Consulted a plant pathologist on this one. He suggested this was a Harpographium state of Septobasidium clelandii [Anamorph = Harpographium corynelioides ]. From memory, current naming conventions for pleomorphic fungi give priority to the teleomorph (where known) which in this case is Septobasidium clelandii. There is a paper on this species by R. B. Coles and P. H. B. Talbot, Kew Bulletin Vol. 31, No. 3 (1977), pp. 481-488. Unfortunately this journal has been captured by JSTOR and an institutional affiliation is required to download it.
I don't think I've seen this species (unless there's an example in my unprocessed collections) but I don't doubt the identification. In the paper referred to by KenT the authors note that the clubs were unlikely to be active in producing asexual or sexual spores for much more than a year and that the clubs from the previous year "were found to be decaying, covered with green algae, or commonly infected by Nectria aurantiicola". Species in the fungal genus Nectria produce fruiting bodies that, mostly, are tiny orange to red balls, each usually under a half millimetre in diameter, but often produced in large numbers.