Hobbs Hedley

Hedley Hobbs was born on the family farm at Lysterfield in 1919. “The Mothercraft Sister came out from Dandenong and stayed with mother for two days before I was born.” He was the seventh and last child of Josiah and Elizabeth Hobbs who had moved to their one hundred acre farm on the south side of Wellington Road opposite the intersection with Lysterfield Road in 1916.

Previously they had farmed near the corner of Stud and Ferntree Gully Roads opposite the Scoresby Shopping Centre for two years and prior to that in the Willaura district south of Horsham in the Wimmera. Bad seasons forced many of the farmers off the land in that area at the time but there are still plenty of Hobbs descendants living in that region to the present day. When things were going badly for the family in Willaura, Elizabeth received a letter from her stepsister in Melbourne, telling her of the Scoresby farm. Josiah and Elizabeth decided to make the move, sold up for about 300 pounds and came to Melbourne by train with their children along with their furniture, a horse and a cow in a goods wagon attached to the same train.

Hedley’s older brother Aubrey, who is the only other member of the family still living in 1997, was born at Scoresby in 1915.

Pineleigh

Josiah was a blade shearer and worked locally and at Pakenham, Berwick and Phillip Island to make enough money to sustain his family and pay off the debt on the farm – which he accomplished after only five years. They named the property “Pineleigh”, the name they had given to their farm in Willaura. Only about a quarter of the land was cleared when they bought it so Josiah and his elder sons worked steadily to remove the trees with a kind of winch called a Forest Devil.

While the family were living in Scoresby the eldest son Gordon worked for a German market gardener named Ehrenfried Exner in Rowville who taught him a great deal about the industry. So when the family moved to Lysterfield, Gordon set about putting his knowledge into practice. The first crop to be planted in a newly cleared patch of ground was tomatoes then beans, peas, cabbages and cauliflowers. The only time the seedlings were watered was when they were first planted out. After that they were left to the elements as there was no water supply in the district. They had four horses for ploughing, not large ones like Clydesdales but more akin to a medium-sized breed such as the Suffolk Punch.

Josiah got up at two o’clock in the morning to drive the horse-drawn wagon laden with freshly harvested vegetables on the long trip to the Victorian Market. In the mid 1920s he bought a T-Model Ford truck to replace the wagon. In those days you could only buy the bare truck engine, chassis and wheels – so Gordon used his carpentry skills to build a cabin and tray.

They owned three cows from whose milk Elizabeth made butter and cream and they also had about 100 fowls and a small flock of sheep. Josiah killed one each fortnight for meat and hung the carcase in a Coolgardie Safe to keep it from spoiling. Elizabeth baked her own bread and Hedley recalled, “Mother was a great manager; we could have shut up the front gate and forgotten the world.”

Elizabeth and Gordon “Get Things Done”

Hedley’s mother was a forceful personality who liked to get things done and she was one of the people who badgered the Education Department into re-opening the Lysterfield State School in 1920. She also approached the Post Office to set up an office in Lysterfield and she became the first Postmistress. Josiah and Gordon built a little shed for her down at the roadside but being a busy housewife she found this very inconvenient so before long the customers had to make their way up to the house which was about 200 yards from the road. Hedley remembered the Italian migrant farm workers coming to buy five shilling postal notes to send home to their wives and mothers. Most of the men were illiterate and Elizabeth had to address their envelopes for them.

Like his mother, Gordon was an energetic person and at her urging he built the first Lysterfield Store (with attached residence) in 1929. He had attended classes at the Mechanics Institute Hall in Ferntree Gully where he had learned carpentry and blacksmithing (he had his own forge at the farm and made all of the horses’ shoes). With the assistance of another dynamic local personality, Freddie Williams, Gordon built the premises and set up business and home there with his wife Kathleen. The store was on the west side of Lysterfield Road about 100 yards from Wellington Road. It was demolished about the time the present service station was built.

Elizabeth and Freddie were two of the driving forces behind the setting up of the :Lysterfield Progress Association whose immediate project was to build a hall. In those days everybody loved dancing and were prepared to travel long distances to attend dances. Hedley remembered riding his bike as a teenager to Belgrave to go to dances and holding onto the back of buses to be pulled up the steep hills on the way. The building of the hall engaged everyone in the district. The Selman brothers donated the land and working bees were held every weekend. The men and older boys started in the morning and the wives would come along later in the day with the younger children and the afternoon tea. Hedley was about eight at the time and he remembered that he had the job of pulling a bag of sawdust impregnated with linseed oil around on the floor to smooth and seal it. He also remembered Freddie Williams mixing linseed oil with red lead and white lead to make paint. One day Fred opened a can of linseed oil, dipped his finger in and tasted the oil. “Ah,” he said, “this stuff is good for you.” Hedley also recalled seeing the men pull up the heavy roof beams with ropes “like a gang of Romans”.

