Smith Arthur

Arthur and Gail Smith were one of the first couples to build on the Seebeck Estate. They bought a block in Gymea Avenue in 1961and lived in a caravan on site while building their home. Over the years they raised four children there while, at the same time, opening their doors to the children of the neighbourhood who came to regard the Smith household as their second home.

In the 70s Arthur established the Rowville Boxing Club to provide an outlet for the energies of the local boys; he was also a great backstop for Gail when she and their daughter Erica became leaders with the Rowville Cubs.

GROWING UP IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Arthur was born in Perth in 1938, the seventeenth child of Richard and Dorothy Nazzari. When Arthur was three the family moved to Kalgoorlie where his father first worked in the gold mines and then on what was known as “the woodline”. The woodline was a 200 hundred mile railway line extending north-east from Kalgoorlie and along its length timber cutters felled trees and cut fire wood (all with axes and hand saws) to service the boilers of the mines and the Kalgoorlie hospitals.

By the time that Arthur was ready to go to school the family had grown to twenty – eighteen boys and two girls – and competition for bed space was a nightly ordeal. No matter how badly he may have slept, however, Arthur was up early with the other children to feed the horses and then run the first team out to where the men were cutting. School was held in an old railway carriage and about fifty kids crowded in with just the one teacher. After school the children went out to bring the teams in and then unharnessed the horses, rubbed them down and fed and watered them. On Friday there was no school because the train arrived with a line of trucks about a mile long. While the men loaded the firewood onto the trucks the engine was coupled to the school carriage and shunted it to a siding further down the line where the following week’s cutting would be done.

Later when the family moved back to Kalgoorlie Arthur displayed the enterprising nature which has always remained with him: he started collecting bottles. Beer bottles fetched a penny a dozen while a dozen soft drink bottles were worth threepence. However, his best deals were done when he sold medicine bottles to the local chemists. Of course, this was during World War 2 and everything was in such short supply that recycling was an absolute necessity. Arthur’s efforts to accumulate pocket money were often in vain, however, as his mother had a keen ear for the jingle of coins and insisted that they go into her housekeeping purse.

One day Arthur’s school was taken on an excursion down into one of the gold mines and it struck him then that working underground was “just for rabbits” and he resolved that he would never become a miner. Although he was only 12 Arthur left home aboard a goods train to work on a farm hundreds of miles from Kalgoorlie. He travelled in the engine with a friendly driver who put him off at four o’clock in the morning at a siding shed out in the middle of nowhere with the advice not to leave the shed until someone called his name. Arthur waited for almost two hours, alone, cold and petrified, until finally a truck drove up and he was relieved to hear a friendly voice call his name. The voice was that of Jack Jones, a wheat and sheep farmer, who drove Arthur to his farm near the small town of Training. There he was warmly welcomed by the family and a new era in his life began. He was well looked after and well paid for his work on the farm. Mr and Mrs Jones insisted that he return to school and , best of all, he no longer had to battle for bed space – he had a bed of his own.

Over the next seven years with the Jones family Arthur’s stifled initiative.blossomed and he was able to set himself up as a contractor with his own tractor, combine harvester and wheat stripper while still a teenager. The 50s was a prosperous era and many of the farmers were happy to pay well to have someone else do their work for them. However, amongst this constant round of job offers one came up that was to change Arthur’s life completely.

TO MELBOURNE

An older couple he knew told him that they wanted to go to Melbourne to attend their son’s wedding and asked if he would drive them. Arthur jumped at this opportunity to see more of the country and soon he was behind the wheel heading east over the Nullarbor. Arthur fetched his passengers safely to Noble Park where he met not only the groom and his bride but also the bride’s sister, Gail Fitzgerald, and he knew very soon that his life in Western Australia was about to come to an end. After a safe trip back west Arthur quickly sold up all of his machinery and equipment and bought a one-way plane ticket back to Melbourne.

MARRIED TO GAIL

The Fitzgerald family were not surprised to see Arthur back so soon and quickly found him a place to live and a job. Arthur moved in to board with the newly married couple in their house not far from the Springvale Railway Station and so there commenced for Arthur a very long association with that suburb. Gail’s father had recently become a contractor and asked Arthur if he could drive a grader to which Arthur replied, “of course”. Although he had never actually been on a grader before in his life his answer was not really untruthful because Arthur had so much confidence in his own ability he knew he would quickly master the skills required. And, indeed, that’s how it worked out.

