Warragul's Ralph Chesterfield contacted me about the grave in Dead Man's Gully, near Darnum and the source of last week's story. So did Mick Crole, as I said last week.
The more I talked to Ralph Chesterfield the more I realised that he had experienced a significant chunk of Gippsland's history and was even keeping some of it alive. He was born 77 years ago and he has not really stood still since.
Our conversation included his account of driving a bulldozer backward off a small cliff, following which he spent a fair while in hospital. That was up on the Swingler's Diversion Wall. Naturally, I asked him how it came to pass. "Just went to sleep. You know, back and forth, back and forth…" There cannot be too many men who can go to sleep sitting on a bulldozer.
He was working at that time for Atkinson and Holland, who also built the diversion tunnel taking Thomson Dam overflow to the Upper Yarra Dam.
He took off from home and school in his 14th year, partly because he did not get on well with his mother. Two uncles in Melbourne had a workshop in a cellar off Collins Street. He started with them as a plumber's mate, but they wanted him to go back to school so he could do an apprenticeship. That was not for Ralph, so he took to his scrapers again.
He got work on Mervyn Pratt's farm at Nyora and then was told about Thorpdale's Bill Willis, who had a dairy farm but was going into growing potatoes (alright, spuds) so he hitchhiked over to Thorpdale and was there for five years. Willis than started scaling back so Ralph moved on again, this time to the Mirboo North Butter Factory.
There he drove a cream truck, collecting cream from farms and delivering Tip-Top bread, cattle food and so on at the same time. His route led up to Allambee Reserve then down to Yarragon and up to Thorpdale, where the Gunn brothers collected them for, I think, the Melbourne market.
He was there 'a few years' then his wandering feet took him over to the Korumburra Butter Factory where he drove a cream truck again, and then a milk tanker. He moved to the Poowong Butter Factory doing the same job, this time for Unigate.
He mentioned with some pride that while normal bulk milk tankers took 2200 gallons he was asked to drive a new 'super-tanker' that could carry 3000 gallons. It had a fibreglass tank lined with stainless steel and was the largest milk tanker in Victoria at the time. Unfortunately, the fibreglass kept on cracking and the truck was taken off the road,
It was here that Ralph got married and became a little more settled. He married Elsie Dorling, who'd gone to school in Poowong and was living in the town. Ralph and Elsie then had four children. Sadly, they lost the first-born but have Daniel, Donna and Narelle. If my notes are correct, and I think they are, Daniel has four sons and Ralph is about to become a great grandfather. If that is so, there is a fair chunk of local history in itself. They married in 1968 and are still very happily together.
They are particularly happy at the moment because they are off to Charters Towers to avoid Victoria's winter.
Going back to Ralph's career as a driver, he went off to Kyabram and drove interstate runs for a time before taking up the job on the Thompson Dam, which was finally opened in 1983. You'd have to wonder whether Elsie ever got fully unpacked before it was time to move again.
While he was working on the diversion wall he lived a while at Aberfeldy and he developed a strong connection with the place, but that is part of, and the source of, next week's column.
He went from there to the Thomson Dam job, Swingler's, to working for Farnham and Stephens at Warragul, one of the nation's biggest bulk-hauliers. He was there for 16 or 17 years, a long time for him to stay in one place! He remembers Ken Stephens, the boss, had a cousin called Kevin who was looking for work. Ken told him to come in and run the business for him while he worked on the trucks. Kevin did exactly that and it really worked out well for all concerned. Kevin was there for years and did a great job.
He also drove buses for Bill Dineen at Warragul and spent quite a few years working for the State Electricity Commission, starting as a boilermaker, then becoming a security guard and then the Emergency Services Supervisor. It was from there that he finally retired in 2009.
I mentioned earlier the dozer accident at Swingler's. The diversion wall took five years to build and Ralph was there for three of them (if my scribbled notes are accurate). He lived at Aberfeldy and went home at weekends to his family in Korumburra, where his wife and children lived. He stayed in the Walhalla Hotel for a time and also in the Erica Hotel.
I gather the family then moved to Trafalgar because that was where they finished up spending their weekends as a family.
Now, when Ralph was living at Aberfeldy during the dam project he became active in that small community, and was on the Aberfeldy Cemetery Trust for 17 years, 10 of them as President of the Trust. It is a government-appointed body of eight members.
As well as the Aberfeldy cemetery this Trust was responsible for maintenance at the Toombon Cemetery and has worked on the Edwards Reef and Store Point (Donnelly's Creek) cemeteries.
There are small cemeteries in many places in the hill country north of Walhalla, for obvious reasons, and some of them are nearly inaccessible now. The mining towns were not very permanent and when the gold was gone most of the people moved on.
I'll talk more about these lonely mountain graveyards next week, with the help of Ralph's information and using "Lonely Graves of the Gippsland Goldfields and Greater Gippsland" (J.G. Rogers and Nelly Helyar, Moe, 1994), a very thorough account of a hard-to-research subject. The records of those days were skimpy at best, and many have been destroyed over the past century and a half, or so.
Finally, I need to mention the fact that Ralph has taken an interest in the Dead Man's Gully grave and provided basic maintenance, following many years where some other and unknown person had been doing so.
