Gibb Harold

Harold Gibb came to Rowville in 1936 when he bought a 100 acre property on the north side of Wellington Road. The land extended back to Corhanwarrabul Creek and was on what is now the Kingston Industrial Estate and Kingston Golf Links west of Corporate Avenue.

“Times were tough and money was scarce and buying that farm was one of the best pieces of luck I had,” said Harold. He had worked on a farm at Narrandera in mid west NSW for twelve years and had grown “sick of droughts, mice plagues and grasshopper plagues” and when he married a Finley girl, Elizabeth Limbrick, in 1936 they decided it was a good time to seek greener pastures.

Harold had had the good fortune to become a close friend of a young Swiss man, Wally Guest, who had been sent out to Australia by his well-to-do family to gain some experience of farm life here. When Wally came into his inheritance he returned to Switzerland, married his sweetheart and then came back to Australia to find a farm. Wally searched throughout NSW and Victoria until he and his wife reached Berwick. They fell in love with the little township and bought a farm on the creek beside Beaumont Road towards Harkaway.

Wally wrote to Harold and Elizabeth in Narrandera inviting them to visit and they promptly accepted his offer. They too were delighted with the green hills of Berwick but could not afford the prices being asked there for farms. Harold remembered talking with the well-known Dandenong hardware merchant, Gerald Magg, who said that there was a place on the market in Wellington Road, Rowville. Harold became particularly interested when he learned that the farm had a milk contract because that meant a steady income.

The 100 acre farm was owned by a young fellow from the Western District, Bill Wallace, whose parents had bought the farm for him and were disappointed that he could not make a go of it. Harold, however, did make a success of farming in Rowville to the extent that he was able eventually to more than double his land holdings.

He had a herd of about thirty Jersey-Friesian-cross cows which he hand milked until about 1939 by which time he had been able to save enough to install a milking machine. The milk, in cans, was collected each day by George Grenda (who later owned Dandenong’s biggest bus company) and taken to Spottiswood Dairy in Malvern.

The neighbouring farm to the west, running down to Dandenong Creek, was owned by Fred Redding, a Dandenong Real Estate agent. To the east there was a 40 acre farm owned by an ex-baker when Harold arrived. The baker had been forced to retire from that business because of flour on the lung. He later sold to Bill Bickerton who came from Geelong. Harold and Bill got on well and when a 50 acre block between their farms came on the market, they bought it between them and divided it equally by putting a fence down the middle. Sadly, Bill had blood pressure problems and decided to give up farming. He sold his farm to Bill Robinson who established the Hill and Dale Hereford Stud on the property.

Across Wellington Road to the south, a Dutch couple, Mr and Mrs Meurs, were share farmers. Behind where the McMillan factory is now there was the ruin of an old house by the side of Dandenong Creek. Harold used some of the hand made bricks from it for paving. A solitary old pear tree is all that remains now on the site of the little homestead.

In 1945 Harold and Elizabeth’s only child Ian was born. As he grew up he became a pupil at Mulgrave State School across Dandenong Creek in Wellington Road.

In the late 1940s Harold bought one hundred acres running back south from Wellington Road where the Ideal Dairy is now located. In 1952 he and his wife built a new cream brick home on this property and a share farmer moved into the old weatherboard home they vacated. They lived in this new home until Harold retired from active farming in 1967 when they moved to a new home at 8 McKay Road (off Taylors Lane). After living there for 12 years they moved to North Dandenong.

Early Life

Harold had spent most of his adult life in calm, sleepy Rowville but his younger years had been eventful – and tragic. He was born in 1904 in Rockdale, South Sydney, the eldest son of George, an optician, and Irene. He had one sister and two brothers. He went to school at Burwood but left at 13 to become a messenger boy for Saunders, a large jewellery firm in the heart of Sydney opposite Central Station, for 12 shillings ($1.20) a week.

One of his most vivid memories from that part of his life was Armistice Day, 11th November 1918 when the First World War came to an end. The normally very properly behaved people of Sydney “went mad, dancing and singing and riding up and down the streets on lorries.” However, the joy of victory in 1918 gave way to the terror of the great influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918-1919 killing up to an estimated twenty million people. Both of Harold’s parents succumbed to the disease within the space of a fortnight, leaving their young children shocked and despairing. Harold recalled “you couldn’t get a doctor because there were so many sick people. Dad nursed mum until she died and then we had to look after him.”

An uncle adopted the younger children while Harold was found a position as a farm boy with a family named Moxham at Parramatta. The farm had orange orchards and thirty cows which Harold helped Mr Moxham milk twice a day. Mr Moxham had a contract to supply milk to the famous nearby Kings School and Harold drove the cans on a cart there morning and afternoon, seven days a week. After three years at Parramatta he moved on to a property named “Barwon Park” in the Kanimbla Valley between Katoomba and the Jenolan Caves.

As well as doing the farm work on this mixed farm he was involved in improving the property. This involved creating pasture land by ring barking and then burning the dead trees and putting in rabbit proof fences. He also helped to construct the homestead built of rammed earth (also known as pise – pronounced ‘peesey’). Slightly damp soil was shovelled into a box-shaped frame and then the soil was rammed down with a strong sapling. The wall, thus made, was a foot (30 centimetres) thick and when the first tier was finished, the frame was placed on top of it and the process repeated for the next layer. They built the walls nine feet high and put an iron roof on top and built a verandah all around. The rammed earth walls were painted with hot tar on the outside and plastered on the inside. Harold and his mate dug all the earth for the walls of the house with pick and shovel. He revisited “Barwon Park” 69 years later and found the house still occupied and as sound as ever.

In 1924 Harold moved on again, this time to a 2,000 acre property near Narrandera where he spent the next twelve years, an era which encompassed the great Depression and several severe droughts. However, as Harold wryly commented, “I’ve never been out of work for a day in my life; the money hasn’t always been attractive – perhaps that’s why.”

Back to Rowville

The war years brought changes to Rowville. The Fire Brigade was formed in 1942 and Harold, with the rank of Lieutenant, was one of its founding members. He served in the brigade for twenty years.

The influx of large numbers of soldiers brought problems too. Harold found fence posts missing and believed they finished up in camp fires. Bren gun carriers were sometimes driven through fences and occasionally he would find a hole blasted in his paddock where the army engineers were being trained in the use of explosives. Of course, it was war-time and everybody accepted these things. For the farmer the constant war with nature is part of his life. Harold grew stock feed crops: sorghum and millet, but mostly maize on the rich river flats along the Corhanwarrabul Creek. The maize crops could be magnificent with the plants growing six to eight feet high. However, in one three year period he had his young maize crops washed away every year by flash floods.

Harold’s long years of farm toil (he once worked for seven years straight without a holiday) have been rewarded with a long and happy retirement.

Early in February 1994, many relatives and friends joined him at the Harkaway Hall as he celebrated his 90th birthday.
Interviewed by Bryan Power                       PHOTOS