Gail and Arthur were married at St Anthony’s in Noble Park in 1960 and moved to a dairy farm that Arthur had bought at Neerim. Part of the deal was that Arthur obtained the grazing rights for a considerable stretch of old railway line reserve but within a year the railways started selling the land to adjoining property owners. Arthur realised that his farm would be unviable so sold up and returned to Melbourne.

TO ROWVILLE

Gail and Arthur decided to look for a block of land and drove out one Sunday along Stud Road to inspect a new subdivision, the rather grandly named Ashbrooke Heights Estate (later to become generally known as the Seebeck Estate) at Rowville. They came upon a family having a picnic on their block at the back of the estate and stopped to talk and after a while agreed to buy the block for 150 pounds. They paid 50 pounds deposit with the balance to be paid off interest free whenever they could. They paid so regularly that the vendor offered them the blocks on either side for the same price and terms. Gail and Arthur bought a caravan and set it up at the back of the property and Arthur started to build their home.

Their friends were surprised and asked, “What are you going up to the bush for?” But Arthur and Gail were delighted with their decision: “For us it was paradise.”

They bought 10,000 bricks from a church that had burnt down in Glen Iris and set about transporting them to Rowville on an old tandem trailer pulled by an Austin 7. The poor little car took about five hours in low or second gear to make each trip to the Seebeck Estate but over five weekends it survived to see all the bricks successfully delivered. Then, of course, came the task of cleaning and laying them.

After returning from Gippsland Arthur had obtained a job with Mobile Cranes of Burwood and again he confidently taught himself the skills of crane driving. He eventually was appointed manager and stayed with the company for ten years. Not content just with the demands of his job and building his home Arthur established a piggery at the rear of his property with up to 15 breeding sows. The pigs ranged all over the area north of the estate as far as Wellington Road but all returned to their sties by nightfall.

Arthur decided to become a contract concreter and his services were soon strongly in demand. While constructing kerb and channels for the Springvale Council, his imaginative mind led him to set up a trailer equipped with a concrete mixer together with bins for sand, screenings, cement and water. As the trailer was towed along by an old Fergie tractor the concrete mix was fed out a chute from the side of the trailer into the form work.
The contractors working on the other side of the road were at first amused by Arthur’s invention but when they saw how well it worked they soon copied his idea. The contractors were two big, good natured, Italian men who later became very successful builders: Bruno and Rino Grollo.

Arthur worked for over 26 years on countless jobs for the Springvale Council. He recalled with a smile how informal arrangements were in the early days. On more than one occasion the council engineer would drop by while Arthur was busy on a contract and simply sketch the plan of the next job with a pen on the palm of Arthur’s hand.

THE ROWVILLE BOXING CLUB
As the Seebeck Estate grew in population Arthur became concerned that a lot of the local boys didn’t have enough to occupy their spare time and so he came up with the idea of organizing a youth club and found premises at Southern Reserve in Police Road near the Waverley Gardens Shopping Centre. He picked up the kids in a large van and drove them to and from the reserve and soon had the van filled to capacity on each trip.
Arthur had done a lot of boxing in Western Australia (where he’d fought under the name of Les Nazzari) so it was natural that boxing soon became the favoured activity of the club. When Gail insisted that their growing family needed another bedroom Arthur decided to build not one but two rooms onto the back of their house and to set up a gym in the space below the extension. And so the Rowville Boxing Club was born. It immediately became a focus for the local boys and unofficially became Rowville’s first drop in centre Arthur recalls one Friday night when he and Gail returned from a night out to find 19 boys curled up in sleeping bags around the house.
Arthur registered the Club with the Victorian Amateur Boxing Association and it quickly made its mark and has had at least one national champion in every year of its operation. In one memorable year 1984 Arthur drove a group of boys to the National Championships in Mareeba, Queensland and returned with four titles.
Over the years Arthur has become a leading figure in the administration of the sport and currently oversees the accreditation of trainers.

1st ROWVILLE CUBS
Apart from raising her own four children and providing meals and care for an endless stream of young visitors, Gail also found time to take on the role of cub leader (as did her daughter Erica). Their time with the cubs was a busy and happy one highlighted by a number of trips away in the family 15 seater.
Arthur and Gail are now grandparents but show no signs of reducing their open hearted commitment to the legion of friends they have made since coming to Rowville.

Interviewed by Bryan Power