Ep 112: Clem Furphy

Some people live one life. Clem Furphy seems to have lived several.

Born in 1943, Clem proudly describes himself as a war baby, not a boomer. In this conversation, he reflects on a life packed with adventure, creativity, community, farming and plenty of good stories.

From riding his bike to school through Melbourne traffic (no hands), studying civil engineering, and enjoying time at the iconic Prince Alfred Hotel, to travelling Europe with his wife Kate in a VW Kombi, Clem has always embraced life with curiosity and humour.

Eventually, he and Kate followed their dream of country and farm life. There, Clem built a mud-brick home with his own hands, immersed himself in the local community, and helped transform everyday locals into actors and touring performers.

This is a warm, funny, and thoughtful chat about changing times, country life, creativity, and making the most of every chapter.

And be sure to stay right until the end, where Kate treats us to a special tune on the piano.

Enjoy this conversation with Clem Furphy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to tell the story. Well, I could ride my bike or crossing interstations and along a train track the hallway to scrolling back now heads.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Well, if you're Australian, you've heard the name Furfee. Maybe it's the famous watercap built in Sheffield. Maybe it's the expression itself. Or perhaps you've come across the family connection to the classic Australian novel Such is Life. But today, we're meeting a Furfee who's got a few stories of his own. Glenn Furfey was born in 1943 and is quick to point out he's a war baby, not a boomer. From riding his bike to school, no hands, and in Melbourne, to studying civil engineering, spending plenty of time at the local, the Prince Alfred, writing theatre productions, touring Europe in a VW Combi with his wife Kate, and eventually swapping city life for the farm. Clem has packed plenty into more than eight decades. Along the way, he's built a mudbrick home with his own hands and helped turn country locals into actors and touring performers. And stick around till the end because Kate even treated us to a tune on the piano. He's thoughtful, entertaining, and full of stories. This is Clem Furfe. Good morning, Clem. Good morning, Dara. Thanks for having me, mate. I was just at your front door and I could see some very flat country. There were some crops coming up. There were lots of birds. And Bess was here to greet me. What do you see?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

In this very flat country, the fact that it's elevated up a meter off the ground at the front, you f you feel as if you're, you know, a lord of all your survey. King of the castle. Well, we've got a big garden, and uh, I guess you look from the house, you can look out to the garden, and then in another in another month we'll have some nice golden canola out there in the paddock beyond the garden.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yeah, fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

So whereabouts are we today, Clint?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Well, we're in uh what we call the Korop District. It's uh uh I think for the purposes of emergency services, it's Barambut. But uh Kurop's been the name of the district for uh many years, well, for since uh they started name the white settlement started naming the area. This particular locality was known in the old days as sand hills because of the Corop Lakes area has got these what they call lunettes, they're basically banks of uh silty clay that have blown out and form the depressions which fill with water periodically. And um the early people thought the these lunettes looked like sand hills. This immediate locality was known as sand hills, and so um but it wasn't sandy, it was quite clay. It's not sandy, it's silty clay and black self-bulching clay, very good for growing tomatoes on the on the flat country. The people up along the Coleman Aben Range where it's red um uh basaltic soil, you could always tell Coleman Abbin sheep at the sale yards because they were red from the from the dust up there. But and I think they used to look down on on us swamp dwellers uh as a lower form of life, but until they started growing tomatoes down here and it suddenly it was became pretty prized country. Fantastic. But it is a bit flood-prone.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

So would you say we're north of Bendigo, west of Shepperdon?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

If you look at the line between Bendigo and Shepperdon, we're about halfway on the Midland Highway.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

And how many acres are we on here, Clem?

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Well, the original selection was the the 640 acres. Uh we've since acquired another 300, so it's about 950 acres altogether. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

And your family have been here for how long?

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Uh it'll now be 157 years on the 24th of May.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Yeah. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yes. You got it down to the date. Well, yes, well, it's a date that's easy to remember because it was Queen Victoria's birthday, and everybody knew that, because that used to be Empire Day in the old days when we were kids. Was my great-grandfather and his wife Judith uh Samuel and Judith Furfee were the the ones who selected the property. They came here at that time. On horse and cart? Would have been, yes, a horse and dray, or I think there was probably two. There was a horse with a pulling a dray, and then a probably a gig as well. Uh well, Judith and Samuel, and I think at least two of their children, my grandfather and uh Annie, who was the one that wrote the letter that got the date wrong. But I think possibly an older brother Reuben, who died when he was about sixteen in an accident here. But um an older son, Isaac, had moved uh come earlier and and s uh he selected over between here and Rushworth. And then of course Joseph, who was the the famous writer Tom Collins, wrote Such His Life. He also selected land between here and Colburn Abbon. So uh again, John, the eldest son, stayed in Kyton for a little time but then moved across to Shepperton in 1870 and started the famous foundry where the Furfee water carts were made.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

And over my shoulder here, how old's this little homestead here?

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Well, that one was built, we think, in in 1888 by my grandfather when he got married. Uh my father left the farm. In fact, he left it to go off to fight the First World War and uh never really came back to live here. But we renovated it for them to come and live in in their twilight years. It's become now a very valuable uh guest house for for friends. Where did you grow up then, Clint? Well, I grew up in Melbourne. My my father, as I said, um uh went to the First World War. He came back and under the repatriation scheme, uh people who had matriculated, uh, he'd he'd done his his matriculation uh before he before he went off to enlist for the First World War. He was born in 1897, and he um went to Melbourne University and did a civil engineering and an arts degree, concurrently uh graduating in uh uh 1921 or 22.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Well, can I ask what year you were born?

