Rich with experiences: Mary Pedler at her Shepparton home recently. Mary wrote two fictional books when she was a teenager.
Photo by
Rodney Braithwaite
Mary Pedler was only 17 when her father died and she knew the family couldn’t afford to keep her at school.
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Although it could have been a crushing circumstance for the English girl, the decision she made set her on a pathway to a career which eventually led her to the other side of the world and a novel job in northern Victoria.
Growing up in Chesterfield in northern England, the daughter of a Church of England padre, Mary loved working with animals.
When she knew she had to find work, she found a job on a dairy farm called Forest Farm in West Wales, which had a herd of Ayrshire cattle, most of them sporting long horns.
Working in Wales: Mary Pedler, 19, (right) with one of Forest Farm's working horses and her mother, Gladys. She loved working with animals.
Photo by
Rodney Braithwaite
“We were quite modern; we had a milking parlour with Alfa Laval machines,” Mary said.
After about 18 months at Forest Farm, armed with considerable farm experience and having been awarded a scholarship from the Derbyshire County Council, Mary enrolled in a year-long dairy husbandry course at the Monmouth Institute of Agriculture in Usk, Wales.
After graduating at the top of her class she was offered an instructor’s position at the college, which she took up. It was while teaching she met her future husband, Alan, who was a student in the general agriculture course.
Animal lover: Mary Pedler feeding calves at Leithchville in the 1960s.
Photo by
Rodney Braithwaite
Asked how they came to get to know each other, Mary simply replied: “He was good looking and he asked me out!”
They married in 1953 and after they worked on several farms at different locations, they decided to emigrate to Australia in the hope there was a way to find their way into farm ownership.
“We were 10 pound poms,” Mary recalled the term given to sponsored immigrants to Australia in the 1960s.
After the long voyage on the ship which was something of a holiday for the couple, they travelled from Melbourne to the Echuca district where they found several farm jobs, eventually ending up at Cohuna on a sharefarm.
Farm life: Mary Pedler with an Ayrshire shown at the Welsh Royal Show in 1950.
Photo by
Rodney Braithwaite
Mary became known as someone who was competent on the farm and, through her contact with the locals, she was approached by the regional herd improvement association to see if she was interested in training to do artificial inseminations.
This was only 10 years after the first artificial breeding association was established in Victoria. Mary went to the Werribee state research farm for a one-week training program where she again found herself surrounded by mostly male trainees from all over Victoria.
She excelled in the class and returned to her home district to begin her rounds, visiting farms, decked out in her white overalls, white boots and white coat, and travelling in a VW Beetle, modified to carry the liquid nitrogen bottles in the front passenger seat.
Mary drew a mixed reaction from farmers.
One old-style farmer, who made his wife and children stay inside the house so they couldn’t watch when the AI man came to visit, was horrified — and quietly asked the artificial breeding company not to send her out again.
Most welcomed her, and one farmer who was especially protective of his young Jersey heifers, insisted she was the only one for the job, presumably because he assumed she had a smaller arm and was less likely to hurt his girls.
“Most farmers were good, and you learned how to deal with all types,” Mary said.
Mary’s husband Alan went on to retrain as a TAFE teacher and the couple spent three years in New Guinea where Alan taught animal and cropping skills in a vocational school.
Alan’s appointment to the former North Shepparton Technical School in 1976 saw them move to the Shepparton area and Mary developed her interest in showing dogs, leading to her role as a judge.
She also worked at Target in Shepparton for 17 years.
“From milking cows to making curtains,” Mary remarked — but that, as they say, is another story.
Recently turned 90, Mary and husband Alan are in retirement in Shepparton.
Daughter Jane Lloyd would be known to many Goulburn Valley people as a former primary school teacher who eventually became principal of Tatura Primary School, and son Jonathan lives in Tasmania where he works for Bendigo Bank.
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