Articles

Riverland 8

When the rowers of Yarra Yarra Rowing Club hear the clamor of Riverland's patrons, it usually means the hard work is done and they're about to turn around and head back to the landing stage.

Anyone who rows on the Yarra will know the Riverland bar and café, even if they have yet to buy a drink or a gourmet sausage there. It sits nestled against the north end of Princes Bridge, with its wooden-decked beer garden leading down to the water's edge. No surprise, then, that so many of us regularly troop over Riverland as soon as we're off the water, for a hard-earned cold beer. In late 2008, though, YYRC gained another reason to be grateful to Riverland: The bar donated $18,000 to the Club to buy a new women's eight.

The team that runs Riverland - Richard Ludbrook, Minh Nguyen and Dave Sharry - value the relationship between their waterfront bar and the rowers on the river: "It's one of the few things that surrounds us here", Richard explains. "We don't see trams and cars going past down here, but we do see rowing boats… It's part of our landscape". Richard doesn't think of Federation Square and Boathouse Drive as "this side of the river and that side", but rather a single community centered on the river, with rowing a quintessential part of the "identity of the area".

Riverland donates to charities each year, but in 2008 the team specifically wanted to give something to this Yarra community and to the rowers who provide so much entertainment to the bar's patrons. "There's a lot of interaction between the drinkers and the rowers", says Richard. "Whenever anyone crashes into the bridge, there are always people here cheering and shouting". The rowers are even a selling point on the Riverland website, which invites customers to "enjoy the rowing boats that replace the cars and the shade of 80-year-old trees that replace the towering city office blocks."

So why Yarra Yarra, out of all the rowing clubs that face Riverland from across the water? Richard already knew Carol Cooke (YYRC's marketing manager at the time) via her husband, so when Carol rang him up saying her rowing club had found a second hand boat for sale and asked if he'd like to contribute, he jumped at the chance. Carol and the 2008 Women's Squad coaches (Stuart McShane and Stuart Poole) had already established a way for money to be donated to the Australian Sports Foundation, so that the donation could be appropriately tax deductible and the donor could specify where the money was to go and how it would be spent.

YYRC is immensely grateful to Richard, Minh and Dave for this beautiful boat.