Exmouth attracts global visitors
Photo: L to R: Club President Graham Jones, Franz and Jakob Fingerlos, Vice Capt. Denise Bailey
The Exmouth Bowling Club regularly receives bowlers from all over Australia during the winter months but was visited by a couple of brothers from further afield this year. Franz and Jacob Fingerlos hail from Saint Michael, a small town near Salzburg in Austria and they are currently travelling around Australia together. Franz has been studying marine biology and fisheries management at Townsville’s James Cook University for the past ten years and met up with Jakob in Melbourne last April.
Jakob studied environmental management in Vienna and has taken time off from managing wind farms in Germany to visit Australia. Since their reunion, the brothers have travelled up the centre of Australia, across to the Kimberleys and down the west coast, arriving in Exmouth in early August.
Soon after their arrival in Exmouth, they noticed people playing bowls at the local club and asked if they could have a ‘roll-up’. They found that they liked the game and before long were participating in social events. Both of them quickly showed promise and were a welcome addition to participating teams. Their successful adoption of the game is quite remarkable as lawn bowls is not a game played in Austria and they had only two previous ‘roll-ups’, one in Melbourne and another at Alice Springs.
Franz and Jakob will be travelling further south after leaving Exmouth and hope to continue their bowling at other centres, including Perth. The brothers have been much encouraged by the warm welcome and friendly atmosphere that they encountered at Exmouth. They both reckoned that the food and beer was pretty good too. They are both keen to return to Western Australia in the not too distant future.
After a relatively slow start, the winter season in Exmouth has proved to be very worthwhile with newer faces mingling with those who have been going there for a long time. Club officials are now gearing up for the men’s open carnival, due to be held in mid-October. This event was run for the first time last year and was extremely well received by participating bowlers. Hopefully, a similar outcome will be achieved in 2015.
