Hobart, Tasmania, 21 May 2024 | Vivienne Christie
As National Volunteer Week is celebrated across Australia, few individuals can match the efforts of Brendon Oliver-Ewen.
Having invested thousands of hours into the establishment of Hobart Out Tennis, Oliver-Ewen has ensured Tasmania’s first LGBTI tennis club has flourished into a vibrant, diverse, and ever-growing community.
Yet a modest Oliver-Ewen, who was honoured as Volunteer of the Year at the Australian Tennis Awards in 2023, doesn’t seek congratulations – or even thanks – for the vast contribution he’s made through his lifelong dedication to the game.
“Very early on, I wanted to invest as much as possible in the sports that I was playing in,” he explains.
“It wasn’t necessarily out of any altruistic ideals, just the simple equation that I loved playing tennis and if I could help other people participate also, there’d be more fun for everyone.
And as a proud gay man, Oliver-Ewen enthusiastically shares that tennis has given him a lot.
The 42-year-old was born in Sydney but as the son of missionaries, spent much of his early childhood in Papua New Guinea, then America. On the family’s return to Australia, tennis became Oliver-Ewen’s self-described “survival mechanism” in his later years at school.
“I was a pretty fem, fat, nerdy kid with an American accent coming into primary school here in Australia. That set of ingredients doesn’t generally result in a really well accepted popular person,” he relates.
“I didn’t know anything about AFL, NRL, netball, I didn’t know any of the Australian sports. The one sport that I did have, that I could play, that allowed me to have a common language with the other kids, was tennis.”
This translated to firm friendships formed through the sport. Oliver-Ewen looks back especially fondly on trips to destinations including Lake Macquarie and Newcastle when he represented his high school and was a member of the McDonald’s squad at the local tennis centre.
“I think the reason I wanted to give to sport growing up was just because I recognised that it provided a place where everyone could get a lot of it, everyone could potentially find a place,” he recalls.
Fast-forward several years, and tennis in Tasmania is now the beneficiary of Oliver-Ewen’s passion for giving back.
After relocating from Sydney in 2017, Brendon was part of a small group of friends who identified the opportunity to create an…
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