section of cladding for replacement was hit with a stop-work order and spent a winter with the wall bare. Any substantial work risks a requirement to bring the whole lodge up to current building standards — the staircase alone couldn't comply — which would effectively mean knocking the place down. Vince Myson, the architect behind much of the club's earlier remodelling, no longer deals with Parks at all. So the club's strategy is deliberate: simple maintenance done well, major works approached carefully and cleared with Planning first. The list ahead was already written down in 2025: the electricity meter boards need replacing, the exterior needs painting, and there is a basement water shut-off valve that slows the water without quite stopping it — "we'll put that on the list for next summer."

Sixty years

The club turned sixty quietly and marked it warmly. The 2024 AGM broke with decades of Sydney venues and met at the Lake George Winery near Collector on 23 June 2024 — lunch to follow — where attendees received a 60th anniversary keyring and were encouraged to take extras for family. Julia Isbister was thanked for continuing to serve on the Board from Canada, where she had recently moved; the meeting mused about east-coast and west-coast branches. The next year's AGM settled into Customs House Library at Circular Quay, opening with an acknowledgement of country.

The anniversary years' seasons were, frankly, lean. Poor late-winter snow two years running cut bookings by roughly a fifth in each of 2023 and 2024, and the wider market told the same story — regional bookings and season-pass sales both down about 27 per cent in 2024. The club posted a modest $12,416 surplus for 2023/24 and a $10,324 loss for 2024/25. The underlying arithmetic, spelled out plainly by the Treasurer at both AGMs, is that levies and bookings now roughly cover the fixed costs — rent rising at CPI plus 2.5 per cent, municipal charges near $30,000, insurance around $34,000 having nearly quadrupled since 2020 — and it is new members' joining fees that fund the maintenance. Nine new members in 2023/24 contributed $35,750, which is almost exactly what that summer's works program cost.

New rules for old problems

Two larger governance matters occupied the Board as the era closed.

The first arrived from the Australian Taxation Office, which revised its guidelines on income-tax-exempt sporting bodies. The Board's honest self-assessment was that Kalymaro could not meet the new test — the guidelines' own worked example of a club that doesn't qualify "described us to a T," as the 2025 AGM heard. Rather than attempt an artificial restructure ("it would be costing us more money to satisfy the requirement than to actually just pay the tax"), the club engaged Kelly + Partners to lodge its first tax returns, with members' own payments protected by the principle of mutuality and only non-member revenue taxable.

The second was older: the constitution. Members at the 2025 AGM were told it had last been amended in 2005 and that most of it descended, in substance, from the club's earliest rules — though the text itself had been through a full rewrite in 1999–2000, in Gerald Lynch's era as Secretary. Whatever its vintage, its gaps were practical: no provision for electronic meetings, voting or proxies, and an annual subscription capped at $250 — a ceiling the club had been pressed against since 2021, when the need to amend it was first flagged at the AGM. The Board joined a national federation of co-operatives to support a full redraft and negotiation with the NSW Registry, with an extraordinary general meeting planned to adopt the new constitution.

And on the horizon sits the lease. The current lease expires in 2028; the club holds three ten-year options, purchased with the lease itself and exercisable at the club's choice, potentially carrying it through to 2058. National Parks cannot withdraw the options, but it does set the rent, and a six-month window in 2027 will decide the terms. As ever, the club negotiates as one voice among the fifty or sixty non-commercial lodges through SLOPES — because, as the 2025 AGM was reminded, "as a single lodge we have no prospect of getting National Parks and Wildlife Service to talk to us, let alone negotiate."

The life of the place

For all the ledgers and lease clauses, the records of these years keep returning to the texture of lodge life. Bookings for 2025 opened at midnight on 1 April; the first booking arrived ten seconds later, the second four seconds after that. Tony Mallis, Booking Officer throughout the era, restocked the lodge before the 2024 winter with, among other things, some forty bottles of Jif discovered in Costco — solemnly recorded in the minutes as "Pete Shea noted that we have a lot of Jif." Paul and Judy Shea spent the whole of February 2025 at the lodge, documenting walk after walk in the club's Facebook albums and reporting rather more snakes in the grass than anyone remembered. A feral cat near the old septic tank in 2024 brought a Parks officer with traps on the first working day; the mountain pygmy possum population, members were pleased to hear in 2025, was up for the first time in years. When smoky cooking set off the fire alarm one Easter, the entire fire brigade happened to be in the valley for an open day and arrived within three minutes, charging nothing.

And the generations kept turning over, as they always have at Kalymaro. Noting in 2021 that Madeline Mallis had booked out the remaining beds for a late-August week, Mark Cahill remembered doing exactly the same thing about thirty years earlier, when Mr Druce was president — and that it was the beginning of his own involvement. The 1966 Perisher Cup photograph — the most improved team — is still on the wall.

Looking ahead

The era closes with the club leaner than it entered it — around 118 members against 124, its reserves rebuilt twice over — but with its affairs in careful order: a stable Board barely changed in five years under Mark Cahill's continuing presidency, a trusted builder, a new constitution in draft, tax arrangements being regularised, and a decision about the next thirty years at Perisher already on the calendar for 2027. The 2025 AGM ended the way these records suggest the club would want it to: with the President announcing he had two and a half weeks of skiing booked and paid for, and inviting everyone to come and join him.

End of Kalymaro_2020-2025_Narrative.md