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I was born in 1943, so my sister and I are both war babies, not boomers, you see, so you can't blame us. So I was um uh grew up in Melbourne in my parents' house, which was in North Caulfield in Melbourne.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

What was Melbourne like then?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

It was very different to what it is now. It's funny how you look at photographs of Melbourne in in the 1950s, and you know, I was there then, and uh I well I used to I went to a primary school which was about a mile or so from the house. I used to ride my bike down roads that you wouldn't dare put your kill children anywhere near now. And I could ride my bike crossing intersections and along a tram track the whole way to school and back, no hands. Really? Just to prove I could. Uh and what sort of student were you at school? I think I was a lazy one, basically. I at primary school I used to sort of come top of the class, and then as it got more and more necessary to actually work rather than you use your native cunning, I I tended to drop back a little bit in the field. Well, I'm not sure. Tell me what you went on to study after school, though. Well, I went to civil I did civil engineering myself. And that's no easy feat. Well, I didn't find it easy because it took me six years to get through a four-year course.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

I tried it for two years and pulled out and thought I'd come back and do it, and I'd never have.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

I studied um engineering and also a lot of extracurricular stuff, mainly involving more amateur theatre and and choirs and Melbourne University Choral Society, particularly. And I spent a fair bit of time at the Prince Alfred Hotel. Um I had a lot of fun at the university, and I think the professors, Professor Francis and Professor Morehouse, appreciated engineering students who were regarded as being not particularly interesting people. They appreciated any that took some interest in the arts and other things other than uh mathematics and uh building things. And I think I got a bit of a bit of a push-up in the end to say, well, you're president of the Melbourne University Coral Society, that's got to be worth something. Wow. And uh so they either that or they got sick of me round the place after six years.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Right. Well, you said uh you mentioned the Prince Alfred. What were you doing there? Entertaining or socializing?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Oh, socialising, most definitely, yes, yes. It was uh our local sort of watering hole, you know, uh over the road in Grattan Street from the engineering school. What would you have paid for a beer then? Well, we got very cross when it went up from ten pence to eleven pence. Uh that's uh less than ten cents. And we occasionally would change from drinking. We used to drink seven-ounce glasses then. Pots were ten ounces, they're what we now call a pot, you know, that's about the smallest you can get in a pub these days is a pot. And they were they were actually slightly cheaper per ounce than glasses, but we always liked drinking glasses. I uh they seemed a nice size, really. The beer was still cold at the bottom as well as the top, certainly the way we drank it, yeah. It was a great life, wonderful time. And in fact, my cohort of engineering students, friends, you know, that I went through with it, graduated with, because I had three cohorts, of course, because I slipped back there. But the but the my graduating cohort, we still meet and have done every year since graduation. You're serious. Yeah, we have a we used to be a dinner now. We're getting a bit elderly, it's a lunch. And every year we haven't missed a year since how many of you? Oh, well, I s there were 70 in the year, but there's about um in civil engineering, but there were about uh I think there's been regularly 25 to 30 come to the we've probably got about 40 odd still on the list. Some have disappeared or fallen off the perch.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

But um that's amazing. So you had six years studying, socializing, and you're in the arts, or you or you're on stage?

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Well, uh I I used to direct the engineers review for a couple of years and uh was was in it for a couple more. And of course, one of the things I boast about now is that I gave David Williamson his start because he used to write the scripts for them, uh, because he was an engineering student at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

David Williamson?

SPEAKER_00 10:48

Yeah, the the playwright, yeah. And he um and he used to write scripts for the for the review, which he probably wouldn't admit to these days because the but he he was extraordinary. We could say lofty, we used to call him, he was very tall, and we used to um go around to his flat and say, Right, Lofty, we need some scripts, and and we'd have a dozen long necks with us. And he'd said that he could churn them out. He used to write the write the scripts in rhyming couplets, and there were there were spoofs on uh, you know, the pol political spoofs and things like this. Very clever scripts. So the engineer's review was my theatrical entertainment then, and then uh the Melbourne University Coral Society. And the the good thing about the Melbourne University Coral Society was there were lots and lots of girls, and their mums were quite sure that it was perfectly safe to send their daughters you know to a coral society. What could possibly go wrong? And so um And did anything go wrong? Yeah well I that's where I met Kate and uh your wife and we've got a group of friends that we still meet with regularly, they're all Melbourne University Coral Society partnerships, yeah. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

So uh after study and university, you got a job. What was that doing?

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Kate and I married in the January after I finished my course in January 68, and we got straight on a ship and went over to England where I got a job with a consulting firm in London and worked there for designing sewage treatment plants for a year, and then we bought ourselves a VW Combi van camper, and we went went uh on the grand tour for about four and a half months in our all over Europe, you know, down to the bottom of Spain and across to Istanbul and right up into Scandinavia living in our in our little camper van.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

And VW Combi, what year was that?

