Photo Enquiry

An email came yesterday from Signpost Editor Jean saying a lady contacted her asking if she could have the photo of Keith and Barb Thomas that accompanied my article in the April edition. This lady is a long standing friend of Keith and Barb and she now lives in Ballarat but was sent the magazine by K+B's daughter.

Of course I was happy to oblige. I enjoy feed back from my Signpost writing most of which is positive but not always and one comment about my April Gembrook column was that it was "obviously done in a hurry and it didn't flow at all."

I'll post them here; I'm struggling to blog lately for one reason or another so this a way to do it despite my tiredness.

A Horse Tale With Twists

Keith Thomas went to Dandenong Market one Friday in 1975.

“I’d never owned a horse but always wanted to, so I bought one. We had a good back yard and there was a vacant block across the road, and paddocks nearby where we lived in Mt.Waverley, but buying the horse led to buying 32 acres at Avonsleigh.”

“I rode horses as a boy. They wandered around the Hartwell and Burwood Reserves, which were not far apart. I don’t know who owned them, if anybody. They were easy to catch and ride.”

Born in 1938 Keith attended Hartwell Primary School before Box Hill Tech. His first paid work was after school with a boot maker when he was ten years old. His job was to blacken the soles and shoes. His grandfather worked in a timber yard in South Melbourne and Keith worked there in school holidays.

“It was hard work. I was 12 years old but was expected to keep up with the men. I left school at 14 and started as an apprentice joiner at Burwood Timber Mills. I finished my apprenticeship with a staircase and shopfitter, and then I was self-employed doing mainly renovations.”

Keith did National Service in this period, and met his wife Barb at a church dance and they married in 1961. He joined Barb’s family’s business, Campbell and Heaps, which manufactured blinds and had a timber yard and hardware and steel interests. Keith started on the factory floor and finished up 15 years later as Production Operations Manager.

Keith and Barb moved to Avonsleigh with their girls Kerryn, Lisa and Joanne, along with the horse, ‘Carn’, short for ‘Come on’, and ten head of cattle. “As it turned out, Carn had crook legs and wasn’t much good so I sold him and bought other horses, the girls all had a horse. We were active members of the Macclesfield Pony Club and had happy times at working bees and events. We bred a few horses and broke them in.”

Keith commuted to a sign making firm in Melbourne for twelve months then became Victorian sales manager for a concrete underlay and plaster company before concentrating on breeding squab, eating pigeons, for Chinese restaurants in the main. The business grew to 1000 pairs till disaster struck in one swoop.

“We were wiped out overnight by poisoned birdfeed. It was a devastating loss. We won legal action, but finished up broke.”

They sold their Avonsleigh farm and bought 340 acres of bush at the end of Ure Rd at Gembrook in 1981, and rented a house in Emerald for a couple of years till they built. Keith was now a contractor tractor slashing for Melbourne Water around Melbourne, which he did for 6 or 7 years.

Before leaving Avonsleigh Barb had gone to the Newmarket Stock Sales and bought two semi-trailer loads of sheep from drought areas for 20 cents a head.

These were slowly transported to Gembrook where there was feed, but the flock was decimated by wild dogs which were numerous. Keith and Barb’s interest turned to cattle, firstly Hereford then Angus. Many years of hard work followed, fencing, clearing and improving pasture, always with problems of samba and fallow deer, wild dogs, wombats and feral humans.

Keith explains, “A 3km stretch of fence along the Bunyip State Park Boundary, five strands and electrified, I built three times. After the second time it was cut to small pieces and totally ruined I sat in the paddock and cried. We had equipment stolen from the tractor and dozer and dirt tipped in fuel tanks. Someone resented our work. The police did annual aerial searches of the property and the surrounding bush over the years and found a number of marijuana plantations, including a very large one of hundreds of mature plants.”

Keith was lucky to survive a heart attack in 2001, after which followed bypass surgery.

In 2002 while rounding up cattle, Barb was dragged under a rolling Land Cruiser tray truck. She was caught in the wheel rut lengthwise and it went right over her, including her head. It went up a rise and came back down, she got her head out of the way but it went across her this time. She suffered cracked ribs, punctured lungs, a fractured sternum, hip and collarbone, and spinal damage. Keith, finding her 15 minutes later, ran 300 metres to the house to phone the ambulance. He was so out of breath and when he took the phone from the wall and rang 000 he couldn’t speak. When he could the ambulance took 40 minutes to come.

“I had to dig Barb’s hearing aids from her ears with a pen knife. She was conscious, in agony. It was a terrible 40 minutes. The ambos called in the helicopter which took her to St Vincent’s.”

Keith and Barb sold their Gembrook property in 2008 and now live in Emerald where Keith keeps budgies, parrots and finches as a hobby and Barb is active at the Emerald Art Society. They have 8 grandchildren, and many memories to reflect on.

Keith and Barb Thomas

Gembrook Column - Written Word Works Wonders

The Signpost February edition included my profile of Emerald resident Stuart Mills who migrated from the UK in 1983. Editor Jean contacted me to say she’d had phone call from a lady at Caroline Springs who was excited to have located Stuart and left her phone number.

I rang the lady who explained that her father and mother had been in Australia staying with her for a month or so and her father attempted to find Stuart with whom he went to school. He knew Stuart lived in Emerald but had no contact details. Stuart wasn’t listed in the phone directory but he rang another ‘Mills’ thinking they might know him. They didn’t, but said they’d keep eyes and ears open, and took the Caroline Springs phone number in case.

The lady from the ‘Mills’ house in Emerald was reading Signpost soon after and there was the article on Stuart. Stuart and his old school friend had not seen each other for 55 years. Neither knew each other’s wife but on the day Stuart’s friend with his wife knocked on Stuart’s door, the wife said to Stuart’s wife Marlene, “My goodness, I know you.” The two ladies also, like their husbands, had not seen each other since childhood.

This feel good story on the power of print prompts me to ask readers of Signpost if they can give me information on Doug Twaits. Doug was an Emerald resident in the 1950’s after marrying Dot Fisher, sister of Dr Bottomley’s wife. Doug lived in Middle Park as a child, was Australasian featherweight champion wrestler before WW11 and served in Nth Africa, Greece and on Crete with the 2^nd 7^th AIF. He was three years in Stalag 383 as a POW. After moving from Emerald in the 1950's he returned in the 1980’s. He wrote a bird column for the Trader newspaper. He died in 2001 in a car accident aged 86.

I’m researching to produce a book on Doug’s life. Please leave your phone number with Signpost if you have information or anecdote.

I've had a lot of feedback re Doug Twaits and must get cracking on the biography that his widow Lynne has asked me to write. While looking for the above photo I came across one of me and Pip with her 'bucket' on recently so I conclude with that.