Jamie Taafe learnt to swim at Sunshine pool as a child and for the past 58 years the place has been a part of his life.

Taafe, 67, who has held many volunteer roles at Sunshine Swimming Club, including being its president since 1996, can still be found poolside at the now Sunshine Leisure Centre every Sunday, 34 weeks a year.

Jamie Taafe, 67, has been a Sunshine Swimming Club member since he was nine years old.Credit:Eddie Jim

He helps organise, and is the starter for, swimming races for young people aged from six to 18 years.

He says the idea is “to give every swimmer an opportunity to succeed”, but also for swimming to be a social as well as physical outlet for them, just as it has been for him.

Taafe and his wife, Dee, still have friends they met at the club 40 years ago.

It’s not Taafe’s only voluntary interest – he is also the chair of Tenpin Bowling Victoria.

And so in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, Taafe receives the OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia in the General Division) “for service to swimming, and to tenpin bowling”.

An unusual combination, but he says he loves helping people participate in two sports you can play all your life.

Taafe, a retired financial accountant, said he felt humbled, surprised and grateful at the Queen’s Birthday honour.

He grew up less than one kilometre from the-then outdoor 50-metre Sunshine pool, in Melbourne’s west. There are now two 25 metre pools – one outdoor and one indoor.

Jamie Taafe, back, fourth from left, in a 1972 swimming team with his father Tom Taafe standing far left.

Jamie’s father, Tom Taafe, was the swimming club president for 25 years and the club rooms are named after him. Jamie was a club member from 1963 at age nine.

He raced and trained there from the age of 11, and as a teenager he worked as a lifeguard at the pool. Roles he’s held since at the club include publicity officer, learn-to-swim co-ordinator and water polo organiser.

Taafe met his wife, Dee, also a competitive swimmer, in 1976 at a ball organised by district swimming clubs. The couple started helping run junior sport after their own two children, Jason and Kirsten, began racing at Sunshine pool.

The couple started helping organise tenpin bowling after their kids started playing that sport at the now-defunct Sunshine Bowl.

Taafe’s involvement in tenpin bowling has risen from local to national level and he has accompanied Australian junior bowling teams to compete overseas. He reckons that community engagement “gives you a few more years on your life span” but he also realised that sport wouldn’t function without someone organising it. “Somebody needs to do it.”

He said getting an honour was hard to put into words. “It’s not the reason we volunteer, but I’m certainly honoured and grateful that my peers thought enough of me to nominate me for the award.”

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