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Oh heavens, well it was it was a secondhand thing when we bought it, so it must have been a uh it was the one with the split windscreen, so it was quite old. Well, in fact, we sold it for £100 before we came back to Australia. And I was a couple of years ago, I was over at Marupna filling the car at a service station and a more slightly more modern one, but with the same with the lift-up roof, and uh it pulled in. And I just mentioned to the fellow filling it, uh, I said, I used to have one of those years ago. And he said, Oh, you can have this one for $80,000.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Well, actually, Clem, talking about Volkswagens, uh, when I was 12 years old, I bought a VW Beetle, and it was too good to belt around the paddock, so I bought actually two more after that. But that first 69 VW Beetle, I'm 53, and I've still got it today. Really?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

And I've got it registered on the road, and it's my weekend car, and I love it.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

You should never sell a car because my my my first car when I was 15, living in Caulfield, I couldn't drive it except up and down the lane beside the house. But Judy, my sister, could drive it, but once she got uh got her license, uh was a 1929 Austin 7 Tourer. Beautiful little thing. Once I got my license, I used to drive it into university. I'd park it in Parkville and take the rotor arm out of the distributor because it didn't have an ignition switch. So I could had to immobilize it. And I can remember again talking about the traffic in those days, even in the 60s, we're talking. It had a three-speed crash gearbox, and I learned to drive it without using the clutch just by matching the revs and the next gear. Starting from a standstill was a little bit of a problem, but because it was a tour, I could reach out and grab the spokes of the back wheel, give them a little heave to get it rolling and clunk into first gear, and away I'd go. And I could drive one, I can remember on occasions driving it all the way from Caulfield to Melbourne University without the clutch just to prove I could do it.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

You're a daredevil. You were riding your bike with no hands to school at what age? Eight or something. Oh, eight or ten, yeah. And then the car no clutch, fantastic. Your surname, Clem, Furfe, it's a pretty famous name.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yes, well, it's been made famous, I suppose, but there's well, three reasons. Now, the first reason, I'm sure, was the the Furfey watercart, and that's where the name got into the language. In 1880, they started making watercarts. Yeah, born 1880, still going strong. Well, the cast iron-ended ones, uh well, they're still going strong in the sense that every now and again uh they make another collector's item. And I think there's such collector's items now that every now and again the foundry says, let's make an another group of 50 or something. And in fact, they made one to celebrate their 150th, and they had a big event in it, Shepperton, and auctioned off six of them as a fundraiser. And I think one of them was knocked down to $50,000. But I mean, that was a donation. It was a the other ones would have sold for a lot less than that. But you go to a clearing sale now, and an ordinary run-of-the-mill Furfee watercart inn will sell for $2,000.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

My dad's got a couple of your water carts and uh they're all done up and looking very nice. Um, but this would have been like a great uncle or a great-great-uncle.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Great-uncle, yeah, my my my grandfather's older brother.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

And they started building water carts during a drought in the 1880s in Sheppard?

SPEAKER_00 16:20

I'm not sure whether it was caused by a drought or my father always speculated that um it was never patented. John Furfee is um generally regarded as having invented the water cart, cast iron ends with a uh sheet metal barrel, and the ends, uh the barrel is fixed round the ends using a wheelwrights technique of uh uh heating up a ring like the wheelwrights used to do, and then putting it over and it as it cooled down, it shrunk and sealed the ends. But there are various other copies of it uh around the Riverina that happened subsequently. And in fact, the uh one of the furfeys, as they call it now, the rumour that's around is that they were at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. In fact, there were furfeys there, but um a little bit like people refer to a vacuum cleaner as a Hoover.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

There were furfeys.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Is that where that came from? Well, uh the uh that they're not the furfey water cart was known as furfees, but but they the ones that were built that went overseas were made by H. V. McKay, I believe, but on the same design.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

But that was a furfee.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Yeah. Well, it was a furfey that furfeys went there. But then then, of course, the the actual word furfee in the language, meaning a rumour, was generally regarded as because the actual Furfee water carts used to uh be at the Broad Meadows uh recruitment camp, the training camp outside Melbourne, uh, but they didn't ever go overseas. But the the story was that the troops who didn't know what was going on in the outside world or with the war, the the water cart drivers would come in and they would probably have all this, you know, the latest information. Some of it was probably not not as accurate as others. And so uh an unfounded rumor was a furfey. And that's a classic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

So that's two reasons you were the first one.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Well, that then, of course, there was Tom Collins or or Joseph Furfe, John's brother, who was um uh uh had a a selection near here when at the same time in the 18 uh the 1860s. It failed um for various reasons, probably drought, flood, and possibly a bit of mismanagement. He ended up losing the property and became a bullocky up in working out of hay in the riverina and worked doing that for some time and until he all all the bullocks died from in a drought, or I think there was plural pneumonia or something that and so he finally ended up working for his older brother John at the at the foundry in in Shepperton. And uh while he was working there, he wrote his famous book, Such is Life, which um is still regarded as one of the great classics of Australian literature, but it's a bloody hard read. Oh well, it's basically uh stories about Tom Collins, his yeah, who's a non-deplume, traveling uh uh uh r around in the river and and he's his encounters with bullock drivers and events that happened. And it's uh it's there's some fascinating little stories all through it, anecdotes about things that things that happened to him and adventures that he had, but it's interspersed with a lot of deep philosophy and it's uh it's fairly hard work to read. The third reason it's famous, you'll see that picture recreated on the neck of a bottle of furfey beer. And furfey beer is made by Little Creatures Brewery at Geelong. Yeah, but the the the stainless ear uh tanks that they use at the uh brewery are made at the Furfee Works in Shepperton. And the story is that the Little Creatures man had an invoice lying on his desk with furfee on it, and he thought that'd be a good name for an iconic Australian beer. Uh, you know, and they made the thing all in Australian barley, uh Victorian barley, Victorian water, Victorian hops, yeah. Purely a Victorian product.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

So then you came back from Europe?

