Camberwell Golf Club's "unacceptable" house rules

Mark Irving, KC, spent the best part of two years cleaning up the feral cesspit that is the CFMEU. Having survived criminal bikies, he has now taken on something far more formidable: the Camberwell Golf Club General Committee. 

Camberwell Golf Club and Camberwell Ladies Golf Club were previously separate outfits – despite playing on the same course in Melbourne's east – with 230 men and 70 women respectively. Recently, they merged. 

But the new club finds itself in a bitter dispute over how it should be governed, particularly whether the union of the two clubs was a genuine amalgamation or, as some of its female members claim, their absorption into a club controlled by men. 

Matters came to a head on September 8, when the women on the amalgamated committee (four in total) were dumped at a meeting, leaving only the men (13 in total). 

Club president Craig Atkins told The Age it was a "storm in a teacup" and that the women were appointed "through an error in the [club's] constitution". 

Camberwell Ladies Golf Club secretary Julia Trafford, one of the four, responded in The Age with: "It was a stitch-up and [we were] ambushed by the president". 

Rampart has obtained an incendiary letter from Irving and the four women that makes the possibility of reconciliation seem unlikely. The letter outlines the "reasons we won't be attending" a general committee meeting held earlier this week. The authors then go on to detail a series of antediluvian "conditions" they claimed the committee attached to the invitation: