Jade Jungwirth
Brian was born in Castlemaine in 1940 at the private hospital (now Mostyn Street Clinic). While Brian’s mum and dad moved to the area not long before he was born, his ancestors on both sides of the family were from the Bendigo area.
“Mum always used to say that her Welsh grandparents came to Adelaide on the ship and walked across to the Goldfields,” Brian said.
The eldest of three, Brian jokes that he fulfilled his parents’ dream of having a boy and hence was the only son.
“We lived up the top of Berkeley Street,” he said.
“It was very territorial in those days. People in the street became very good friends, and we stuck to that area. We used to have fun playing kick-to-kick footy.”
A charter member of the Castlemaine Lions Club, which formed in ’71, Brian remained a member for 38 years.
“That’s a sh**load of sausages!”
“They didn’t have a Lions Club in Castlemaine in those days, and Kyneton decided we needed one here, so they went to the paper, and the editor of the day, Paul Blanchard, and he was hot to trot,” he said.
After finishing at the North School, Brian went to the high school (which, at the time, was located at the site of the Maxi IGA), where his dad worked as an art teacher.
“There were only 90 boys in those days, but there were about 300 girls! Not bad odds, but it didn’t work cause we were segregated on other sides of the quadrangle and we weren’t allowed to intermingle out of class,” he said.
“I finished in Year 11. I got to almost the end of first term, when a neighbour of ours, Les Mackey, who was employed at the Mail as a compositor, came by one lunchtime. I’ll never forget it; he called in and said, ‘Áre you interested in an apprenticeship in printing?’ Dad said, ‘What do you think?” And I thought, ‘Damned if I know.’ I hadn’t really thought about it. I was always told if I didn’t pick my game up, I’d be up to the Foundry. Everybody worked at the Foundry; there were some very clever people there, don’t get me wrong, but anybody that wanted a job went to the Foundry.
“So Les said, ‘If you’re interested, go and see Charlie Almond,’ who was the manager at the time and have a chat and see what you think.”
Brian met with Charlie and started his five-year apprenticeship as a compositor and machinist at the Mail the following week.
“The first thing you were taught was to feed the paper manually through the machine, and I’d put type together, predominantly for the paper, but they did job printing as well, like invoices and putting docket books together,” he said.
“The paper came out three times a week in those days. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
“It used to be where the Oriental Bank is now at 155 Barker Street. My wage was £2, 15 and 6, which is the equivalent of $5.25 today,” he said.
“There were 14 people working when I was there. It was all hands-on stuff, all letterpress. You read it from left to right but upside down. You’ve got to be able to read it just as quickly as you can read a book.”
During his time at the paper, Brian met his wife Norma, who had gone to school with his younger sisters, at a function at the Methodist Church. The pair married on February 17, 1968, at the Baptist Church.
“We built our first house in Bowden Street and had two children, Ashley and Justine,” Brian said.
After that, he worked on the Intertype. Brian finished up at the paper after 18 years, working with a builder mate for a year, before deciding to start his own printing business.
“We burrowed out under the house and bought a machine and started Golden Banner Printing Service,” he said.
“We had that business for 30 years, not all of it under the house; we built a factory in Bruce Street.”
In 2004, Bruce sold the business to Steve at Bart ‘n’ Print and retired, spending his days travelling in Australia with his wife Norma.
“We went to Queensland, New South Wales and in 2012, we bought another caravan, so we did the mandatory up the middle to Darwin and ‘Kaka’don’t’ and down the west coast,” he said.
And the all-important questions.
What hobbies do you have? I loved water skiing, so I built my first boat called ‘High Time’. This was before I met Norma; I was 19, I think. It was a beautiful thing, a skiff. I sold that for $400 and bought a fibreglass hull and made a deck for it with a mate. I’ve taught myself to do wood turning, and I started metalwork a few years ago after I saw something on YouTube.
What are your philosophies in life? Treat other people the way you expect them to treat you.
Who are your dream dinner guests? John Wagner, a billionaire in Queensland who owns the Toowoomba Airport. He is researching technology to make fuel from household garbage, and I saw something on YouTube about the surgeon Charlie Teo; it was fascinating what he was talking about.
Finally, what do you love most about the place you call home? For a starter, I don’t know any different, but things have changed a lot, so much so that it’s refreshing to go to the supermarket and meet someone that you actually know!