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Came back from Europe and joined my father's consulting engineering firm, Scott and Furfey, that had started in um 1933. After uh dad came back from the war, did an engineering degree, and then he um got a job with the public service. Uh, I think he was with the railways at one stage, and then uh but raised pretty quickly in the Commonwealth Department of Public Health to director of the Commonwealth Department of Public Health, but found over the depression, in that period 29 to the 30s, he um basically found he had an important job with no budget, you know, and you know, no point really. So he resigned and went off overseas. He thought I'll I'll further my interest in particular in sanitary engineering sewage treatment. He worked for a period of time in in London, uh, designed the Dagenham sewage treatment plant, which is a major sewage treatment plant at serving London. And then he he went to Germany. In fact, he told a story about how he was staying in a uh boarding house in Heidelberg, where he'd been doing a bit of study at the Heidelberg University, proving his German. And one of the other uh boarders said, Why don't you come with me to a political meeting, Adolf Hitler speaking? Dad sort of, Well, why would you want to hear who the hell is Adolf Hitler, you know? So that was a great opportunity, miss. You could have said, I heard him. So it's uh it's a little bit like it when I was living in Canberra at one stage. I was only about a ten minute ten minutes from the the front steps of Parliament House when Gough Whitler made his famous speech when he was sacked in 75. So great opportunities missed. But anyway, so so Dad then he'd come he came back from Germany and he was out at without a job, there wasn't much work around, you know, come just coming out of the depression. And Ronald Scott had just been retrenched as city engineer of Melbourne with a golden handshake, again, because they were everyone was pulling in their horns and there was no money. So they sort of met each other and sort of both they were in the same situation. And so after a few long conversations, they decided that they'd put their shingle up and uh form, make a partnership and become consulting engineers. Ronald Scott had all the contacts in uh local government and this sort of thing, and dad had the particular specialist skill. You couldn't advertise in those days. They put up their shingle on the door in a in a room in Collin Street, and Scott and Furfe consulting engineers and sat and talked to each other, and their total income in their first year was nine guineas. Guineas, guineas. For the year. For the year, yes. So they basically lived off Ronald Scott's golden handshack, I think, which is about a year's salary. Yeah. And then gradually the firm built up and it got more and more work. I think their very first job was the Ararat Hospital, a sewage treatment plant for the Ararat Hospital, which they call job 33. They thought it was probably not a good idea to call it job number one for the number two.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

See, when you came back from England, then you were working for your team.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Yeah, I worked for them. By that stage they were a big prosperous firm. They'd gradually built up uh then the Second World War came along and disrupted again. Dan Dan re-enlisted, but he didn't serve overseas. He'd been badly wounded in the First World War and uh he uh worked basically at Albert Park Barracks. Tom Leary used to say the army refuses to discriminate on the grounds of race, creed, or ability. And and so he was in the electrical and mechanical engineers. That was his his position.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

And then he got sent to England, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Yeah, well he was repatriated back to England. He was wounded first of all at Bulla Corps, the Battle of Bulla Corps, and then that was a slight wound, and then he was put back at the front and he was badly wounded at the Battle of Menon Road, and was invalided back to to London, and he spent the best part of six months in hospital before he was he he he came back. Um well it would have been uh uh 1918, I suppose. He crossed the inter by ship crossed the international dateline and almost missed his birthday, his 21st birthday, because they'd sort of lost the day crossing.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Did he talk much about it?

SPEAKER_00 25:06

No, not much at all. No. He uh not that we quizzed him much. I guess he didn't talk about it. He he he didn't he didn't march in the Anzac march because he didn't approve the RSL. He thought they were too political, but he religiously went to his annual reunion of his olds and bolds, as he called them, you know, the his uh the people who'd been in his 5th battalion, and uh they used to meet on Anzac Eve in the lower Melbourne Town Hall. They didn't I don't think he had any PTSD, I think it wasn't even known, you know. I suppose the worst cases were known as shell shock in those days, but he um he seemed to manage pretty well. His younger brother Charlie, uh, who stayed on the farm when he'd uh kept the farm going when Dad went off to war and then to engineering, Charlie ended up with three and a half years in Changy, so I think he he suffered a lot more as an aftermath of the war.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Yeah. So Clem, at this point, you had worked for a while with your father, civil engineering, you married Kate, and you were living in Melbourne. Yeah, living in Melbourne in Hawthorne. And at some point you were drawn back to the land.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

