"The past is never fully gone. It is absorbed into the present and the future. It stays to shape what we are and what we do."
Sir William Deane, Governor-General of Australia, Inaugural Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture, August 1996.

Articles about People

 You can access articles about particular people by scrolling through this Blog,
or by opening this
LINK
If you use the About People tag appearing in every other article in the Blog
you will find a few more articles "About People" but those which are more topic specific and located elsewhere in the site.

 

John La Gerche

Peter McHugh (bio)

For tens of thousands of years humans, and the natural environment, co-existed in relative harmony in the area now known as south-eastern Australia. From 1788 however, sustained migration, sponsored by the British, commenced.

The discovery of gold, in the 1850s, was to result in a literal stampede of humanity, from across the Globe. Among other things it was to be a brutal time for the environment, and particularly for the area’s forests and woodlands, as the skeletal British-based bureaucracy struggled to adapt.

In 1882, one of Victoria’s first foresters in the then British Colony was appointed, to supervise the Ballarat-Creswick State Forest. Over the next couple of decades this remarkable individual, and truly committed public servant, John La Gerche, battled to deal with what he termed ‘…the great (forest) slaughter…’ and its aftermath and, in so doing, became a great example to those who, to this day, follow in his footsteps.

Some Migrant Memories

Dave Holmes (bio)

“Tears in the Rain” 1

Background

In the past year I celebrated the 40th anniversary of my migration to Australia with a small group of family.

It is a story that actually began 50 years ago when two friends and forestry students at the University of British Columbia (UBC) talked and dreamed about travelling adventures in New Zealand and Australia after we finished our degrees - John Fuller and I. John had taken a gap year and hence was a year behind me in his studies, but we hoped to meet up "down under" if our adventures overlapped.

Richard (Dick) Richards

Physics Lecturer at VSF, 1934

This article is based on extracts from an article about Richardson the website of Federation University.

During the early years of VSF, many lecturers of the sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Geology etc) were persons from the Ballarat School of Mines.

Sometimes lecturers attended at Creswick and sometimes students travelled to Ballarat for tuition. One interesting person in this category was Richard (Dick) Richards who lectured in Physics at the VSF in 1934.

Alan Cracknell

David Buntine (bio)

This article was written in 2008.

I first met Alan Cracknell early in the 1980’s when he was Principal of the Wodonga High School. It was a fleeting contact but I do remember him giving me the stern well practiced Principal look designed to freeze students in their tracks. Some time later I moved to Wodonga and I found myself attending the same Church as Alan but even so that student look still kept me at a distance. But slowly our Church lives intertwined and the barriers were broken down. With time we shared some Church responsibilities and often had to work on projects together and enjoyed each others company.

But Alan had a surprise in his past. He knew I had studied forestry but it was not until many years later that he casually told me that he had taught at the forestry school at Creswick. And so it turned out that Alan had done a stint at Creswick as the Education Department science lecturer early in his career.