Change Rooms

The change rooms at the Bankstown RSL sit in the underground recreation wing, between the pool and the showers. The walls are pastel-tiled in the same pink-and-white as the rest of the basement amenities, with timber bench seating running along three sides of the room. A row of steel lockers stretches along the long wall, the doors all numbered, most of them closed. The floor is non-slip tile in a darker shade than the walls. The lighting is fluorescent strips overhead, several of them dead. Coat hooks are bolted to the wall above the benches at regular intervals. A wall-mounted mirror at one end is the only spot of reflective surface in the room.

The change rooms served the pool, the squash court, the gym, and the sauna, all of which sat in the underground recreation wing of the 1955 clubhouse. Members changed into their training kit here, locked their street clothes in the steel lockers, and crossed through to whichever facility they had come down for. The wing ran continuously through the club's working life and wound down through the 2000s as the membership thinned. The Bankstown RSL was demolished in March 2019. The change rooms, the lockers, the benches, and the wall-mounted mirror are all gone with the rest of the basement.