That to me was uh I guess the classic midlife crisis when I I turned 40, a lot of men have either got to change their job or their wife. I was rather fond of my wife, so we're good. I'm glad you've kept it. So the thing about the farm was that it it was was sitting here, Charlie, Uncle Charlie had uh had been um uh running the farm, but he'd really after he came back from the the Second World War, he his heart wasn't really in it. I mean he was interested in it, but he always had you know a married couple living here and you know and doing a lot of the a lot of the work and uh he ended up you know buying a place down at Mount Evelyn as a sort of a getaway. It had a lovely big garden there, and and he had chair farmers doing things, and generally the farm had fallen into disrepair. When dad retired in 1970s, he actually bought the farm from Charlie. So the place was falling into a bit of um a bit of a bad state, but it was sitting here, and I just decided at the age of 40, well, I've still got some petrol in the tank, now would be the time, was also to some extent triggered by the fact that I I mean I'd been with the firm at that stage for 15 years and I was offered a partnership in it because I, you know, dad didn't believe in nepotism or he didn't, he thought, now I've got to make my own way. Um and so w when he took in partners back in the 50s, I'm pretty sure he just said, come and join us. But by the time I got there, it was a much bigger organization, a company, and if I wanted to buy in, it was like buying another house, you know, it was a lot of money to become a partner and start enjoying the profits, if any. And so I I thought, well, now's probably if I'm going to make the decision to make the break, now's the time to do it, you know, while while um uh before I make that that big commitment, which is basically golden handcuffs for the next 25 years. That's right. And so we uh pulled the pin and and came up here and I we rented this place from my father for a couple of years and and let out our house in Hawthorne. It's interesting. When we bought the house in 1969, we paid $18,000 for it. When we sold it in 1986, we sold it for $230,000. It's now worth about three million. Sailor V. So you came up here. Came up here and and uh and started farming. Basically, virtually there was virtually nothing here except an old Fordson tractor and uh an old truck that didn't go. And um, what am I gonna do? You know, in the end I bought the basics, bought an old tractor, bought an old seed drill, ended up even bought an old PTO header, and I started cropping, and I'd bought bought some merino weathers, and we gradually got going. But I pretty quickly realized that particularly as I had at that stage I had two of my children were at at reach secondary level, and we'd put them at into uh Girton College in in Bendigo private school, because we sort of thought we wanted to follow that model. And I pretty quickly realized, you know, this is a joke, you know, there's no way I'm going to be able to survive, particularly until I really get things going. And I got a phone call from a consulting engineer in Shepperton out of the blue, and he introduced himself and said um who he was. And he said, I believe I've heard that you've moved up to the Goldman Valley. I've decided to become a farmer. And he said, Would you like to come and work for me? And I said, No, I've turned my back on that. He said, Look, I'm in a bit of strife here. I desperately need some help. You know, I've got a client that's not happy and I've got to you know work things out. Can you come and work for me for just two or three weeks? I thought, oh yeah, maybe, you know. And anyway, I did that, and um, and then we he talked about, you know, can we keep something going here? And I I said, well, I'm primarily a farmer, you know, when I've got shearing or crutching or sowing or harvesting or whatever else, the farm takes priority. But uh, on that basis, I'm happy to come and work in your office for you on an hourly basis where I can, which was my salvation, there's no question. And in fact, I did that for the next 15 years. Did you really? Yeah, and then even after that, I'd worked for a couple of other consultants just on it, and briefly for Golden Valley Water as well, uh, part-time, and it was a very satisfactory arrangement.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

But But this helped the kids through private school.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Yeah, and and there were four of them, and um fortunately two of them blessed me with scholarships, but uh it was still a uh uh you know quite a kept me very poor for a long time, yeah. Uh then I reached a point with the farming where the things the models were changing, you know, bulk handling was becoming the only way to go. You know, I would sow my crops, I'd get the wheat graded, I'd bag it, I'd have it in the in the shed until I needed it, I'd have bags of wheat and bags of superphosphate, then it was DAP on the on the truck, and I'd back up to the combine and wheel it across on a trolley. It was all manual handling, and uh, which I was strong enough to do in those days, but then got to the point where you you couldn't buy superphosphate in that form. You had to buy it in bulk of bags or bigger bulk. So I thought it's time that I really rethought all this, you know. Am I going to now go uh bulk handling, which means getting a better truck, getting a grouper to uh handle the the bulk fertilizer and the bulk grain, basically upgrade everything. Or am I going to say now's a good time to um call in the contractors? I started off first of all you giving up the old PDO header, you know, 12-foot front, and getting in the professionals who were, you know, with all then they were 30 foot, they're now 40-foot fronts. You know, what pay uh harvesting that paddock out there would take me about a week. They do it in two or three hours, you know, and you think, well, apart from you know, you had to pay for it, but you eliminated the risk of you know getting a two inches of rain between when you started and when you finished and losing the lot.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

That's right, I couldn't do the whole season.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

And fortunately, my uh good neighbor, his son, was just getting going and he came to me and said, Would you like to share a farm with me? And I said, I think now's the time, yes. I was running up to 1300 merino sheep as well.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

For wool?

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Yeah, for wool, and I'd done a wool classing course, and uh then again I decided, you know, would I keep that going, you know, or would it now is a good time to say, look, I'm in well at the 60s now, why don't I um start to take it a bit easier?

SPEAKER_01 33:24

So you gave the sheep up too and then gave the sheep up, yeah. And then started to shear farm. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 33:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Did you have your own shearing shed here?

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Yeah, I've got I've got a just a two two-stand shed over there, which I was pretty dilapidated. I fixed that up.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

So you would bring shearers in for a few weeks.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that that was an issue in itself, and that getting shearers was a bit difficult, particularly shearers who who were happy to shear big woolly merinos when they could shear crossbreds who were smaller and lighter and easier to shear. And I ended up finding the best time to shear was February, March, which meant they were full wool right through the summer, which made it a nightmare for fly strike. Yeah, and also hot for the shearers. Yes, yeah. Well, we didn't care about the shearers, but that was their problem. I had a little evaporative cooler blowing on them.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah, and a few long necks at the end of the day. Yes, absolutely, yes. Was there any hidden pressure on like this would have been perhaps a third or fourth generation farm by then? Yes, um Was there any hidden pressure on making that work?

