A sprightly Les Abrehart has celebrated his 90th birthday with 100 family and friends on Sunday 16 November.
“They seem to come out of the woodwork when free food is available,” he jokes.
By his side were his three children Linda, Gary and Karen – with seven grandkids and seven great-grand kids – at the celebration at Hillview Bunyip Aged Care.
The former greenskeeper at Keysborough and Cranbourne golf courses remains an active and independent Mr Fix It. He’s still driving and has close to 20:20 vision.
He’s an active part of Garfield-Bunyip Probus, tinkers on a family farm in Bunyip and mends bikes from hard rubbish and donates them for op shops.
“I’ve been a scrounger all my life. I hate seeing those bikes go to waste.”
The Abrehart family has been part of the South East for about 140 years, he says.
The surname is scribed on signs across the region – Abrehart Street in Doveton, named after Les’s father, and Abrehart Road in Pakenham where his relatives farmed for about 120 years.
He recalls him and his now-late wife Heather once visiting the 200-acre homestead, which was home to his Nanna, great-aunts and great-uncles.
They were greeted by Nanna on the porch, with a shotgun under her arm, enquiring what they were doing there. All was later sorted out over a cup of tea, Les says.
Three decades ago, the homestead sold for about $490,000. The undeveloped tract was probably worth about $40 million now, Les says.
Most of his formative years were in what is now Doveton’s Abrehart Street.
His father Carl and mother Edith had moved down from Nar Nar Goon – where there lived off a road “not much more than a two-wheel track through the trees”.
The hope was that Les and his nine siblings could get an education at Hallam. They moved into a four-acre place in Doveton, just before the farmlands were carved into sub-divisions.
Les used to set rabbit traps in the paddocks later claimed by big industries such as General Motors Holden and Heinz. There was no such thing as a freeway in those days, he says.
While his brothers and sisters knuckled down at high school, Les left after grade 6 and got to work.
At 14, he landed a job at Keysborough Golf Club, which at the time was just being built on the site of a cattle farm off Hutton and Chapel roads.
Les and his father were hired to pull out the old barbed-wire fences, with his father exploding gelignite to remove trees and stumps.
“You’d be locked up for that these days,” Les mused.
When he turned 18, he was being paid junior wages while doing more work than some of the men. He thought he deserved more, and so accepted a job on the fairways and greens at Cranbourne Golf Club.
Les and wife Heather settled briefly in Yallourn, where Les became superintendent of the golf club, before they built a new home back in Doveton.
He returned to work at Keysborough Golf Club for 25 years – until he had a “run-in” with a club member one day.
“He said ‘I’ll get you Les’. Then he got on the committee and I got sacked on the spot.
“But it had a bit of karma in it. He ended up getting done for embezzlement.”
Meanwhile, Les joined his son Gary in driving Browns Grain dairy trucks across Gippsland. It took some convincing for Les to get a truck licence, after being unable to reverse the truck around a corner.
Evidently the instructor was happy that Les would mainly be reversing around farms.
Now 65, Gary runs Abrehart Transport based in Livestock Way, Pakenham near the former livestock exchange.
And Les drove trucks for about 20 years, earning a well-deserved gold watch on his formal retirement.
