Don Harvey sharply remembers the jargon of a local council officer when he was getting involved with the Daylesford Show.

“What,” he was asked, “is your Mission Statement?” Don, pictured centre, did not miss a beat: “More dollars than last year.”

Last year, for the first time in six years, the show made a profit. Now, as the 150th show approaches in November, he looks back on his 12 years on the show committee and, as president at 79, he reckons it’s time for someone new.

His start was not great. “I thought I’d do something to help them and volunteered to paint the chook pavilion but had a heart attack which set me back three and a half years.”

Don’s background is that he went to Bendigo Junior Tech, first as a student and then to teach history until having a blow-up over the method used and moved to English.

Later he became a newsagent in Boort. His cosy Bullarto home, which he doubled in size from a holiday place built in 1978, is chokkers with books and family photos.

There he is keen to discuss the show, not himself, but when pressed tells of his time as a players’ advocate at country footy tribunals.

“Now, listen to me, I would say. I’ll do the talking. If they ask you something, don’t say there was a fight. But every time, the bloke would say, ‘He snotted me as I ran onto the ground’.”

Don moved into the gentler world of iris growing, exhibiting at the Melbourne Iris Show, so he’s naturally passionate about the Hall of Flowers in Daylesford, held in the Table Tennis Centre, with vegetables, farm and home produce joining the blooms.

Add to this 250 horses, about 100 sheep and birds and more than 400 dogs on show, plus homecrafts, music, wine, needlework, photography, food, showbags and sideshows and the picture for November 23 grows.

About 3500 people attend. There is only one event after Daylesford at which people can qualify for the Royal Melbourne Show.

Winners of an event can go to the next level at the Midlands Group, which is the doorway to Melbourne.It’s by no means a one-man show.

Don’s wife Mary compiles the detailed 20- page program, down to the cookery section, including Blokes’ Chocolate Cake and Sponge, “not iced, no filling”.

This is all part of a tradition stretching back to the first show in Hobart in 1822 and the first ploughing trials at Glenlyon in 1864.

Farmer-to-farmer innovation and education rolled out, as well as tremendous technological advances on display, from the first automated shearing machines to the start of GPS-controlled tractors.

In all of this, however, there is a heartbeat to the show, such as the one revealed by Don, who tells of being aged six or seven when he went with his father from near the rear of Cliffy’s, his sister on his father’s shoulders, up to Victoria Park.

“I walked,” he says, “and there were others walking, too, in 1952”. Don is also keen to share his view on people’s unhappiness.

“I’ve met people who make others miserable, and my approach is not to be bloody miserable in return. It is possible to talk to people and make them feel a bit better. I’ve had a few years’ practise at that.”

Besides the Show, Don is involved with the local historical society and the Friends of Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens, where he is known for his wry humour.

Which is just as well, says Patrice O’Shea, secretary of the Friends, because Don and Mary have faced health problems.

“Living and gardening in Bullarto is not for the faint-hearted. Putting aside the characteristically bleak weather, the terrible damage wrought by storms made a pretty grim prospect of trying to restore your place in what was beautiful bush,” Patrice says.

She says that as a keen seed collector Don is an inveterate optimist by nature.

“He shares his joy in plants, many of them rare, in the community and even in politics.” And we all benefit from this.”

Journalist: Kevin Childs | Image: Kyle Barnes

The desire to go to Gallipoli for the Dawn Service burnt strongly in Daylesford’s Alan Eaton. Major heart surgery and three operations firstly stopped him, but even when he did go it was with an undiagnosed broken leg.

His father always wanted to attend the service, but died without fulfilling his dream, so Alan ‘took’ him in the form of a treasured photo of the pair of them.

At each cemetery out came the photo. At the Anzac sector he sat on the beach. “I felt my father was standing next to me. Many people say if you don’t shed tears, you are not human.”

With him, too, were his grandfather’s medals from WWI.

To Alan’s surprise, a young girl on a pilgrimage with her father, found the grave of Corporal Alma May, son of James and Frances May of West Street, Daylesford.

Wounded by machinegun fire, Corporal May was taken to an aid station but died the next day, aged 24. His name is in the Avenue of Honour. Alan lay the medals on Corporal May’s plaque.

“The chances of finding a grave of someone from your hometown are slim,” says Alan, with some understatement.

He stood, too, at Lone Pine, where seven Victoria Crosses were awarded. To him, Gallipoli is where Australia was blooded as a nation.

His fascination with the Victoria Cross also took him to “Jacka’s Country” where Jacka the VC winner killed seven Turks in a trench by bullet and bayonet.

At Shrapnel Gully Alan saw where Simpson cheerfully earned a form of immortality as he brought down the wounded with his donkey, five of whom died before he was killed.

Alan’s family is steeped in military history, as shown by the books and pictures crowding his den. He was in the Army for 26 years until 1999.

His grandfather was seconded from the British Royal Navy in 1911 to help form the Australian Navy and fought in the first action in 1914, taking part in the capture of a radio station from the Germans in Papua New Guinea.

Alan’s father was in the artillery as part of the anti-aircraft force, guarding the steel works in Newcastle, and then in Darwin. Alan’s older brother Wallace went to Vietnam in 1970.

“I enlisted in ’74, just after Vietnam,” says Alan. He served in Malaysia, Canada and Hawaii.

