Skatey...The life of Les Skate

Skatey
The Life of Les Skate
A new home, and the start of my working life
So, I put in two years at Kerang High School and at that stage it was still the Depression,
the end of the Depression. Before the War. And Pop hadn’t gone all that well; it was very
tough times with a big family. He mortgaged our little place to keep us in tucker and all the
rest of it. We weren’t the only ones; there were dozens of families up in that area in the
same boat. So, he had to sell the farm and most of that went paying off everything, the
grocer, the butcher, baker and all the rest of it.
We weren’t the only ones;
there were dozens of families
up in that area in the same
boat.
We moved into Barham and rented a place there for a
while. Pop shore sheep for a big pastoralist out of
Deniliquin who owned a property down here in the
Yarra Valley, around the Healesville area. And there
were no shearers down in this area. His name was
Henry Lindsay-Field. Henry said to Pop, ‘You come
down and shear my sheep Bill.’ So Pop went down
there. He took a couple of shearers with him, and he shore Harry’s sheep.
Soon as the other farmers around here realised there was a shearer in the district, they
grabbed him and wouldn’t let him go.
When he went back home, he knew there was more
opportunity down here for him and his family, so he
took up that option. He loaded everything on the
train and had an old Fargo truck which fitted the
family in the back and the front. With the pets as
He became the number one
shearer in the Yarra Valley.
well. He had no place really to go, but there was a little cottage, Eyton-on-Yarra, which was
Lindsay-Field’s property at the time. Lindsay-Field just said, ‘If you fix that up a bit Bill, you
can live there.’ So, we did, until we found another place and we rented that.
I didn’t go back to school. I was picking up wool. Roustabouting is the word for it. I did that
for one or two seasons. In the meantime, I was learning shearing. It was a good
opportunity for me with Pop being a shearer and with the other shearers there. Every now
and then I could hop in and do one, and I learnt to shear pretty good in that twelve
months. But Pop was thinking about what he’d gone through … you know all his life, hard
work shearing. (It is noted as one of the hardest work in the industry.) And I can vouch for
that!
The owner of one of the other properties we worked for, Yarra Grange, was Mr Herman.
He was a director on Australian Estates Wool Store. A wool company. Pop must have had a
word with him one day and he got me a cadetship; wool classing out at West Footscray. So,
I went and boarded there for about six months. I rode the two miles to work on my
pushbike, (which I’d bought on the never-never for five shillings a week.)
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