Trevor

By Peter Sweeney
One week after he got his ticket as a motor mechanic, Trevor Longmuir quit and went working around Australia with a mate for a year.
The 21-year-old was sick of the grease. More so, he was sick of the poor pay.
“Mechanics are still poorly paid, compared to electricians, plumbers, builders, carpenters,” Mr Longmuir said.
“My first job was picking up spuds for eight pounds a week. I got five pounds a week as an apprentice motor mechanic … and three of that went in board.
“There was no beer and skittles in those days.” However, Mr Longmuir knows it has been “handy to have” mechanical knowledge.
After all, he has been a man of the land all his life. He owns, and leases, farms. He works as a transport carrier – and as a livestock agent.
Reared on a market garden on Cheltenham Road, Keysborough, Trevor Longmuir wasn’t even a teenager when he earned pocket money weeding vegetables and hand-rearing calves. And when he left Dandenong Technical School – where he was one of the first students – he picked potatoes for two years.
“That’s where I learnt a work ethic,” Mr Longmuir said.
He left home, boarded and operated a bulldozer for 18 months. However, the urge to get back on the land was too strong.
He accepted an offer to lease a property, Masefield Park, in Shrives Rd, Narre Warren. Land in hand, he had to put something on it, so he trudged off to the old CBC bank in Dandenong to ask for a loan to buy his first herd of cows.
He might have been moneyless, but Mr Longmuir thought he was a chance with the bank manager: after all, his dad had been a 30-year customer.
But money in hand wasn’t to come.
“I needed 10,000 pounds to start the farm, but was told I would only get the loan if I had collateral,” Mr Longmuir recalled.
“It was hard to have collateral when you had nothing.
“I didn’t get a loan through the bank, but was fortunate enough to borrow it from my father. I worked hard to pay him back.
“It is funny how things change. A few years later the banks would give you $100,000 if you looked at them, more if you sneezed at them.
“But that’s how it was at the time.”
He started farming with a 40-gallon milk contract – which was built up to more than 100 gallons – on Warren Park, another Narre Warren property, he leased.
However, it was land ownership what Mr Longmuir had in mind.
The first farm he owned, on the corner of Browns Road and Godfrey Lane at Officer, is as it was.
“My ex-wife has it,” Mr Longmuir said.
“I gave my first farm, my dream, away when the marriage failed. The wife was happy enough to divorce – but she wanted the farm.”
The happenings led to Mr Longmuir having a breakdown – but he regarded himself as “very, very lucky.”
“I was lucky enough to get the right doctors, the right counsellors for help,” he said.
“Looking back, I see myself as having more of a breakthrough than a breakdown.
“I got better – but then I had to start over again with nothing.”
For the past 15 years, he has lived in a small country style home in the middle of Pakenham (overlooking the new Woolworths building) with his 20-year plus partner, (Dorothy) Joan Upton.
He owns ‘Tathra Downs’, a 30-hectare property at Pakenham South, where he fattens sheep, but mainly cattle and is getting into harness horses and vintage buggies, and another property south of Swan Hill, which he leases out.
A major organiser of a project where the sales of locally donated livestock went to flood-ravaged Queensland farmers, Mr Longmuir’s two properties were flooded in February.
He leases land on the Pakenham-Gembrook Road and also in Golf Links Rd, Berwick, and – “when they’re not in the pound” – also fattens cattle there.
“When you’ve got land bordering suburbia, there’s trials and tribulations,” Mr Longmuir said.
“People dump rubbish and kids cut fences to ride their motorbikes on your land. When my cattle aren’t in the pound, hopefully they’re in the paddock.”
A rodeo rider as a teenager, Mr Longmuir and “DJ” recently hooked up a caravan and went on the road for five weeks. Under orders to stay on the bitumen because “the last time we went somewhere you scratched and scraped the van” the main attraction was the 101st annual race meeting at Brunette Downs, 350 kilometres from Tennant Creek.
“There’s a week of races, rodeos and campdrafts,” he said.
“I’m not a betting man, but I reckon I got taken by a couple of bush bookies standing on a table.
“I went up to have $10 on a horse called Bonny Lass in the first race of the two-day meeting. They said they didn’t go by names, but numbers, and told me to look at the boards.
“So I had $10 on number three and they scribbled something on a piece of paper. When it won and I went to collect, they gave me $5. When I protested that it didn’t seem quite right that I had $10 on a winner and got $5 back, they said they didn’t know the price of the horse.
“Little wonder the bookies make money. I’m just glad I put my money into paying off a property or two rather than punting.”