Now 68, he was medically discharged from the Army, then spent 13 years as a contractor to the Defence Department. “I enjoyed it,” he says emphatically. “I would not change a step.”

Alan stoutly denies the stories that have sprung up that the Anzacs landed at the wrong place, saying there was 1.6 kilometres of land for them to come ashore.

Then there is the Turkish side. A professor from that nation told the Anzac pilgrims of their 86,000 soldiers killed, including those who charged with bayonets because they had no bullets.

“The world has learnt that a nation will fight to defend itself,” says Alan, instancing Vietnam, Korea and the Ukraine.

“The trip was all I wanted it to be.” Now he has his sights on another storied Anzac battlefield, Villers Bretonneux in France, where 2500 died saving the town.

Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Contributed

Brilliantly coloured images of rock and pop stars fill a book by Yandoit’s Dave Lewis. They arose out of extreme trauma.

He says if his wife had not heard a bump as their daughter Kate fell out of bed, she would be dead. It seemed that Kate, then 16, was having a fit. She was unable to speak.

An ambulance took her first to Ballarat, then to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She was there for six months recovering from an aneurysm.

Dave and his wife, Sharon Treloar, moved to Melbourne to be with Kate in March last year.

“They operated on her for nine hours,” he says. She was in intensive care for weeks. “It was insane,” says Dave, a 55-year-old teacher’s aide and part-time rock muso.

Recuperation was slow. Physiotherapists helped, as did speech pathologists and helpers to take her shopping. There were setbacks. Kate had a stroke and a second, much milder, aneurysm. An aneurysm is a bulge in a blood vessel in or around the brain.

“We just took it one week at a time,” Dave says. “We were lucky that she lived.”

Now Kate can walk, but with a limp and has little movement in her right hand.

During Kate’s time in the Royal Melbourne Dave lined her white walls with Texta drawings of music legends, from Bob Dylan to Patti Smith.

Here, too, in his 136-page book are Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Blue Lines, Massive Attack, Kurt Vile, and Yo La Tengo, a famously noisy American alternative rock band formed in 1984, with their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. “I tried to liven it up.” Dave says.

His book will be launched at Words in Winter in August. Dave has nursed an ambition to produce an art book for 32 years and now aims for another.

Another American band in the book is one that Kate introduced him to, the Neutral Milk Hotel, formed in 1989. They split up for what seems an eccentric reason in rock: they could not cope with the attention they were getting.

Which is unlike Dave’s band The Bedridden, which also split up, got together only to split again, only to recently emerge at Yandoit.

The spirit and survival of these bands and musicians, caught on Kate’s hospital walls, may have meant a lot.

Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Kyle Barnes

Words: Kevin Childs

Public transport is a mystery for many people in Central Victoria. Yet nine buses leave Daylesford on most weekdays to link with trains to Melbourne and Ballarat.

Four go to Woodend, three to Ballarat and one to Ballan and Castlemaine, with an extra one to these last two towns on Fridays.

What’s more, concession fares for people such as seniors are $5.30 for unlimited weekday travel on train, tram or bus across Melbourne or the state. This drops to $3.60 at the weekend. And you can throw in four free travel days a year.

These insights come from Daylesford’s Lily Walden who has passionately taken up the cause of public transport by running free seminars for 70 people over five months and talking to local councillors and transport officials.

Her background in marketing services quickly becomes clear as her presentation starts. Up come reasons for using public transport: the main street of Daylesford is choked with cars, wildlife, the cost of
fuel, potholes and perhaps an attraction to beer or wine.

Then there is the ferocious freeway traffic. And the ease to reach places such as South Melbourne beach, the Victoria Market, Melbourne Zoo and films at the old Pentridge Prison.

Where it gets tricky, however, is that there are three transport ticket systems. V/Line runs trains and buses to the State border, regional services operate between V/Line and the Metropolitan system, which covers the city’s trains, trams and buses.

Daylesford passengers just need to ask for a regional extension ticket for their return journey at a station where they leave their bus.

And for people going to Ballarat for medical appointments there is even a medical zone bus. Daylesford’s buses leave from opposite the CFA in Bridport St, with the first leaving for Ballan at 6.15am. Three minutes later the Woodend bus leaves, with the Ballarat bus going at 7.15.

There is also a 7.25 to Ballarat, 10.23 to Woodend, 2pm to Castlemaine, 3.18 to Woodend, 4.45 to Ballarat and 5.23 to Woodend.

Lily explains that someone wanting to shop in Melbourne or Ballarat can easily be back in Daylesford by mid-afternoon.

And for people wanting help travelling, the century-old, free Travellers Aid offers volunteers and other support to get to appointments, events, work or education. Showers, luggage stores, and change tables are among the facilities at Southern Cross.

“They are available for everybody,” says Lily.

If public transport is not your thing, you may prefer a simpler, more energetic form of travel and do what Lily once did: walk. From Ballarat to Bendigo, as well as Hepburn to Castlemaine.

To many people, the Hepburn Golf Club is one of the district’s hidden gems. Tucked away off the main road, it’s an oasis for kangaroos as well as those out for a bit of a hit in the open air.

But it has struggled and now, after operating for almost a century, the club has become privately owned.

“We realised a year ago that we were losing money and members,” says its final president, Daylesford’s Vic Delosa. “We were facing insolvency.”

