What a privilege's it has been for me , as the city born and bred visitor , to get to know some of those tough wonderful people through spending many lovely warm evenings around the piano with them .
Jean Towers and Syd Young were amongst 10 or so people on the ridge who loved to get together to sing each week . Making your own music and fun was a tradition encouraged by the isolation ,sparse resources and the many preaching places ( Chapple vale in photo ) set up by that extraordinaire teacher Rev John Flynn.
Even if you wanted to , you couldn't go out every week and play footy in the mud and mist.
What you could do is sit around the fire and sing and tell stories. The church at Barongrook has a fireplace
Anyone who has stopped to hear Paddy O Connor recite poetry at Tanybryn hall, race the horses on the foreshore or heard Russell Holloway sing and story his way around the dance hall will know why we now miss them all so much.
Which of us , with our vivid imaginations from watching eons of TV , would envisage these people in constant lockdown. In the mist and dripping rain Cliff and Syd Young would compete to see how many times they could cling under and around around the kitchen table -- without touching the floor.
In those rare days when it wasn't wet, Syd and Cliff would compete to be the first to finish the row when bagging potatoes . And those two have been known to compete to load the truck by hand at the end of the day .
What characters these people were to get to know
Let me remind you that you don't get the warm fire ,the music , the cream cakes and scones at half time...... at the football .
I could go on , but maybe you might like to add some more stories of these great characters. .
Rev John Flynn , who started work as a teacher at Beech Forrest , became a great companion to many in the bush ; wrote the extraordinary little book " Bushman's Companion " and went on to set up the Royal Flying Doctor Service .
