Mornington Tenpin

Mornington Tenpin was a former Tenpin Bowling centre, located at Mornington on Hobart's Eastern Shore which operated between 1984-1992.
History
The history of the sport and recreation of Tenpin Bowling in Tasmania started with the opening of the AMF-owned Moonah Bowl (now AMF Moonah) at 162 Main Road, Moonah, on the land of former Moonah Mayor and businessman Keith Dickinson on 9 April 1963.
For almost twenty years Moonah was the state's only tenpin bowling establishment until the sport underwent a large growth spurt in Australia during the 1980s and centres were quickly opened in Devonport, Burnie and Launceston during the period of 1983-1984.
Tasmania's last newly opened centre was the Charles Martin Construction-owned and operated Mornington Tenpin, a 24-lane Brunswick-equipped facility that was originally planned to be built on top of Eastlands Shopping Centre, but was instead constructed in an open field at 400 Cambridge Road, Mornington, next to the Tasman Highway.
Mornington Tenpin was opened on 23 December 1984 and was established in order to expose the sport and recreation to a new market in a fast growing region in the city as well as giving tenpin bowlers more of a choice of facilities in Hobart which at that time was confined to the ageing and increasingly outdated Moonah Bowl.
Despite the initial honeymoon period for Mornington and an ongoing increase in participatory numbers and financial members of the STTBA in Hobart, AMF responded within six months of the new centre's opening by spending almost $1m on an upgrade of facilities at Moonah Bowl with upgraded lanes and masks and a new Accu-Score automatic computer scoring system, in order to woo back customers who had made the move to bowling at Mornington.
By the late 1980's the honeymoon period appeared over for Mornington Tenpin which underwent several changes of management (and had been renamed Mornington Bowl), was struggling to keep league bowlers from drifting back to Moonah and was also much-maligned because its facilities were generally seen to be inferior to those at an upgraded and more centrally-located Moonah.
It also became a victim of its own location in what was then a rough Housing-Department suburb only 200m away from one of Hobart's most infamous hotels (The Sun Valley Inn) at the time.
After Charles Martin Construction went bankrupt in 1989, the centre was bought shortly after by AMF (as part of their policy in this era of buying out independant centres across the country) and they duly responded by removing eight lanes from the centre (Lanes 17-24) and replacing it with an "All-Ball Arena" which was then a popular but short-lived form of ball-sport entertainment in Australia, manual computer scoring terminals were installed and the centre was again re-named, this time as Eastern Shore Family Bowl, but this failed to win back lost bowlers and the centre was continuing to struggle for social players on top of this.
In 1990 and 1991 Mornington was the designated back-up centre for Moonah which was the host centre of the 1990 ATBC Junior National Championships and 1991 ATBC Adult National Championships respectively, but despite this, in its latter years of operation the centre was mainly populated by an ever-dwindling number of Eastern Shore-based bowlers and even fewer social bowlers, by 1992 its league participatory numbers had fallen to critical levels (of the 1,577 STTBA-registered Adult league bowlers in Hobart in 1992, just over 200 of them were registered at Mornington compared with more than 1,200 at Moonah) and the centre was continuing to struggle financially and as a result, AMF executives made the decision to close Mornington by 31 August 1992.
The former bowling centre later became a religious-based auditorium and church of which it still is as of 2011, currently known as Citywide Baptist Function Centre.

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