The club has been acquired by Golf Services Management (GSM), which is committed to spending a substantial amount on the course over five years. GSM runs courses across the state with a 6000-strong data base and is owned by the son of a 1980s Daylesford Primary School principal.

Vic says many people were doing a lot of work at the club, but they were getting older, tired and drifting away.

“There is an enormous amount of work in what is a $400,000 a year business and we didn’t have enough financial or human resources to turn it around.”

Over summer, Friday nights at the club showed its potential as it drew golfers and non-golfers to a First Tee evening of some glorious singing, the fun of a raffle and even indoor putting. But the club needed about 15 active people to run marketing, the clubhouse and more.

After a year in talks with GSM, the club members voted nearly 100 per cent for the change. “Clearly GSM needed to own it,” Vic adds,” because if they can’t turn it around, they can sell it to hopefully re-coup their investment.”

GSM’s owner, former professional golfer Ian Denny, was Hepburn’s junior champion in 1968. Says Vic, “I don’t think this would have happened if he didn’t have the passion and enthusiasm that comes with being a local boy.”

Among the six Victorian courses GSM runs is St Andrew’s Beach on the Mornington Peninsula, which is now ranked as Australia’s best public course.

Vic says the clubhouse and its surroundings will be improved, as well as the course, which needs work on its paths and drainage to make it more playable in winter.

Members will be offered a 25 per cent discount in fees for five years. Full membership is currently $695 a year. “The emphasis will move from competition to social golf, but not one at the cost of the other.”

We talk in the clubhouse beneath big honour boards listing decades of club champions and officials, those who scored a hole-in-one, and much more. TV screens may replace these and the club is in discussion with the Daylesford & District Historical Society to be custodians of any historical material for which the club does not have a home.

Outside, holidaying young boys are having a round, sharing one bag of clubs as the third to hit off misses his tee shot.

GSM, says Vic, is a marketing expert and will make the most of the course as one of the region’s hidden secrets. “Many people don’t even know of it.”

Golfers love visiting other courses, according to Vic, opening a largely untapped market. One idea is to offer a shortened “round” of five holes from the 14th to the 18th, taking about an hour.

Other long-term suggestions are accommodation pods where golfers can stay, and perhaps a food and drink business in the clubhouse.

“This is a win for the community: members play a better course that is better managed at no extra cost, and the council is happy and has offered to promote it.”

That is not to overlook what Vic says is the greatest asset of the club, course superintendent Darren McColl, who has been there for 37 years. He works with Paul Thomas, who has put in 18 years. They regularly work a 50-hour week. Now, more help may be on the way.

Words: Kevin Childs | Images: Contributed

Long-time Daylesford resident Megan Jones whoops for joy as she tells of at last becoming a poster girl. At 70.

She’s on the poster for a new play by Hepburn’s Adam Fawcett. Called Every Lovely Terrible Thing, he says it is two acts of family mayhem , funny, chaotic, surprising, with ghosts and magic realism.

A prodigal daughter returns to the family home after 10 years with a secret that threatens to blow everyone up. It even has Megan bursting out of a coffin to sing Don’t Rain on My Parade.

Four years in the writing, the play is co-commissioned by Lab Kelpie, the biggest and first for the 12-year-old company since being based here.

“This shows the strength of independent artists and companies working in regional Victoria who can take a high-quality work like this and stand next to our metropolitan contemporaries.,” Adam says.

Megan’s last stage appearance was 15 years ago in a play called The Prostitute. Amazingly, she got the role after a woman asked her, while she was sitting in the foyer of the North Melbourne Arts Hub, whether she was an actor.

Her record could scarcely be more impressive: besides acting, she is a theatre and circus director, working for 40 years with a wide range of independent artists, companies and organisations, creating more than 80 original theatre shows and 20 main stage circus shows.

Trained with master teachers in London and Moscow, she founded Machination Theatre Ensemble which over the six years of its existence was picked from 60 companies to be on the VCE Drama playlist, being awarded for its contribution.

Adam, 41, says he started writing the play before meeting Megan. “When I got stuck, I went to her, and she was a mentor and gave me encouragement.”

In spite of the seeming toughness of the plot, he stresses that it is “not trauma porn”.

A third play by Adam, Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a finalist in the 2024 Midsumma Queer Playwriting Award, while a work of prose fiction, Black Rainbow, is a finalist in a new writing award, the Pearl Prize for 750-word pieces to be announced next month.

For her part, Megan says, “He is original in his approach, well balanced and his work is unique because I’ve never seen this topic dealt with in this way. Some people might have a cry here and there, but there’s a lot of comedy.”

Another local involved is costume designer Martelle Hunt, whose credits extend from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Shakespeare and musicals. The birth of this play may lead to fresh projects, such as theatre classes.

