McQUEEN Arch McQueen Remembers

Arch McQueen's association with Lysterfield commenced in 1926 when, as a young boy, he arrived there with his parents, brother and four sisters. Arch's parents, Donald and Alice, had exchanged their home in Sunshine for a 118 acre dairy farm in Powells Road about half a mile south of Wellington Road.

Donald McQueen was a Scot who had sailed around the world several times aboard wind-jammers until, tired of that miserable and dangerous life, he jumped ship in Melbourne and then worked as a shearer around Victoria. After he met and married Alice, they took up a farm at Rockbank where, like his neighbours, he built those beautiful hay stacks that could be seen in that area until fairly recent years.

Donald's Accident

Ironically, having survived all the hazards of the sea for many years, Donald was seriously injured in a freak accident while opening a farm gate to allow entry to his property for a horse-drawn water-drilling plant. The leading horse took fright, lurching the team and the wagon towards Donald. If he had been standing only a few inches to the left or to the right he would have escaped with a few bruises. However, he was right between the wagon and the gate post and was badly crushed.

Donald made a slow recovery but could not continue to farm so sold up and moved to Sunshine where an old mate, Ted Kinnear, organised a job for him at his father's rope works. Donald was able to use his old sailing days skills to splice the special ropes used to drive machinery in those days before belt drives took over.

After a couple of years of this work Donald felt well enough to look around for an opportunity to return to farming. This he found through an agency that dealt in the exchange of properties and so the family packed up and headed for Lysterfield.

Days at Lysterfield Primary School

Arch and his brother and sisters, like almost all the other kids at Lysterfield, walked to school each day. No one had a bike but Ron Stewart rode his pony.

Over 30 pupils, two to a desk, were crowded into the one room school. Although the teacher was assisted by two former pupils, Lorna Gillies and Eva Bailey, he had his hands full maintaining discipline and regularly wielded the strap on the boys while the mischievous girls were made to sit in a corner with a dunce's hat on their head.

On two occasions the strap "disappeared"; once the boys hid it in the bush and later they cut its replacement up into little pieces. It was quite a hike from the school building to the toilets so the boys would ride the teacher's bike up there and back - if they thought they could get away with it!

The families with children at the school in Arch's time there included Gillies, Selman, Bailey, Hobbs, Wright, McDougall, Reynolds, Dicker, Daniel, Hayes, Pitson, Alberni, Stewart, Newton and Coggins.

Work in Lysterfield

The major industries in the area were market gardening and dairying. Those who did both were the Alberni brothers, Tony Lizza, Joe Hobbs and the Van Brummelen brothers. Those who specialised in market gardening were Bill and Jack Taylor and Jack Newton while those who concentrated on dairying were Arch's father, Tom Simpson and Violet Lambert (both of whose farms were, at different times, managed by George Gillies), McDougall and the Selman brothers.

People used to strip wattle bark and sell it to tanners as well as cut the wattle timber for sale to bakers who liked it for its hot flame. Also, charcoal used to be made in a kiln that was located south of Wellington Road near what is now Cornish Road.

Some farmers sold a number of smaller blocks - about five acres each - that they were permitted to subdivide from their properties along Wellington Road. The owners of these blocks used to drive out from the city at weekends to stay in their bush shacks. Joe Hobbs's son Gordon and his wife Kath built the shop on the corner of Wellington and Lysterfield Roads in the early 1930s and this was a great asset to the district.

Arch's father first produced cream in his dairy and Arch and the other members of his family shared the long and tedious chore of hand separating. However, Arch's lot did not improve when his father decided to change from cream to whole milk production as he then had to spend an hour each day hand pumping two hundred gallons of water up into the header tank of the milk cooler.

Arch obtained his Merit Certificate at the age of 13 but stayed on at school until 14 gaining Proficiency level. After that he returned to the western side of Melbourne to commence a motor mechanics apprenticeship with his stepbrother who had a garage at Melton.

Career at the Quarries

By 1931 the Great Depression had forced Arch out of the motor trade and he was grateful to Ted and George Daniels who took him on at the Lysterfield Quarry.

The work was hard, rough and dangerous. Arch had to be the first one on site each morning by 6.30am as one of his duties was to heat the firing pins of the giant diesel engine which powered the crusher. This diesel engine, a Petter, had first seen service in a World War 1 submarine.

The daily round was blasting, picking up, loading and crushing, punctuated by the backbreaking task of moving with hand bars the railway tracks on which the rock skips ran. The morning was usually taken up with blasting and then picking up the shattered pieces of rock by hand, fork and shovel and loading them into the horse-drawn skips for transport to the crusher.

Pieces of rock too big for the crusher had to be hand-drilled and "popped" (blasted) again. Arch had even, on occasions, to blast rocks caught in the crusher, so he quickly became an expert in knowing just what was the precise amount of gelignite that would blow up the rock without blowing up the crusher at the same time!

By the time he was 20 Arch was offered a job as a truck driver by Mark Foy, a wholesale fruit merchant, who had bought the family farm following the death of Arch's father. Arch thought that his life as a quarryman was over.

Despite the tough economic times, the people of Lysterfield decided to work together to build a hall and funds were raised at house parties and dances, the latter mainly being held in Hobbs's large barn. Arch attended these functions with a friend from his schooldays, Dorothy Gillies. They fell in love, were married in 1919 and settled in Footscray where Arch, like his father before him, found a job at Kinnears.

War Time

Arch and Dot's two children, Beverley and Barbara, were born during the early part of the war and Arch counts it as a great blessing that he was never separated from them and Dot for very long despite his time in the Army. He was called up for military service in 1942 and posted to the 2/23 AASL, a searchlight battery based at Maribyrnong as part of the anti-aircraft defence system protecting the huge army ordinance and ammunition stores in that part of Melbourne.

At the height of the midget submarine scare, Arch's crew was sent to Williamstown to sweep the light across the bay in an attempt to detect Japanese periscopes.

Arch's technical expertise was soon recognised and he was transferred to Albert Park Barracks as a Staff Sergeant with the Engineering Corps where his duties included the investigation of faults in search lights and the writing of instruction manuals which showed crews how to fix faults in the field.

Arch Returns to Lysterfield

After the war was over Arch returned to his original trade with Signal Motors in Footscray until he was approached in 1948 by his old school friend from Lysterfield days, Ron Stewart. Ron had won the contract to supply crushed stone for the construction of the Avalon Airfield at Lara and persuaded Arch to join him in the venture. So for three years Arch managed the quarry and crusher (known as Corio Blue Metal) beside the Princes Highway there.

When the contract ended, Arch was persuaded to return to Lysterfield to manage the operations there for three successive owners, Bladin, Bayview and finally, Boral. During the next 21 years he not only successfully managed the quarry but also studied hard to gain a thorough theoretical knowledge of his profession. This effort won him membership of the Institute of Quarrying.

When Arch first went to work at Lysterfied Quarry, production was about 100 tons a day. By the time of his retirement in 1972 he had managed the installation of equipment that pushed the figure to 4000 tons. Despite a career that caused him three broken ribs, a severely crushed foot and severed tendons in his hand, Arch looks back on his time as a quarryman with great satisfaction and affection for the men who worked for him.

"They told me I was a pretty easy boss to work for", Arch said; "I only ever sacked one man - and then I gave him his job back the next day."

Interviewed by Bryan Power

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