SPEAKER_00 34:30

I don't think so because, well, uh, I mean, there was no one left. My uncle, my uh my uncle died in what '88, my mother died in '87, dad died in '91. So, you know, the family pressure. I had I had uh a good example of good farming practice from my sister, of course, but she would never sort of look at what I was doing and said, you you should be doing this better. She'd made and my eldest daughter would really rather I got got rid of everything on the farm and turn it into a nature reserve. Uh she's a bit of a She's a bit like her auntie, is she?

SPEAKER_01 35:08

So this is Judy you're talking about. And um, for our listeners, if they'd like to go back to last year's episodes, there's two fantastic episodes with Clem's sister Judy doing extraordinary things just north of Aubrey. Uh Clem, tell me about the irrigation side of the farm here. Was it already in place or did you have it?

SPEAKER_00 35:28

Yes, it was in place. Yeah. It wasn't the farm wasn't really, it was available, the farm wasn't really properly laid out, and I did quite a lot of laser, laser work and laying paddocks out in bays for flood irrigation, which was the way most people were irrigating in those days. Actually, when the environmental buyback came in, I decided at that stage really I'd be better to take the money and run, which was another bad decision on my part because it's worth twice as much now as it was. There were various changes came at at the time that there was the buyback, and they brought in water trading, which really changed everything. Back in the day, you had you had a water right on the farm and and you basically paid for that water right, whether you used the water or not. If you didn't use it, bad luck, you know, uh you couldn't do anything with it. And of course, one of the effects of that, and I always attribute the the fact that Lake Cooper, which is we now believe to be very much an ephemeral lake, uh uh stayed um full for 57 years. And it was because I I believe, uh don't know if I'm right or not, but all through that period there was no incentive for farmers to conserve water. Uh, if they had a big water right and they didn't need it all, well, why get up at two in the morning to shift the water when you could just let it run out into the table drain and shift it in the morning? And so the whole area was much wetter than it is now. And then once they brought in water trading where you could sell the water you didn't want, then there was a great incentive to conserve it. And so that's been a good thing. Uh, it's probably, and some other people say it's been a bad thing in that when we first moved here, you could drive from here to Shepperton up the Midland Highway, and it was in the middle of summer, it was green all the way. All these little dairy farms all flood irrigating their their land. And then they brought in water trading and selling off water on the to uh the buyback water, other other people could buy your water. A lot of the dairy, small dairy farms, often I think their kids didn't want to take on the dairy, it's hard work. They'd sell off their water, that's their super fund, and uh just run a few dryland cattle and sort of see out their retirement years.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

So was this in that era when you you know, if you're into dairy, you either stayed in and got a lot bigger or you got out.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Yep, yep, that's right. You know, people used to make a living out of milking a hundred cows, you know. Now there's dairies out there that are milk milking 1,500 cows, you know. And three times a day, some of them.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

That's right. And going back to Lake Cooper, is it ephemeral now?

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Yes, it's nearly empty. It's drying up. It was it filled up in the big flood of October 22. Yes. And it's nearly drying, it's nearly drying out now again. And uh it dried out the first time in my memory, because uh it was dry in 1946, and then it it dried out again um in 2003, and we thought this is uh once had a lifetime event, fantastic. And we put up a big marquee, this is our corrupt community group that I'm involved in, put up a big marquee in the middle of the lake and had a big lunch on the lake, uh 250 people. It was a big event, you know. We buried a time capsule and we said this will never happen again. And and blame me down, it stayed dry for seven years, and uh and everyone was cursing it. Corrupt was disappearing under a dust storm, and and along the eastern side, you could see how the lunettes were developed because the community group had built a walking track round the east side and picnic tables and fences, and and uh the whole lot disappeared under a a a meter of built-up of of silt just planned out of the bed of the lake.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Is this because we didn't have ground cover and the wind would take it?

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Yeah, it was just a bare big uh clay bottom. We had a nice golf tournament there before uh before the and then the the wind started to you know when it really dried out. I suppose the only benefit was that it blew all the salt out as well on adjoining land. And then it filled up again in 2010, I think, and then was dry again pretty quickly. And it's but at the moment it's uh uh it's a lovely um video going around with about um or eight or ten Brolgers dancing on the edge. The water birds just love it because as it proceeds, it must be an absolute picnic for the water birds. Um Stewart's Lake to the south of us. Last year, we I think the biggest count was 52 Broglers. Broglers? Yeah, yeah. It's a real Brolga headquarters here. Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 40:09

Yeah, I'd love to see that.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Now tell me about this house that you've built here. It's a mud brick house?

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Mudbrick house, yes. When we decided to move to the farm in uh 1984 was when we moved up here. That says there was the old cottage which was derelict and our white hands got through the floor and it was bad in a bad way.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

You built this yourself?

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Oh well, I was the builder. There was a local Coleman Avan builder who was a fantastic tradesman, and he thoroughly disapproved of mud brick houses because he thought they were not neat enough. And uh, and uh, but we'd we were it's that era of the 70s, 80s, that was that was pretty much the thing to do, you know. The the uh elf and mud brick movement was uh big and everyone liked the idea of a mud brick house. I don't know if I was doing it again now, I would, because you know, they do have their inherent problems, not the least of which they're very porous when it comes to mice and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

Right. Clint, what was the township of corrupt like, you know, back in your early days?

