It started at midnight
At midnight, at the start of a June weekend in 1915, about forty people walked onto an empty block beside the Fairfield railway line, sang the National Anthem, and picked up their hammers.
A hundred spectators stood in the dark to watch. The frame went up through the small hours. The roof went on in ninety minutes. Gas and water were connected, the walls were painted, and at five o’clock in the afternoon they stopped, because there was nothing left to do. The Argus reported, a little breathlessly, that the Fairfield Rifle Club had built its clubhouse “within 17 hours”.
It was opened that same evening by the Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, who inspected the day’s work with a professional eye. He was a carpenter himself.
The club has never left. Our clubhouse and range stand on that same block beside the railway line, and when you walk in for the first time you will be shooting on ground the club has held, and shot on, since 1915.
Eleven weeks, start to finish
The building day was not even the audacious part.
In March 1915 a local councillor, John Coate, put an advertisement in the paper calling a meeting of “all interested in the formation of a Rifle Club at Fairfield”. On 6 May, more than 120 people turned up and 62 joined on the spot. Within three weeks the new committee had bought a block on Wingrove Street, sold off the half it did not need, and banked the difference. The Argus totted it up: the club had “the land free and £69 in hand”.
They had been in business for nineteen days. The same paper declared that no rifle club in the metropolitan area had commenced its career so auspiciously, and for more than a century nobody has argued.
The first trophy went home with a woman
On the night the shooting range opened, 13 July 1915, women were on the firing line, and Mrs G. Alexander won a trophy before the paint was properly dry. The first ladies’ competition that October drew twenty-four entries, and the committee noted, in the careful language of 1915, that the ladies’ scoring “compared very favourably with that of the male members”. By 1916 the club had a ladies’ champion, Mrs G. Anderson, who shot 131 out of 150 for the title.
We mention this because plenty of clubs have spent the last century apologising for a men-only past. We never had one. And the thread holds: Fairfield has entered the state women’s pennant every edition since 2016, and in 2024, ten of the thirteen competitors across the entire event were Fairfield women.
Sixteen went to the war
The club was three months old when it started farewelling its own.
Sixteen members served in the First World War. Two came home decorated twice over: Ernest Gothard with the Distinguished Conduct Medal and a Mention in Despatches, Sydney Dunston with the Military Medal and Bar. And the founding captain, Alf Pettit, a Boer War veteran, was partway through officers’ school when he heard a draft was sailing early. He gave up the course and went as a private because, as the paper said at the time, once he had made up his mind to go it mattered little to him, so long as he got there. He died of wounds in France in May 1917. His portrait in uniform, printed as he left for the front, survives.
The members left behind won six silver shields in two years. They are on the clubroom wall today.
Of the sixteen who went, fifteen came home.
Where the suburb happened
If you lived in Fairfield between the wars, sooner or later your life passed through our hall. The Red Cross worked here through the Great War. The Labor Party branch met here for thirty years, and a rising politician named John Cain, later Premier of Victoria, spoke here in November 1918. The Oddfellows had their lodge nights, the Free Gardeners kept their strongbox here, a motorcycle club roared in and out after the Second War, and on Anzac Eve 1951 the returned gunners of “M” Battery chose this room, of all the rooms in Melbourne, for their reunion.
A rifle club, yes. But for the best part of forty years, also the room where Fairfield happened.
The blacksmith and the boy
Every club has its legends. Ours start with a man the papers called the Village Blacksmith.
Fred Smith won the club championship in 1918. He won it again in 1947, aged sixty-three. In between he was selected to shoot for Victoria, served on the Heidelberg council, and held the club’s land in trust for thirty-nine years, because that is how a small club kept its ground safe in those days. In 1956, aged about seventy-three, he was still carding a perfect hundred over three ranges at Williamstown. For four decades, the best shot in the club was also the man minding the deeds.
Then came the boy. Ron Stanfield won his first club championship in 1958–59 at twenty-five and simply did not stop: thirteen championships in a row. He donated the honour board himself, which was either generosity or supreme confidence, and on the evidence it was both.
And in 1957 a Fairfield six shot 598 out of a possible 600 in a single pennant round. It was only good enough for a draw. Brunswick shot 598 as well. That was the standard of the company we kept.
The neighbours who stayed
In 2007 the Eltham club, our neighbours of fifty years’ standing, were given a month’s notice that their range was to become a station car park. They asked if they could shoot with us “on a short-term basis”.
The short-term basis never ended. The two clubs have run a combined competition ever since, and we would not have it any other way.
Why this sport
Target shooting is a sport of stillness. Twenty metres, indoors, in any weather, where the contest is between you, your breathing and a target patient enough to record the truth. Size does not matter. Strength does not matter. Age barely matters, which is why a steady sixteen-year-old and a steady seventy-year-old can meet as genuine equals, and why one small club can hold more than a century of people.
One last thing about the kind of club this is. The family that donated our championship trophy in 1935 still has a member on the firing line today.
Help us tell the story
Most of what is on this page came out of old newspapers. The rest of the club’s history is in shoeboxes and sideboards — photographs, programmes, clippings, and the stories that go with them. If you have any of it, we’d love to include it: mention it to any committee member on a club night, or write to us at P.O. Box 1, Fairfield VIC 3078.
Walk in
We are a Target Rifle Victoria affiliated club at 167 Wingrove Street, Fairfield, beside the railway line — the door has been open since 1915.