Since he was a 17-year-old boilermaker welding every steel joint in the Lilac Time Hall in Goulburn, Ron Fielding has moulded football and water polo teams and built up businesses in hotels and on the road. Photo: John Thistleton.
No tougher lesson came from the school of hard knocks than playing hooker for a rugby league team, as Ron Fielding did in the 1960s and 70s.
“I never used to shave mate, so I could rub my face up against the other hooker,” says Ron, recounting his days playing for Goulburn United and provoking his opponents.
“My first game out of juniors at Captains Flat, when I packed into a scrum, bang, straight here,” he says, indicating a punch striking him directly in the mouth.
That hooking role prepared him for almost anything, except having to snatch a shotgun from a man’s hands one day during a business dispute. (More about that later).
Of all the good fortune to come his way, mateship from the football field is the one he most values. One of his best mates, Terry ‘Shadow’ Hartnett, who died in July 2022, had come from a broken home and is still sorely missed.
“Old Shadow used to get cramps,” he said. “He was sitting there in front of Geissler Motors eating scallops. I said come down home and Mum will cook you a feed. He stayed for four years.”
Mum was Pauline who had earlier left his father Bill, a head ganger on the railway. An outstanding mother, she had lined up Ron’s first job as an apprentice boilermaker in 1958 with Steve McCabe and Les Kershaw who formed North Goulburn workshop Kermac Engineering.
Ron left Kermac in 1965 when plenty of jobs awaited young men prepared to do anything, in his case at the railway and later wool stores.
Playing water polo as well as rugby league, he said Goulburn had 14 men’s teams and eight women’s teams in water polo in the 1960s.
Later, working as a casual barman at the Exchange Hotel in 1971 and 1972, successive publicans recognised his strong following among patrons and doubled his wage to keep him behind their bar. He was ultimately offered the lease of the Tarago Hotel in 1973, but could not raise the asking price.
“I was walking down Auburn Street and saw old (motor dealership principal) Burt Geissler standing there talking to (car salesman) Bede Fitzgibbon. I said how much are your new cars in the window?
“I said, how about giving me the same money ($9000) to buy a pub and I’ll pay you back, the same as a car?”
Having secured his finance, he organised a Tarago football team drawing on his network of Goulburn footballers and took the hotel’s turnover from two 18-gallon kegs a week to 19 kegs a week.
He took boarders in and sometimes had to think quickly – for example, when the hotel’s boilers ran out of hot water. He turned to Woodlawn Mine operating near Tarago, which had provided the pub with a steady flow of thirsty miners at knock off time after their shifts.
“So I would take a bottle of port to Woodlawn Mine, have a port with them and used the big vans out there for the boarders to have a shower in,” he said.
Ron had met his wife Lyn Evans when she worked at Jack and Terry Tilden’s dry cleaners in Goulburn. The couple married at St Nicholas Church, Goulburn, in 1976.
He sublet the pub to another man, and managed clubs and hotels in Wollongong. Plans to relocate to Cairns were abandoned when Lyn, expecting twins, became ill and miscarried. Her mother was unwell too and the family returned to Goulburn.
About this time his solicitor in Goulburn, Brian ‘Rocky’ Lulham, warned Ron the lessee was not fulfilling his financial obligations. “You need to get him out of there,” Rocky had said.
While confronting the lessee at Tarago, the man produced a shotgun which he pointed at Ron who quickly disarmed him.
“I thought it was a stupid thing to do. I just pushed it down. Had he pulled the trigger it would have blown my foot off,” he said.
When the hotel later changed hands and became The Loaded Dog Hotel, Ron bought his taxi business, and then a mail run in the Southern Highlands, which led Australia Post to engage him as a removalist for their staff.
He began his own removals business. “I saw a lot of towns I would otherwise not have seen, little places along the coast, even Chinchilla way up in North Queensland,” he said.
Lyn died in 2014 and Ron continued driving the taxi, as he does today at age 83 on a road paved with priceless memories.
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