DOOLAN, Marcel Kingsley

BORN JUNE 18TH 1925 in Marrickville NSW, Doolan was a radar operator with the RAAF during the war and married Rubina Rose Whealey in 1949. He became a barrister admitted to the bar in February 1952. A recreational skater with his wife, their daughter Margaret (Nichols) began skating around 1965 when invited to a rink by her cousins.

After the closure of the Glaciarium Ice Centre at Burwood in January 1970, Doolan formed the Ice Skating Club of NSW Co-operative Ltd with two other parents of skaters — John Coulthard and John R E Brown, a Killara builder and a former vice-president of the national association. They were drawn together by an ambitious plan for the rink near the Tasker Park baths which had closed in 1969. Originally constructed in a converted aircraft hangar in 1966 by the Canterbury Olympic Pools company, it was in the hands of the receivers and had not been used for eight months.

"That morning, January 27 1970," wrote John Brown, "I had stood in a dimly-lit galvanised-iron clad building… Through the eyes of a builder I took in the substantial framing of the structure with approval. On the debit side was the large amount of uncompleted work… I wondered whether the 30 year-old Carrier compressor down in the engine room was as good as I had been told, and whether any of the 300 galvanised pipes running under the bitumenised ice-floor were blocked. I moved up to the grandstand. I could feel the powerful radiant heat of a summer sun, and I pondered on summertime operation without insulation. I had a sudden awareness of the immense technical responsibility I would have to assume to put this rink into working order with volunteer labour."

The Co-op and its members set about rebuilding the derelict rink, unselfishly giving their services freely. Every night and weekend, a team of workers which included parents, friends and even the young skaters themselves, knocked the building into shape. They laid nine miles of pipes, replaced 180 copper tubes in the compressor, carried out major drainage works, installed grandstand seating and set about cleaning 1,000 pairs skates.

The local Council granted a 10-year lease and the federal government donated $55,000. The new Canterbury opened on March 5th 1971, bringing Sydney ice skating back to life. It later became the venue for one of the earliest international ice racing tournaments held in Australia - the Caltex Southern Cross Trophy — a speed skating teams event contested by Japan, Canada, and Australia, led by Jim Lynch.

In its early years, Canterbury produced tens of thousand of dollars to send skaters overseas and interstate. Home to the Sydney Figure Skating Club, Doolan's daughter Margaret became Australian Junior champion in 1974 and earned her gold medal for figure and free skating there in 1975. Belinda Coulthard, a reluctant skater at 22 months, became Australian junior champion at 15 and represented NSW from 1968.

She won the Australian Senior Championship in 1979 and the Senior Pairs title four times with Mark Lynch (1971 to '74). Nola Dickenson became Junior Champion in 1972. Two Campsie school students, Cheryl-Anne Jupe and Brian Meek won the NSW Junior Pairs championship in 1973 and Jupe was the Australian Novice Champion in 1974. Then there were Olympians Michael Pasfield, Jim Lynch, Peter and Elizabeth Cain and Vicky Holland.

The salvage mission Marcel Doolan launched with Coulthard and Brown in 1970, helped rescue these skaters' careers by breathing new life into an abandoned rink. Doolan died in April 1996, a founding member and honourary director of the Ice Skating Club of NSW Co-operative Ltd. He was inducted posthumously to the Ice Skating Australia Hall of Fame in 2017. Still today the Canterbury ice rink is "a living memorial to the tenacity and dedication of a small group of people who had brought it back to life against almost impossible odds".