Skatey...The life of Les Skate

Skatey
The Life of Les Skate
I ended up renovating or building quite a lot of
dairies in the Yarra Valley.
This upgrading of the dairies made a big difference. They all had needed new machinery
and pipes and so forth. They had old wooden bales and the concrete was all cracked and
grazed. I was supplying metal pipe bails and salt feeders to make it a lot easier for them.
Some of the properties I could just go in with my pocket knife and cut the green string,
that’s all that was holding the rails up.
Yet the people were quite clean, they just didn’t realise … it just went on, one generation
after the other. I remember one family in particular, dairying down Tarrawarra Lane. There
was the man, his wife, the mum and someone else. There were about four of them
anyway. After I’d finished, it only took two to do the same work that four people had been
doing. That was a big asset to them.
From then on, I put in steel bails, self-feeders and overhead tubing carrying feed to the
bales. It was a good era. Once the dairies had all come up to scratch for the Dairying
Department, the industry went full steam ahead. I went on from there to build all sorts of
farm buildings. Steel sheds, hay sheds, machinery sheds and that kept me going in
between my shearing commitments.
I went on from there to build
all sorts of farm buildings.
Steel sheds, hay sheds
machinery sheds,
these nice brick dairies are still standing.
After a while I saw a big change in the dairying
industry in the area. I don’t know why the
government saw fit to do what they did. They
reckoned there was too much milk being produced
and they started paying the dairy farmers out. So
much a cow. Of course, a lot of them had been there a
long time, so they took their money and went. And all
I remember thinking to myself at that stage, ‘Goodness me, what’s going to happen to the
Yarra Valley?’ They tried beef but the properties weren’t big enough to run beef. And then
fortunately, as I mentioned before, there came these rebates to wealthy people. They
came out to the Yarra Valley and bought up the properties that had been dairy farms. They
put up their wineries and a whole new industry was born.
I remember thinking to myself at that stage,
‘Goodness me, what’s going to happen to the
Yarra Valley?’
27