Every Lovely Terrible Thing is on at Theatre Works, St Kilda, from February 29 to March 16. Tickets available from theatreworks.com.au

Story & image: Kevin Childs

Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Kyle Barnes

When it comes to playing soccer, many children learn bad habits. Lee Stevens wants to put them right. At 38, this Coomoora resident with two young children understands how some parents may struggle to coach their offspring.
He has set up a part-time soccer academy for youngsters in Daylesford and is pleased with the enthusiasm he has encountered, even though it only began two weeks before the latest school term.
The soccer season ends in August, leaving kids with nothing to do until February.
“That is where I come in. Parents are keen for their kids to be active and not in front of screens or on phones.”
When we talked, he has had five coaching sessions involving more than 100 children in the holidays, with local coaches helping, for which he’s grateful.
Next month it will be the turn of “little kickers” aged four to seven. Term four sees sessions for under eights and under 12s.
Otherwise, he says, his coaching is about structure and keeping it basic. When it comes to his academy, however, his passion bubbles over.
“Every child has a ball: there’s no waiting and no queuing. Make it fun and they listen. They learn and develop and, who knows, they might take it further.”
Lee runs birthday parties as well, with 90 minutes of entertainment and refreshments. A fair way from playing in front of 60,000 fans at Wembley Stadium.
His soccer story is one that possibly many from his home town of Swindon in England could but dream of. He began playing for Southampton before being chosen for England Youth, playing mostly mid-field and in defence. A scholarship took him to South Carolina, USA.
All the while he was coaching, having started at 16. “That was generally young to
start,” he says, “but I had a passion for it and wanted to give it a go. It essentially kept me involved in the game all year long.”
California drew Lee seven years later to continue coaching for Ventura CountyFusion Soccer Club, which plays in the Professional Development League, before moving to Melbourne in 2015. His Wembley Stadium game was for the FA Vase, competed for by 600 teams in the lower ranks of the English football league.
Away from the game he started working in recruitment and in 2020 launched his own Melbourne firm, Vivid Recruitment, specialising in architecture, engineering and construction.
And how does he get youngsters interested? Lee says marketing is involved and it’s important to get parents interested. “They need to see the benefits. Most of the children have mentioned it to friends (word of mouth) because they had lots of fun. Also my experience is unique for the area and this has a lot of weight.
“Generally if you keep it fun and light hearted, they are good as gold.”
His group sessions last 60 minutes and one-on-one is 45 minutes. “They’re varied sessions, but always structured with a warm up, ball skills, fun games and then small-sided games. Essentially we coach soccer fundamentals because it’s really lacking in the area and at grassroots. You are unable to progress in your game if you cannot control or pass a ball.”
Lee is also doing tailored coaching in the junior section of the national premier league. “It was meant to be small, but has taken off, which is not a bad thing.”
When he’s not coaching he straps on his gear for Daylesford Seniors, for whom he’s “scored some goals”.
Now he slips into his boots, while wearing the academy jersey, complete with ad logo (“The kids will eventually get them”). He readies training equipment. Next up is a 12-year-old, keen for a one-on-one session to sharpen his game.

Words: Kevin Childs

Signs are emerging that the long-promised Wombat State Park may become a reality.

This comes at a time when the State Government prepares to break up its logging business VicForests. The business lost an unprecedented $52.4 million in the last financial year, blaming the cost on legal actions by community environment groups which stopped logging.
VicForests has been roundly criticised in the Supreme Court, which upheld logging bans.
The court found VicForests breached environmental protection laws by logging the habitat of endangered greater gliders and yellow-bellied gliders. A judge said “serious or irreversible harm” had been caused to the gliders.
The Wombat State Forest is also home to the vulnerable brush-tailed phascogale, carnivorous marsupials.
The government’s decision was greeted by Gayle Osborne, convenor of Wombat Forestcare, as a small step towards dismantling VicForests. “It is not soon enough for the Wombat Forests,” she said “We still have VicForests causing massive environmental damage.”
VicForests’ heavy industrial logging in Central Victoria is blamed by environmentalists for heightened bushfire danger. Research shows that fallen trees from the 2021 storm raise fire risk because of the regrowth of dangerous fire fuel, with Ms Osborne pointing to the ferocity and carnage in the fires of Hawaii, Canada and Greece.

Ms Osborne said that after the 2021 storm, 175 logging coupes were set up over the Wombat area and Cobaw, near Hanging Rock. Starting at Babbington Hill, every big tree was to be removed, beginning with 8000 square metres at Babbington.
“This was ‘overseen and regulated’, but the forest does not have a lot of protection,” she said. “Working under forest fire management, the Department of the Environment cleared 80 to 100 metres each side of every track, taking out every large tree. Piles of bark and small fuel were left, endangering the bush.”
VicForests, which harvests and sells timber, is to be split into different government departments, easing great concern over native logging. This worry grew when the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), set up to provide independent advice, recently held three small “storm debris community meetings”, at Blackwood, Bullarto and Barkstead. The meetings were seen as an attempt to get community agreement to salvage logging and timber harvesting.
Environmental groups and scientists, including some from Daylesford and beyond, combined to set up a mobile field observation base to record any impact on endangered species. Dozens of people have been involved.
Locally, eagles’ nests at Babbington Hill, near Lyonville, have been threatened by log salvaging.

