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| Mum and Dad - July 2012 |
My Dad, Ken Bolton, owned a sawmill. A place he worked in from the age of 14 until
his 60’s. I worked there during some uni
breaks and I know a little of how hard and hot the work was.
The mill consisted of a big shed, with no walls, no heating,
no cooling and only pretty basic dust extraction. It was cold as ice in winter and hot as all
else in summer. In winter everyone would
huddle around a single oil burning heater during smoko. To beat the heat in summer they would start
at 5:30am. Mind you this was the routine
only after the donkey engine burnt the place down and they subsequently rebuilt with
electrical motors and flouro lighting.
Before that 1960’s rebuild Dad was up at 4:00am to fire up the steam
engine so it was ready to go when everyone else rolled up a couple of hours later.
Before the steam era, for the first 15 years of Dad’s career,
the mill was located 14 miles out of town in the middle of a forest. Accommodation then consisting of a tin
cottage with a dirt floor.
Dad liked a routine - morning tea was at 9:15am, lunch at
12:00 and afternoon tea at 3:15pm. Those
times changed only once a year – on Melbourne cup day afternoon smoko was at
race time. The shed floor was a combination
of dirt and oil from the log skids and the only chairs were a couple of seats
out of an old Morris car.
Even though
Dad was the owner he was also one of the men who physically pushed and shoved
logs around until they became something useful like a wall stud, a floor board,
a noggin or a fancy cabin profile weatherboard.
Each evening he’d come home, reeking of cypress sawdust, with bits of
timber under his arm – each with an order he’d written down during the
day. After dinner he’d do the paperwork
in his office, have a port and go to bed around 9:30.
Dad finally sold the mill in his 60’s after it had been on
the market for some years. He then took
up a job as a school bus driver, clocking nearly a 1,000 kilometres a week on a
long country run. He loved it - the
kids, the parents, the driving and finally being able to fulfil one of his
wishes – to be a mechanic. Something he’d
been pulled away from by his family when he was 14 and the mill needed an extra
set of hands during the war.
He retired from bus driving when he felt that his reactions
were no longer as sharp as they used to be.
Handing his licence in voluntarily because he didn’t want to be the cause of an accident.
I got my love of making things out of timber from
Dad. For him, any construction or design
problem could be solved with a 4 x 2 piece of cypress and some 3 inch
nails. Dad’s design genre is probably
best described as a cross between early industrial, steam punk and “just get it
done with what we’ve got”. Not always pretty
– but it never fell down.
But most importantly, I’ve got Dad to thank for my love of
God. After all it was his good mate who
told me about Jesus when I was 13 and Dad who showed me what serving Him looked
like by how he cared for others.
Dad was the classic “chopping wood for widows” type of bloke.
A bit of a rough diamond - he hated wearing a tie but loved flannelette shirts,
towelling hats and t-boots – he had a loving heart. I could wax on for ages, but maybe some other time.
Jeanette and I had the honour of being with Dad when he passed
away on Sunday. He was nearly 84.