SPEAKER_00 41:11

Well, i in my early days it was pretty much gone, you know. It was um back in in its heyday, which would be a hundred years ago, more more than that, you know, back when my great-grandparents were here at the turn of the century, 120 years ago, it was quite a big town. They had um, you know, half a dozen pubs and half a dozen churches and uh that public library, and um, you know, it was quite a quite a place, and Colbin Avon barely existed. Then in the 1920s, they brought the railway line through from Rushworth to Colbin Avon, and that basically killed Karop and Colbin Abbon moved from up on the hill where it really was percentered, down onto the flat to the railhead because they couldn't take the train up over the hill.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

So, what sort of local events would they have had back in those early days?

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Well, at Colbin Abbon they used to have a uh a Colbin Abbon picnic. At Karop, they um well, they used to have uh uh when Lake Cooper was full of water, they'd have uh yachting and speedboat races and things. And this is well before my time. There's a lake, an ephemeral lake, uh just to the northeast of Corop, a circular lake. You know, and it's another one of these wind-blown lakes with the lunette around it. And they call it the Race Course Lake because it's you know you know had a lunette here, the grandstand, and a perfect circuit for horses to race around. And they used to have race meetings there, apparently. I well before I I was here.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

But I believe you're involved in lots of community projects.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

Yeah, yes. Well, I've been uh civic engagement, I suppose you'd call it, was uh uh something I seem to have made a bit of a habit of. I don't know um I'm whether I'm just one of these sad cases who can't say no or something, but uh it's it's I suppose a little bit of a case of being a well, perhaps you could say a big fish in a small pond. If you've got certain abilities, you're in demand, you know. And I I came up from Melbourne having been six years on the school council of the Auburn primary school near where we lived in Hawthorne. Came up here, and our two younger children were then at Colburn Abbon Primary School. So I was on the school council, and that sort of involved me in that. And there was a movement to build an aged care hostel in Rushworth. I was attending a meeting of the Waranga Water Board, which's uh wearing a little bit of my engineering hat, and um talked to one of the fellows who was on the um planning committee, I suppose, uh, of of the looking at the possibilities of building an aged care hostel. And I foolishly said, Oh, my they were looking for people to join, and I said I might be able to help there, and of course they grabbed you with open arms, and the next thing I knew I was president of it. um and then we had the challenge well what do you do now you that we could build a an aged care hostel in rushworth if we could raise half a million dollars so I I had to lead a campaign to raise half a million dollars which we did despite everyone saying cut not possible we did it we got the money and we built the hostel and so I found myself on the board of gol of Golden Valley Health in um 96 and then I became chair of the board in 2001 was chair for 10 years which was the by far the longest time hospital boards also and water boards the same started to become more and more political I I was completely apolitical or not not of any consequence anyway and and so uh I stayed on there till second nine year period had expired and so I was actually on the board for 15 years and chair for 10 yeah so it was a a fascinating time uh during which there was tremendous expansion. I think when I started from memory it was it was about a 60 million a year business and when I finished it was about a hundred and eighty million a year. And it's now very much more than that. Because I finished in 2011. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

You're a mover and a shaker Clem and life was always very busy and it seems to be still very busy now isn't it? Your days are pretty hectic.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Oh well well yeah we make it hectic for ourselves like yesterday we'd like to go down to Melbourne to the Nova cinema where they have metropolitan opera films films of actual stage productions and that's fabulous you know it's it's like being not just at a front row in the opera but actually on stage with them. It's if you're into opera it's just magic. So we went down to Melbourne yesterday to to to go to the Nova theatre at 11 o'clock and then um I was very much involved for years with uh the Yuka now Moama Theatre Company in doing musical theatre that one of my great loves and they were having their final dress rehearsal for their show which is opening tonight uh the Rocky Horror Show and so Kate and I because we're life members up there they said come to the dress rehearsal because we can't can't go to the actual performances because we're going to bendigo for the weekend for the Beethoven festival. And uh and so we went up to that so it was a case of left left Carlton you know at a bit half past three and drove straight to a chuca to the to the show so um we I guess we're gluttons for punishment. Yeah you were busy and both yourself and Kate your dear wife uh loved music yes yeah we met in the choir of course and uh Kate's a good pianist you know and over the years she's played piano a lot around the district so anyway I was at the Colbo pub one night I don't know how it came up but I was talking to the then president of the footy club and I must have mentioned that I'd been in a been in a this show Dimbula you know and oh yeah and told him a bit about it I must have had one too many pots I think because I said in fact when I look at Colbin Emin all the characters are here you know which wasn't very discreet when I think about it because some of them weren't particularly admirable but anyway he said uh you just laughed and then about a couple of weeks later I got a phone call saying we've talked about it on the committee we want you to put it on here you see using some of the local characters absolutely I I just put an ad in the paper and I said I'm I'm looking for actors to be in a play and they came out of the woodwork and I could cast it I could see see each character in real people and you directed it I directed it and played the same part in it as well unearthed some real talent and and uh it went it it caused a storm in the town they you know they were hanging from the rafters we did two performances in Colbo and then we went to Rushworth and Murchison and really and went on tour.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

But for a lot of these people it was their first time on stage.

SPEAKER_00 48:05

First time on stage never done anything before like that.

SPEAKER_01 48:07

Any of them going with it?