Words: Kevin Childs

LOVED by many for its music, eccentricity and atmosphere, the Old Hepburn Hotel upset many locals when the taps were turned off and doors shut three years ago.
Now, one of the new owners of the hotel and its land, local businessman Eddy Comelli (pictured above) says the hotel will become a house. “It’s zoned as residential and is to be sold soon,” he told The Local.
Bare soil around the heritage-protected hotel signals seven building blocks, plus three dwellings, making 11 residences, including the hotel, in a horseshoe- shaped area. The homes will be around the hotel that served the community almost continuously for 165 years.
Mr Comelli said a company had been formed but declined to name his partners. When the Old Hepburn shut it was threatened with demolition, but the Hepburn Shire Council obtained protection in the face of some locals saying the place should be pulled down. One suggested just a memorial plaque.
Using expert advice, the council found that the hotel “is of local historical significance as an example of the vernacular timber stores and hotels which sprung up along the principal routes to the goldfields around Hepburn and Daylesford in the mid-19th century”. Other local examples are Daylesford’s Beppe Restaurant, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Trentham and the Swiss Mountain Hotel at Blampeid.
The Old Hepburn was the site of the first licensed store in 1854, serving Swiss Italian and Chinese goldminers digging in the nearby Breakneck Gorge until the late 19th century. As the rush ended, the village of Hepburn, and the Old Hepburn, emerged as a centre for the agricultural, horticultural and service industries.
Rebuilt in 1911 after it burnt down in 1906 and 1909, the hotel has a design that still resembles the 1860s building, incorporating fabric from the Victorian brick chimneys.
Included in the protection order is a requirement for external paint colours to either suit the building or be reinstated. Heritage Victoria says the hotel meets its threshold for listing and will be consulted on any work undertaken.
The council hoped that allowing further use of the building could contribute to its restoration and conservation.
In protecting the hotel, the council also said: “The application of the heritage overlay on a permanent basis may have an adverse economic impact by constraining development of the site. However, this would only apply to part of the property, with opportunities to develop the balance still able to be explored.”
As well, retention and conservation of the hotel could lead to “highly resolved and innovative architectural solutions.” Rather than someone’s home, as is now happening, the council believed that the old hotel would be “making opportunities for small business with benefits through tourism”.
“It is considered that economic effects will be offset by the contribution that the heritage place offers to the broader community and economy.”
Keeping a watchful eye on this is Cr Lesley Hewitt, who says one of the key conditions is protection of the cellar. Already, an ancient and unprotected pear tree behind the hotel is gone. Having twice arisen from the ashes, the pub that refused to die will now play host to new owners, their relatives and friends.

Words: Kevin Childs | Image above: Contributed | Image below: Kyle Barnes

WHEN Edward Benedict lived in a bedsit in East Melbourne, his neighbours called him The Farmer. He had a small patch opposite the MCG, where his veggies grew and grew and grew.
Today, he grows even more at Adsum Farmhouse, a thriving market garden in Glenlyon and his produce has keen followers at the Daylesford Sunday Market and local restaurants. His property is three acres of which an acre is under cultivation.
“It’s great to know that you can make a living on an acre of land. You don’t need 100 acres. Think of this as a vitamin shop. This is the preventative stage of health care.”
He elaborates: “There are four keys to longevity: nutrition, exercise, sleep and emotional health.” He tracks both his calorie intake and his 15,000 daily steps.
For 53-year-old Edward, who previously worked in sales for an organic food company, there is greater purpose in growing clean, healthy food for the community.
His market garden is meticulously ordered. All beds are standardised at 20 metres by 7.5 metres wide, which allows drip irrigation to be interchangeable. To continue the maths: where there was nothing nine years ago, there are 18 sections in six rows.
Add up all his plants and they would just about stretch from Daylesford to Hepburn. He shows an area. “Three months ago, this was gherkins. My pickled gherkins
have a terrific local following.” Once the frost comes, the gherkins are out. Nothing is planted in the same spot for three to four years.
He points to a section, from this garden came a tonne of pumpkins and further on, capsicums and jalapeños. He shows beds of coriander and rocket, long stretches
of still-selling broccoli, an orchard of nashi pears and apples and, after one attempt, manages to wrench a carrot from the earth and chew on it. “You need a pitchfork,”
he explains. Once the garlic is out, in goes the basil, and now parsley, which he says grows like a weed.
Here are three varieties of blueberries, then asparagus, some spinach, rainbow chard in a greenhouse, tomatoes for next year. Oh, and he had rocket, onions and
chillies, plus a rhubarb patch and some leeks. There are 3000 garlic plants readying themselves for the harsh winter ahead to emerge after spring into rich fat bulbs.
We look at the handsome lavender cauliflowers and cabbages that seem to be almost bursting with life. “The soil,” he says, “is like chocolate cake.”

Also under cover are the last of the tomatoes and baby spinach. We gaze at a massive mulberry tree. “The farm is like a wild beast…something coming at you from every angle…insects, weeds, weather and wild life.”
Among his attributes is a lot of re-using. For instance, now that his daughters are aged 11 and 14 their playground has become a nursery, home to two worm farms. He rakes his hand almost lovingly through thousands of worms. A bucket catches their juice. “Black gold,” he says. The juice is diluted to water the plants.
Another nursery is for seedlings but is now holding pumpkins and firewood. A repurposed wash station incorporates sinks and timber rescued from the tip. All of this is tracked on A2 sheets of paper.
Just to add variety, and perhaps to show it’s not all deadly serious, a replica blue British police box stands nearby, just like the Tardis in the Dr Who TV series. “If I make a mistake I just get in the Tardis and fix it.”
There is no tractor, just a tiller which uses little fuel and doesn’t have much impact on the ground. What’s more, he can listen to podcasts, gaining more knowledge and philosophical insights, while he works.
He has a commercial kitchen for the pickled and sliced jalapeños and jars of traditional gherkins with dill and garlic that he sells at the market. The label of the gherkins says it is “packed by the gherking and his family”.
Sitting in the shade of a massive Himalayan cedar, their 1880s house is a former blacksmith’s shop (horseshoes are still uncovered while cultivating the soil as well as blue and white china). The front room of the house hosted lunches for local
councillors when they met down the road in the Glenlyon Hall. Some visitors remember being in the house as children when the great fire of the 1930s burnt out a third of the town. Now part of it is an AirBnB run by Fiona, Edward’s wife.
Spectacular bird and animal themed murals enliven the house and fences. Adsum Farmhouse was a title given to the property many owners back. Edward found it literally means to be present. When Latin was still taught in schools, students responded with “adsum” at roll call. It seems to fit: all present and correct.

Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Contributed

AN ALMOST century-old silent masterpiece of documentary filmmaking will be given new life next month when an acclaimed singer performs a “sound-track”.
Grass, made in 1925, recounts the yearly migration of 50,000 tribespeople into Iran, taking 500,000 animals across fierce wide rivers and snowy peaks to fresh pasture. The trek has been going on for a thousand years.
The film will be shown at the Castlemaine Documentary Festival, which runs from June 16 to 18, with the music by ZOJ, a Ballarat duo comprising acclaimed singer Gelareh Pour and her partner on drums, Brian O’Dwyer.
Festival director Claire Jager found ZOJ, which is modern Persian for couple, through a computer search for Iranian musicians in Central Victoria who might compose an original score. To Jager’s knowledge, such a silent film-live music collaboration has not been done before.
Born in Iran, Gelareh is a singer and songwriter, who also plays a bowed lute
called a qeychak. She has performed in Iran, Tajikistan and across Europe. In
Australia she has appeared at festivals and venues across the country, collaborating
with leading innovative musicians as well as producing three albums.
So how did all this come about? “Inadvertently,” says director Jager. “A Turkish
woman got in touch with me to suggest a festival of Iranian films, which led to Grass.”
Another happy coincidence: it will be shown during Refugee Week.
It is one of the first films to study a culture. Jager says she knew of it through her
30 years in the field of documentaries and was able to track down a new print in the
US.
Under its full title, Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, the documentary was chosen
for preservation by the American Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or
aesthetically significant”.
Another reason for Grass having such fame is that Merian C. Cooper, one of its
three directors and producers went on to make the classic King Kong.
Another producer was Marguerite Harrison, who also worked as a reporter and
translator as well as spying for the US in Japan and the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
She was held for 10 months in the notorious Lubyanka prison.
She first met Cooper at a ball in Warsaw during the early days of the war between
Russia and Poland, giving him food, blankets and books when the Russians jailed
him in 1920.
By contrast, another documentary takes the viewer into the world of descendants
of camel drivers in Australia, commonly called Afghans, although most were from
the far west of British India, including today’s Pakistan. Others came from Egypt and
Turkiye.
Watandar, My Countryman centres on an effort by a descendant of the cameleers,
Muzafar Ali, to film them to try to understand his new Afghan-Australian identity. It
is directed, written, and produced by Jolyon Hoff who, like Ali, lives in Indonesia.
Journeying far from his favourite surfing beaches, Hoff undertook a type of road
trip looking for the cameleers and filming Ali on his mission.
Another festival highlight is Weed & Wine, described by Jager as an intriguing
account of a French family with centuries-old vineyards and a son who runs a staterecognised cannabis farm in California.
And this year C-Doc introduces a second venue – The Yurt – a beautiful microcinema located in easy walking distance to the Theatre Royal. The Yurt features
an alternative program of family-friendly sessions across the Saturday and Sunday
mornings and enticing programs for young people in the afternoons and evenings.
It will also host an immersive interactive parlour game, Werewolves, for more daring
festival-goers.
Link and tickets: www.cdocff.com.au

