Historic Wentworth Park: This Working Class Sporting Life of Dog Nights, Speedway Thrills and First–Generation Rugby League  

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The curtain has finally come down on greyhound racing at Wentworth Park in Glebe. Since 1932(⍺) the Park has been the city’s epicentre for this sport which, if you had to describe to a recently-arrived Martian, you might conjure up an image of manic, fast-footed pooches running at breakneck speed round and round in hot pursuit of a mechanical tin hare, urged on by a horde of screeching, equally manic humans with elevated BP levels known as punters. The 3.3 (3.9?) hectares Wentworth Park complex is slated to become green space to service the recreational needs of the burgeoning number of dense, high-rise apartments increasingly blotting the landscape of the inner-city suburbs of Ultimo, Pyrmont and Glebe(ɓ). 

Greyhound racing is only the most recent of many sporting pastimes since the Park’s area was first reclaimed from swamp land in the 19th century. In the 1880s Wentworth Park was a popular location for rough-and-tumble games of rugby which were often blighted by frequent spectator intervention. Games of Aussie rules (AFL) and soccer–football followed. From 1893, when the Sydney Grade Cricket competition commenced, until 1923, Wentworth Park was the home ground of the Glebe District Cricket Club, with matches featuring the club’s test stars such as Warren Bardsley, Tibby Cotter and Bert Oldfield. 

When rugby league first kicked off in Australia in 1908 Wentworth Park was in on the ground floor. On the very first day of the inaugural Sydney (NSWRFL) competition, the WP ground hosted two of the opening games…a crowd of 50,000 saw a double-header comprising Eastern Suburbs v Newtown followed by Glebe v Newcastle. WP became the home ground for the two local clubs Glebe and Annandale. In 1910 Wentworth Park was chosen as the venue for a rugby league test match involving Australasia (a combined Australia/New Zealand side) who defeated Great Britain 32–15. Until 1931 when the NSWRFL stopped using Wentworth Park for its premier comp, 234 first-grade games were played on the WP oval, many featuring Glebe’s sensational try-scoring star forward Frank Burge. Thirty years after Wentworth Park ceased to be a venue in the Sydney RL comp, the punters were treated to a new spectacle on dog nights at the Park…100–yard foot races between Sydney rugby league speedsters, involving over the years the likes of Ken Irvine, Michael Cleary, Steve Morris, Larry Corowa, Martin Offiah, etc.

In the late 1920s Wentworth Park became home to yet another sport, motorcycling and speedcars, a perhaps surprising initiative considering Glebe/Ultimo was already a built-up residential precinct at this time. In 1928 the Wentworth Park Speedway opened, featuring riders on motorcycles racing each other round a quarter-mile banked dirt track. The quality of riders was often first-rate, among those competing at WP were two 1930s world speedway champions, Lionel Van Praag and Arthur “Bluey” Wilkinson. It must have seemed like Nirvana for “rev-heads” at Wentworth Park because within a few years “big car” motors and then midget speeders were also hurtling around the Glebe track. The track was eventually deemed to be too small and too tight for full-sized cars, but the WP races gave future three-time Formula 1 world champion Jack Brabham his start in the sport. But motor racing’s days at Wentworth Park were numbered, a combination of severe track damage caused by the racers and neighbour’s complaints about excessive noise forced the speedway’s closure in 1936.  

The operators of the Wentworth Park greyhound racing complex—the Park’s trustees, later in collaboration with the National Coursing Association and later still with the Greyhound Breeders, Owners and Traders Association—conducted two race meetings a week (Thursday and Saturday nights). Wentworth Park greyhounds reached it’s peak of  popularity in the 1960s through the 1970s with thousands coming through the turnstiles, so much so that the expression “Wenty Dogs” became part of the Sydney vernacular. More recently, the Park’s fortunes underwent a decline from these heady days with attendances dropping off alarmingly. Several factors have shaped it’s decline, beginning with the rise of off-course betting (the TAB and then online digital wagering). Another concern turning many people against the Park’s continued existence has been animal safety, the track has been responsible for a rate of injuries and deaths to the racing dogs considered unacceptable. The trustees held a final (farewell) dog night at Wentworth Park on 16 October 2026 with a special program, The Million Dollar Chase, and a big turn-out, marking the complex’s permanent closure after 96 years(ɕ).

Footnote: Greyhound enthusiasts and supporters haven’t all gone quietly, many are bitter at the decision. Max Solling puts the case for the pro-greyhounds position. The author of Going to the Dogs, a history of NSW greyhound racing, emphasises the class dimension: Wentworth Park was part of the working class culture of the area, he argues. Wenty’s working class battlers were not given the same immunity afforded the patrician “sport of kings”, horse racing. Solling decries the government’s double standard, Wentworth Park dogs’ fate was sealed but no one has ever suggested closing down the Melbourne Cup or even Randwick Racecourse (‘Final race bids farewell to Sydney’s 94-year-old Wentworth Park greyhound track’, Ursula Malone, ABC, 17 October 2026, ww.abc.net.au).        

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(⍺) except for around four years during WWII when it was taken over by the US Army as a base

(ɓ) the state government had earlier banned greyhound racing in NSW in 2016, but after a political backlash from conservative politicians, GBOTA and the gambling industry, it caved in and allowed it to continue with conditions 

(ɕ) with greyhound racing no longer an activity in the Sydney basin, the sport is now concentrated in Gosford and Richmond