Skatey...The life of Les Skate

Skatey
The Life of Les Skate
I hadn’t heard that much about that particular area, but I knew Charlton very well. It had
been badly flooded too by the Avoca River. I was more or less set to go there when I saw
an article in The Weekly Times. It was written by the daughter of a gentleman named
Lindsay Schultz. He was a farmer and a feed merchant. He was also the chief flood warden
of Benjeroop. Luckily for him, his bit of land was on high ground. But he was right in the
middle of it.
His daughter Kelly wrote about how much
Lindsay had put his heart and soul into
rescuing people and trying keeping the place
viable.
I had been up in that area in my younger days and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll give him a ring.’ In the
meantime, my brother Geoff, who had done a lot of work with fire and rescue groups, was
preparing to go to Charlton. When he heard I was thinking of going to Benjeroop, he said,
‘Well, I’ll come with you, but I’ve only got a couple of weeks.’ So off we went. We joke a bit
about this now … we could just hear Lindsay and his helper Billy thinking, ‘What have we
got here?’ when they saw these two old fellows turn up. I was eighty-two and Geoff was
not much younger. Anyway, we proved that wrong. Geoff had his caravan and I stayed in
an hotel on the first night, but I knew I couldn’t keep paying for that. Lindsay was right on
the Murray and he had a fully equipped big houseboat and he offered it to us to use. That
was good.
It became my accommodation for the time I
was there, off and on for about five months.
As soon as we’d got there, I’d asked,
‘Have you got anything for us?’
‘You can start tomorrow,’ he said.
He drove us all around the place and showed us four or five houses. We started the next
morning. The first was the house of a chap called Jack Challis. Jack was a shearer-come
farmer. So, we got stuck into it, started wrecking and pulling it down. In one day, we had
all the dirty stuff out … oh it was a terrible, shocking job to do. When the water and mud,
and the dead frogs and God-knows-what, got down behind the plaster, it was just putrid.
Anyway, we got it all shovelled out and got it dried. About a week later we had all the new
plaster back in.
So we got stuck into it, started wrecking and
pulling it down. In one day we had all the
dirty stuff out…oh it was a terrible, shocking
job to do.
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