BESTSELLING author Tim Winton is coming to the region with a message of hope: good
information and organisation can stop destruction of our world.
He’s spent decades striving to save one of the last intact wild places left on Earth, Ningaloo Reef on Western Australia’s remote coast, beside the Indian Ocean. Once given over to the fishing of turtles and whales and set to become a quarry and an oilfield, it now has World Heritage listing.
Winton will be in Castlemaine and Kyneton next month talking ahead of what is said to be his visually stunning three-part TV documentary on the reef.
Author of 29 books which have sold in the millions, and winner of countless awards, the 62-year-old father of three and grandfather of two is seen stopping a whale shark, getting hit by a critically endangered ray, holding a dugong against his heart, saving baby turtles and encountering sea snakes and
tiger sharks.
All this began about 23 years ago when he gave the campaign $28,000 from the Miles
Franklin Award for his book Dirt Music. Now a National Trust Living Treasure, Winton
largely set aside his writing to throw himself into the fight for Ningaloo, an indigenous
word for promontory.
Here, as he says, where the desert has its feet in the sea, survival depends on a clash of ideas. What has happened is a beacon of hope on the edge of an abyss. It’s a place, Winton says, that could teach us how to get things right if we just pause a moment and listen.
Not that it was a complete triumph, however. “We tried to get all three eco-systems (heritage) listed as an entity. Exmouth Gulf was to be included but developers white-anted it.”
One irony is that just recently thousands of people from all over the world came
to Exmouth to see another natural phenomenon, an eclipse of the sun.
So is he ever dispirited? “Every day. I’m enraged daily, and nightly, by the poverty of public discussion, but slipping into despair is giving victory to the dark side. We have to cling to life, we have to cling to hope.
“People are tired of being told something is impossible when it is possible. Every lake, every forest that is saved is because people acted.”
The documentary was made, he tells The Local, “in my other spare time” and done out of a sense of duty. He didn’t want to be on television but without him there was no money for the project, while cracking the old joke, “I’ve got a good face for radio”.
Cultural and ecological values are examined in the series which, Winton says, is not as outstanding as, say, the BBC might make, but nevertheless is blue chip natural history.
Making it meant working in “a bubble”, a massive, six-days-a-week undertaking
involving animals and children, where the day’s script changed all the time.
Having always worked alone, he found it strange at the age of 60 to be with a
team working for the long haul. “The writing is different. It’s a recipe, a wish-list for the animals to show up at a certain time…”
Filmed over 57 weeks during Covid lock-downs, and in collaboration with traditional owners and cultural advisers, the series involves almost 100 experts in fields such as archaeology, geoscience, biology, marine science and eco-tourism.
Now the documentary, called Ningaloo Nyinggulu, is to be shown on the ABC and in more than 100 countries.
This is not a campaign documentary, Winton adds. “I just hope that when people
see one of the last places of global significance they will be inspired.”
At the end of our 20-minute phone talk, Winton discloses that, in spite of the
demands of the documentary, he has that day finished another novel. “But I don’t
know if anyone will want to publish it. Shit, what else would I do?”
Words: Kevin Childs | Main image: Vee@BlueMediaExmouth

The Local has six books by Tim Winton to give away to readers. For the chance to win
email donna@tlnews.com.au with your name, town, contact number and which title
you would like to win from Eyrie, Shallows, The Shepherds Hut, The Riders, Three
Plays and An Open Swimmer. Entries close on Friday, May 5.

AS A a paramedic, Baydon Beddoe says he picks up the injured by ambulance. As a boxer, he says, he knocks ‘em down.
Now he’s up for a state title that could lead to a national championship. And all this after surviving bowel cancer.

A father of girls aged five and eight, 46-year-old Baydon, of Miners Rest, is training at his father Denis’s boxing club in Wombat Dam Road, Daylesford, for the State Masters Championship today Saturday,
April 1. And if 76-year-old Denis passes a fitness test he will also box in an exhibition.
Baydon will be fighting for a trophy he’s never won, a championship
belt, and coincidentally it’s against a boxer who beat Baydon 23 years ago in Baydon’s first professional bout.

That was seven years after Baydon started training, representing Victoria in the Nipper class in 2000, later competing in Olympic trials on the Gold Coast and twice in the Australian Masters event before Covid hit.
In that time, he’s moved through weights such as welter in 2000, light-heavy 19 years later and is now an 86-kilo cruiserweight. “You get heavier as you get older,” he says.
Cancer hit him in 2014-15 but looking at the fighter in the ring sparring with his father that’s hard to believe. “This year’s a bit of redemption,” says Baydon.
He’s been training daily since January, running half an hour in the morning and then spending up to 90 minutes on a punching bag, working on his footwork, getting ready for the four two-minute rounds.
Baydon thumps a speedball, rhythmically hitting it with one hand, then both. Then he picks up a big stuffed strike shield used for injury- free sparring.
Nearby is the Wombat Fight Club’s motto for sparring: “Only hit as hard as you want to be hit.” “Men fight in the ring, dogs fight in the street,” says another big sign.
Baydon has more one-liners: “Some think defence is the thing that goes around the yard.” “One boxer thought he’d won a title, but the only one he has is for his house.”
And a parting zinger: “There are three sorts of fighters, orthodox, southpaw and piss-poor.” Being only one of these, I make a retreat.
Words: Kevin Childs | Images: Kyle Barnes

Words: Kevin Childs | Images: Kyle Barnes

FOR some time now there’s been a belief that print is dead. Many say
the world is all online.
A chink of proof that this may not be ironclad is in the story of Chris
Olver of Yandoit.
Just over five years ago this paper told of his Wild West/Aussie outback model
village. Chris featured with his battered hat, rifle and Bowie knife.