Every year there was a Birthday Ball to celebrate the anniversary of the hall’s opening and these balls continued up to the time the hall was taken over by the 1812 Theatre.

Ehrenfried Exner was often the MC at dances and he was very strict about people’s behaviour although occasionally there were fights outside the hall among the young fellows who’d had a few too many drinks during the day. There were a lot of very good dancers including a man named Bill Van Brummelen who had migrated from South Africa. One night he was spinning around in a waltz with the Rowville Postmistress, Elizabeth Bergin (who was a very large lady), when they slipped and fell. Bill crashed to the floor with Miss Bergin on top of him, much to the amusement of the crowd of young men standing around the back of the hall. Many of the unmarried men in those days were too shy to come in or too poor to afford the one shilling entrance fee. However, when supper was served, the MC usually relented and let them in for a hot drink and something to eat.

During the Depression days, out-of-work men had to work for the dole. Mr Coggins (whose two daughters went to school at Lysterfield with Hedley) was employed by Ferntree Gully Shire Council and he was in charge of the “susso” gangs that worked on repairing the roads and clearing drains. There were a number of unfortunate men employed on farms in the area who were isolated, poorly paid and poorly fed. Hedley once heard his father refer to one such poor man as being expected to “live on corned beef and string”. A man named Bob Campbell came to the farm one day complaining that he had been mistreated on a farm further up Wellington Road. Gordon made up a room for Bob in the barn and he worked for the family for many years. Bob bought a hand-operated film projector and delighted in putting on shows in the barn for the people of the district. The film in those days was very brittle and broke easily so Bob had to stick the pieces back together with a special glue. The only problem was that he didn’t mind which pieces he glued together so that when he rolled a film, odd scenes followed one another without any sensible continuity. Still, the audience didn’t seem to mind and happily paid their one shilling each for a night’s entertainment. The projector, called a Cinematograph, was a bulky affair that stood on a tripod and initially its means of illumination was an oil lamp. The family later bought a more powerful petrol lamp and when Bob used it in the projector the pictures were much brighter. He eventually made more than enough money to pay for the projector and films.

Many young Englishmen migrated to Australia in those days in search of work and sometimes fell into the clutches of unscrupulous employment agents who sent them off to exploiting farmers. The mind of one such young man in Lysterfield snapped under demeaning conditions and he went berserk. A message was sent urgently to Elizabeth to telephone the police who had to restrain him and take him away.

At Lysterfield Primary School

When Hedley commenced school he went each day with his sister Olive and brother Aubrey (the other four older children in the family – Gordon, Hurtle, Austin and Doris – had already left school). Mr Scanlan was an overworked teacher as were many in the rural schools in those times. He had to teach from the beginners up to Grade 8 standard with little help from the Education Department. In Hedley’s later years at the school, an ex-pupil Eve Bailey was employed to assist Mr Scanlan and later Lorna Gillies helped with the ‘bubs’.

Hedley stayed at school until he was 14 but came down with measles the week before he was to sit for the Merit Certificate so he missed out on it. There was no opportunity for the Lysterfield children to go on to secondary education in those days.

Hedley showed what an amazing memory he had by recalling the names of all but twelve of the 46 pupils in the 1932 school photograph. The family names he remembered were: Daniels, Taylor, Bailey, Wright, Newton, Gillies, McDougall, Desmond, Selman, Coggins, Hayes, Reynolds, Hill, Moore, McQueen, Williams, Dicker, Coad and Alberni. Despite the hard times, as you can see in the photograph the children all appear healthy, well fed and well dressed.

While Hedley was at school, the property behind Pineleigh which was known as Sweet Hills was sold to the Church of England and set up as a home to accommodate about twelve wayward boys. It was run by the Reverend Bob Nicholls and was supposed to teach the boys farming although Hedley couldn’t recall seeing much evidence of this. It was closed down after about eight years when the State Rivers acquired the land for the Lysterfield Reservoir catchment area. Pineleigh was also severely reduced in size at the same time, losing about 80 acres. The people of Lysterfield were upset over the amount of compensation they were paid by State Rivers. Even though the land was taken over in the early 1940s they were paid 1930 prices.

Hedley’s Working Life Begins

Hedley left school at the age of 14 and began working on dairy farms in Lysterfield. He worked for Mr Gillies who managed a Jersey Stud for a Melbourne businessman named Tom Simpson. Some of the bulls and cows were entered with considerable success in the Royal Melbourne Show over a number of years. He also worked at “The Leasowes” (now Auxilium College) for a share farmer named Pearson who later leased the Lysterfield Store from Gordon Hobbs. The Leasowes was owned by a wealthy man named Watson who lived there throughout WW2 and later became a Ferntree Gully Shire Councillor. Hedley recalled that two of his former school friends, Edna Wright and Nelly McQueen, worked there as housemaids.