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Oh yeah well we started then we we formed the Geberup players and so we went on for about 20 years putting on annual shows and we that the model we did we'd put on a show uh and we'd say to local groups if you want this as a fundraiser all you've got to pay us is our production costs and the performing rights was generally about $400 and you can do with it what you like. You can put on a meal and sell tickets for $50 or you can tell people to bring it bring their own and charge them 10 bucks. You know as long as we get our cover our costs.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Does Kate still jump on the piano?

SPEAKER_00 48:44

Yes it's all the way through she's been the accompanist and you know we did some amazing shows up at a truca and I suppose the highlight for me was Les Miserables which was a big deal and uh I've hung up my dancing shoes completely now I've close enough. And Clint there's some grape vines growing close by what's this all about the wine that you make where's that where do those grapes come from they come from our vineyard which is just down past the shearing sheet it's only an acre and we make the wine here but we're slowing down the trouble is the next generation don't drink as much of we're fat. It's a bit a bit of a disgrace really and and well I've got a cellar room there that's chocolate block.

SPEAKER_01 49:25

Gee Clem I should have come here at about five o'clock tonight rather than midday.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

Well we could keep this going I suppose you've got to get somewhere else though haven't you yes yes and and Clem I believe you have an OAM is that right yes I do yes congratulations well thank you it's um as I said before if you've got certain skills then you you can be useful in a committee but and I probably have because I've been in that world a fair bit but it it it the the thing that I learned early in the piece is get the job of president the secretaries and the treasurers do all the work and I get the pres I get the credit you see. That's right. And I think the IM's got a bit of that about it you know the services to health and the community and an awful lot of it has been me me heading up a fantastic team of people and I get I get the gong and they they get don't get recognized at all but uh there's a lot of time and commitment you've put into it and hard work so um I think it's well deserved a lot of fun too yeah now as I said earlier I had the privilege of recording two episodes with your older sister. Yes. And I want to know did you ever annoy her when she was you were growing up probably yes I think we get on pretty well I mean certainly we do now I don't remember well I suppose as little kids we probably had our punch ups but we're no we've always got on well together.

SPEAKER_01 50:48

Yeah what's one thing people might be surprised to learn about you Clint surprised to learn about me that I'm still alive perhaps well surprised to hear that you're you're making wine still and enjoying it. Well that's the secret to a long life perhaps I don't know and a long marriage what's the secret there?

SPEAKER_00 51:08

Oh you married the right woman in the first place I think yeah Kate and I we hit it off. How many years? Uh what are we up to at 66 it must be 58 years now. Well done going strong the first kiss on the beach at Talabudra up in Queensland is an intervarsity choral festival.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

Uh if you had to pick one memory that sums up your life on the land what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 51:31

Oh the the um I think oh there's so many memories it's hard to pick up pick up one I I guess one of the things I suppose that makes living not so much on the land but in rural areas is the the sense of community which don't you don't really have to the same extent uh in the big smoke. Do you want to want to stop here's your dear wife now hello Katie just been hearing about you actually so I just mentioned our first kiss I'm sorry was that was that was that the right thing to do I'd love to hear you on the piano it sounds like you've quite talented would you play 20 seconds for me now?

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Oh Clem, we're up to the off the wall questions. These are a little bit fun a little bit quirky. If your sheep could talk when you were here farming wool sheep what do you think they'd say about you, Clem.

SPEAKER_00 52:33

Oh I think they'd think I was a lovely man yes except that I uh sometimes left them a bit too long but without without checking that for fly strike. And left the wool on during those 40 degrees of course wool acts as an insulator too you know that keeps them cool as well as warm.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

If there was a musical about your life on the farm what would be the opening number oh goodness me.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Well we're singing out our little choir of songs from the shows and one of them is from Oklahoma the farmer and the cowman should be friends so that's it seems appropriate that's it'll do have you ever used an old tractor in a way that it was absolutely not meant to be used I've got to be careful here because there's OH and S issues but the kids absolutely the grandkids love riding in the bucket of the loader what's one local committee you absolutely loved? Local committee well I suppose the Golden Valley Board was the most challenging and interesting but the local committees I guess the corrupt community group in its heyday it's in a bit dormant at the moment but in its heyday it was very good fun.

SPEAKER_01 53:47

Beautiful Kate well done thank you and if your life to date was a country song what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 53:54

I'm not much into country and rest in music. I know a lot of people think they're the only two types of music but what sort of song then in operatic aria would be more my style I've always if I'd had my druthers I would have been an opera singer but I didn't have my druthers and it's probably just as well because there's a lot of opera singers out of work.

SPEAKER_01 54:16

And Clem, one final question if you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?

SPEAKER_00 54:21

Oh anywhere in the world goodness I think probably one of the most exciting places to be when we lived there was London but I don't think I'd want to live in London now. So I reckon Sandhill's co-op's about as good as it gets.

SPEAKER_01 54:35

Here we are fantastic. Yeah well Clem, I've learned stacks about you this morning you've you've led a fascinating life you're you're a hard worker you're very clever and I really appreciate your time in this chat.

SPEAKER_00 54:48

Well thank you for uh involving me it's uh it'll be interesting to hear what comes out of it.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

Thanks Clem.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 55:00

What a life and what a storyteller. Clem Furfey has packed more into eight decades than most of us could imagine. And yes he's changed it all with touch warmth humour and humility a huge thank you to Clem for joining us and to Kate for the beautiful tuning. Until next time keep your hands dirty and your spirit