The article was spotted by a representative of the Wolf Creek films, TV series and
touring show, who asked Chris if he’d like to go to a 40th anniversary celebration of
the film Mad Max in Maryborough. The Wolf Creek crew and those with Mad Max
are mates.
Chris, for 30 years a gravel truck driver, agreed but changed his mind. His wife
Shirley thought he was wrong. “Go,” she said, “you have nothing to lose.”
Putting on an old cowboy hat and red chequered shirt and strapping on a Bowie
knife he headed off. “When I turned up in Maryborough a bloke named Fletch, who
runs a car TV show in Sydney, came up to me. He thought I was John Jarratt, who
he’d interviewed recently.
“I was off to a pretty good start.”
Chris met the Wolf Creek representative, who made a short video that was sent to
Jarratt. Back came the word that Chris had the job of playing Mick Taylor as a stand-
in for Jarratt at shows around the country.
Then he was in the world of Wolf Creek, which features a sadistic outback pig
hunter called Mick Taylor who grabs his chance when he comes across a busload of
tourists from around the world. Their outback encounter is unimaginable.
Actor John Jarratt made Mick Taylor his own in two films and two TV seasons.
Chris has now been doing it for about four years, touring country Victoria,
including Melbourne, Adelaide and New South Wales, sometimes with Jarratt but
mostly with the Wolf Creek truck and crew.
The spin-offs include a fan club, Wolf Creek car badge, a Mick Taylor statue
($750), a pig-sticker hunting knife, a game and a pink cameo stretch gun sling.
Along the way there’s been some fun, such as when Chris was asked if the Wolf
Creek show would appear at a cancer fundraiser in tiny Lexton in Western Victoria.
“There were about three dozen people out front. A woman of about 24 looked a
bit worried as I did old Mick, so I picked up one of our movie props, half a human
leg with bone sticking out the top and blood running out of it.
“I went over to her and said in a raspy Mick Taylor voice, ‘Meet Sally or what’s
bloody left of her’. As the crowd laughed she looked at me and said in a stuttering
voice, ‘My-my-my name is Sally.’
“I had to do some quick thinking because she was a bit shaky, but she had a
little boy of about five, so I coaxed him up and we chatted and they both had photos
taken, so it turned out okay.”
Chris is full of praise for John Jarratt, “a great bloke. If I need to know anything I
ring or text him. He answers me straight away. He has a huge following.”
Jarratt appeared with Chris and others at the recent Australia Day Musicland
Theatre show in Melbourne. “The place was packed. It can make you a bit nervous
but I got through it okay.”

Back home in Yandoit Chris shows his Wolf Creek museum, its props including
a charred body, severed limbs and a skull, posters, signed photos and, dominating
the space, a sky blue 1977 Ford F250, a replica of one in the film, signed within by
Jarratt, and a massive 1978 HX Holden Statesman Caprice, used in the TV series.

At age 77 Chris is not sure how long he’ll keep playing Mick. “It’s a fair build-
up before each show. I don’t shave for well over a week and I’m down in the bush to
practise the Mick Taylor laugh a lot. It’s not easy to do. And I practise Mick’s voice.”
(“What are you buggers doin’ ‘ere?” he rasped when we arrived.)
“Shirl has to put up with me as Mick, which can be a bit trying.
“At the end of it all,” he says, “it’s good to get home, have a shave, get cleaned up
and get back to being me.”

Words: Kevin Childs | Image: Contributed

LIKE a never-ending game of chase, the campaign to protect the Wombat State
Forest manages to save some trees, then logging starts elsewhere in this vast area.
Now it appears to enter a new phase with a threat to Daylesford’s water.

And one of the many odd aspects is that taxpayers subsidised VicForest’s logging with $54 million
last year, a figure predicted to double this year. The increase is expected to come from the cost of paying
retainers to contractors, who may have no work.
Another curiosity, according to Daylesford forest activist David Stephens, is that it is 21 years since the
local ALP branch voted to have the forest managed as a national service, providing clean air and water.
That same year the party pledged to create a Wombat National Park.
Instead, according to Mr Stephens, the most massive equipment to enter the forest has been
clearing swathes. “There has been overwhelming forestry reduction, with the greatest damage ever
seen,” he says.
“Muddy water is running into the Wombat Dam, which is Daylesford’s water supply.
“Removing ground cover leads to erosion and pollution. Then the fine regrowth increases the fire
risk because there is more fuel. It takes 40 years to get sufficient regrowth.”

Intriguingly, VicForests did not comment on the water supply threat but acknowledged that it has
paused all commercial harvesting while a new survey is done, while insisting that its work is recovery, not harvesting, subject to external audits and independent sustainable forest management standards.
Another worry for locals, says Mr Stephens, is that six B-double trucks have been seen on narrow bush roads, concerning parents of children at Bullarto Primary
School.
Such was the worry that a woman, pictured, supported by about 20 peaceful
protestors chained herself to some equipment on January 30. After talking to
authorities she undid her lock and was allowed to leave but is expected to be charged
by police. Logging has stopped in this area.
Mr Stephens, long a community activist and mentor to forest community groups,
says up to 20 hectares have been cleared at Barkstead, off the Daylesford-Ballan road.
“We would like to see a moratorium on all industrial-scale extraction until laws
are introduced to protect Wombat Forest.
“We have seen logging protection lifted in 2019, allowing drainage lines to run
into Wombat Creek. Anything dead on site is washed by rain into the catchment.”
After an exacting inquiry, state government agreed to adopt almost all
recommendations, including preserving and protecting the forest, but no laws have
been introduced.
The Supreme Court agreed to protect the vulnerable greater glider in the Central
Highlands, but there is no such protection in the Midlands.
Logs from here go to mills in Sale, Orbost, Beaufort and Heyfield. “This,” says
Mr Stephens,” is the last resort.”
And the future? More than 7000 hectares are listed for logging. As for VicForest,
it said “recovery work” in the forest is in response “to removing debris and treating
hazardous trees” after the 2021 storm.
“Timber removed through these operations will be going to the highest and best
end use. This potentially includes community use, utilisation by traditional owners,
customers, as well as community firewood.”