^{Cover Image: Western Australia’s oldest community theatre, The Goldfields Repertory Club turns 95. Image by Sarah-Jayne Eeles.}

This year the Goldfields Repertory Club in the regional mining city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder celebrates its 95th birthday, making it Western Australia’s oldest continuously operating community theatre. For the past 88 of those years, its home has been at 7 Brookman Street.  

It has delivered performances and productions, hosted touring artists and various community group events, supported social activities, and provided accessible arts and culture experiences for Goldfields audiences and participants for more than nine decades. 

But despite this longevity, the Rep Club (as it’s affectionately known) is facing the closure of its ageing theatre. The biggest obstacle is not a lack of commitment from the Club, but that it is a theatre, not a sporting facility.  

Sport and the arts are equal pillars of healthy communities. They build connection, wellbeing, confidence, belonging and opportunities for people of all ages — including children — to contribute and thrive, but the funding options and recognised value of each are far from equal. 

The Club formed in 1931 and, in 1938, was gifted the use of a synagogue by the Jewish community, which it later purchased outright. When fire destroyed the building in 1972, the Club continued to perform at other locations — the show must go on — before buying, relocating and transforming a building from the Railway Yards (effectively, a large shed) into a theatre and opening again in 1976. 

In the decades that followed, with perhaps a distinctly 1980s laissez-faire approach to planning approvals, the building evolved through a series of ad hoc additions and upgrades while the Club continued to thrive.  

Yet despite years of work by dedicated members to keep the theatre compliant through multiple upgrades, the original core of the building can no longer meet modern standards. The Club has explored numerous solutions, investing significant time and money in consultant reports and other essential documentation only for them to become outdated before the next funding opportunity. The current ‘shovel-ready’ plans cost $20,000.  

When the Club first began planning its upgrade, the estimated cost was $2 million. A proposed three-stage renovation was rejected by the City in favour of funding a $50,000 consultancy to explore even cheaper alternatives, but ultimately that report found the only option was a complete rebuild. A new facility is now estimated to cost $6 million. 

Surely there are funding options for this? 

If you are a sporting facility, yes. 

If you are a theatre, not so much, and almost all those options exclude new builds. 

Kalgoorlie-Boulder has more than 30 dedicated sporting facilities, including the $14.8 million Goldfields Basketball Stadium redevelopment (2023–25) and the $18.9 million Ray Finlayson Sporting Complex, opened in 2017. 

By comparison, the City has only three theatre venues. Stage Left Theatre Troupe operates from a converted nightclub, providing an intimate boutique space, and the Goldfields Arts Centre caters for large-scale productions. It’s a classic Goldilocks case: both are local assets, but for many community groups one is too small and the other too large and expensive to use. The Rep Club has been ‘just right’ for decades, and there is no facility ‘waiting in the wings’ that could fill this role. 

^{Despite the Club continuing to thrive, the facilities are in need of some TLC. Images by Sarah-Jayne Eeles.}

What are the funding options? 

The State Government’s Community Sport and Recreation Facility Fund (CSRFF) can fund up to $2.5 million but almost exclusively focuses on sport and ‘recreation’ is defined as physical activities, not theatre.  

Lotterywest is another big hitter when it comes to funding and does have an Arts and Culture Infrastructure Grant Program, but it is for renovations and upgrades, not new builds. The City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder also has an enhancement and restoration fund of up to $50,000 but has publicly expressed reluctance to fund any capital works. 

No one is saying sport isn’t important; it is. Nor is anyone pretending it won’t take multiple funding partners to support the rebuild, but current funding avenues heavily favour sport and often exclude arts facilities entirely. 

When sport and art both provide the same multitude of benefits to their communities, why is it nearly impossible for only one of them to be recognised, let alone have pathways of support? 

See the Goldfields Repertory Club website for more details.