Lionel Smedley

I mentioned the Smedley family at Mt. Burnett in my last post. I don't think I've written about Lionel Smedley before, so I should.

I first met patriarch Lionel in the early 1990's when he was already an octogenarian. I picked various foliage and blossom in his established garden including beech, camellia, magnolia, rhodie, wintersweet, pieris, bay, pittosporum, and viburnum. Lionel loved nothing more than to walk around his garden showing trees and shrubs he'd planted and nurtured over the previous 40 years. He loved "the blooms" and grew a paddock of daffodils and jonnies just for the flowers, and a large vegie garden. Every visitor left with bunches of flowers and vegies.

Often he'd offer me a cuppa and usually I made the time as I loved talking to him about gardens, sport, history, and life in general. He was genuinely interested in my situation and offered good advice, somehow rolling it into an anecdote from his own personal experience. We became good friends.

He was born at home at Black River near Stanley in Tasmania in 1911. He remembered being sick on the trip across Bass Strait from Tassy in 1917 on the 'Marawah', a boat which carried general cargo and cattle as well as passengers. The family moved to Victoria so his father could take up a job as manager of a vegetable farm, 'Beach Farm' at Numerella, owned by three businessmen, near Port Welshpool. Lionel had 3 sisters and two brothers and went to primary school at Hedley, a 7 mile horse ride each way. It being wartime, the kids had trenches in the playground and used to throw clay as pretend bombs.

Lionel's father got crook a couple of years after moving to Port Welshpool, (he died of cancer when Lionel was 16 or 17) and the family moved to Clayton in Melbourne. Lionel went to Caulfield Tech and learned blacksmithing but couldn't get a job at that, eventually finding work at the Diamond Dry Cell battery factory in West Melbourne. From there he moved to the E.M.F. Electric Co. after being sacked for being late for work due to poor public transport. He moved to the Kiwi Boot Polish factory at Burnley, easy to get to by train, for 12 months, where every pay day they'd give you a free tin of boot polish, presumably because they knew you'd knock it off if you weren't given it.

He then worked at B.S.Spark Plugs West Melbourne for 3/4 months until they went broke. He went back to E.M.F. Electric Co. and shifted to Nth. Carlton where he lived with his boss who'd befriended him, but who could be "a bit cranky" at times. He'd lost a leg in the war and Lionel had to take his 'leg' to Repat for repadding. He was a Footscray supporter who drank at the footy and when he came home he wouldn't come out of the lavatory in the backyard. His wife would send Lionel out to try and coax him in. He was good to Lionel and taught him welding after work. Lionel worked for three months for C.J White and Sons making locks, welding fences etc. by arrangement with E.M.F.

The Depression bit hard and Lionel was sacked. He saw an ad for rural workers at Exell's Labour Bureau and went to a mixed farm at Dimosa, out from Charlton, for 15 shillings a week plus his keep. It cost 30 shillings to get there on the train. His boss was a bloke named McNicol, a Wycheproof councillor. Lionel slept in a tent at the back and his bed was a stretcher on four kerosene tins. He stayed for the wheat season and his time was spent loading wheat, cutting thistles, and building fences. On Sunday they would divert water from the main channel using sandbags to replenish dams.

McNicol's wife milked the cows and separated the cream, but there was no butter milk for inside, it was all sent away. There was no sheds for machinery, it was all left outside in the weather. There was a mice plague. Galvanised iron sheets were used to make fences eighteen inches high around the haystacks to keep the mice out. Less than eighteen inches and the mice would pile on top of each other till the those on top could jump over. The same was needed around Lionel's tent, or the mice would eat his clothes and bedding, a fate suffered by the previous worker.

He went back to Clayton, market gardening with his stepfather. They grew beetroot and Lionel would leave with a load by horse and cart at 9.00pm. after a day's work picking and packing, to get to market by 5.00 am. More than half the time he couldn't sell so he'd buy other stuff for variety to sell around houses door to door at Oakleigh on the way home. He did this for a couple of years in the early thirties till things got a bit better, when he went back to C.J Whites in inner Melbourne, doing welding around houses and banks. Metal fences were popular, and elevators containing metal cage and surrounds, were now common.

Before he was married in 1937, he took a job welding for A.I.Steel(Aust.Iron+Steel) as he needed the higher wage, but it invoved travelling. He worked on the wheat silos at Geelong and the Bogong Kiewa Hydro scheme. He stayed with A.I.Steel through WW2, during which he spent six months on Cockatoo Island off the Kimberley coast building the pier. After the war he lived in Caulfield and was well paid as an experienced heavy welder; his salary was 14 quid a week in 1952 before he sold his house and moved to Mt.Burnett where he bought a farm and the Post Office agency and the mail run Cockatoo to Mt.Burnett.

The Post Office agency paid only 4 quid a month and the mail run a similar amount, but Lionel had a strong desire to farm. In November '52, not long after he and Vera and the three young boys moved to the farm, 9 inches of rain fell for the month. The post office operated in a room at the side of the house for many years before later being relocated to a small building on the main road. Whilst he'd had a large drop in income, it didn't worry them as they grew their own food and the annual council rates on their 39 acre farm were 4 quid and four shillings. Lionel grew spuds for a couple of years but "couldn't sell 'em", so he changed to dairying and made cream, supplying the Dandenong Butter Factory.

Lionel had strong interest in sport and was an excellent footballer and cricketer in his day, having played at Oakleigh, Northcote, Springvale and Clayton. He barracked for Carlton, beginning when his father took him to a VFL match, Carlton vs Collingwood. His father, who before going to Tassy was captain/coach of Footscray at one stage in the VFA, barracked for Collingwood. His dad lifted him up so he could see. Horrie Clover, a high flying full forward, and 'Dasher' Donohue were stars for Carlton and Lionel was hooked.

When he first went to Oakleigh in 1928 or 1929 as a seventeen or eighteen y.o., Frank Meagher (ex Essendon mosquito fleet) was coach, and the team included several famous players; George Rudolf (ex Richmond), Eric Fleming (Geelong), Sailor Irwin, (Carlton) Driver(Melbourne) and Gomez(Essendon). Gomez, a Spaniard, "was a good bloke", and gave Lionel his guernsey at training, as he didn't have one. When he moved to Mt. Burnett he played cricket for Cockatoo and despite being in his forties he won the best player trophy in 1953/4 and the best bowler another year. He was a medium pace bowler with a nagging line and length and such accuracy that most of his wickets were caught and bowled, as batsmen were forced to play straight back. Some of Lionel's old teammates from way back still visited him.

I never met Vera, she died in 1988. Lionel enjoyed his garden and fresh air at Mt. Burnett till just before Christmas 2002 when he died, falling to cancer. He was ready to go, having lost his mobility through arthritis in his legs in his last couple of years. When I was trying to box the swarm three days after Christmas, Don and Barb were picking flowers before visiting the Gembrook cemetery where Vera and Lionel are buried.

Lionel is one of the people I feel so grateful to have met. I still pick in the garden. Bob and Dawn, Don and Barb, and Len, follow the family tradition of growing vegies and flowers. They live happily in retirement and show the same warmth, friendship and generosity that Lionel did.