Doing it tough, but thinking about others

Doing it tough,

but thinking about others

Words Tricia Welsh

Septuagenarian Graham Ladd knows what it’s like to do it tough. Growing up in a housing commission area in Melbourne, he was brought up by his mother, a single parent, when his father left them when he was only 18-months-old. They moved in with his Irish grandmother in working class Sunshine, where both his mother and grandmother worked in the ammunition factory in Maribyrnong during the war years.

It was his own tough childhood that taught young Graham to think of others.

He remembers when he was about six-years-old making homemade lemonade with fruit from his grandmother’s trees to raise funds for the Royal Melbourne Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal.

“Every year, a few months before Good Friday, the girl next door and a few of our playmates in the street, we’d set up a stall outside our house selling cakes and lemonade. We might make about six pounds. I think the most we ever made was 10 or 15 pounds. And we’d take it in to 3AW (the appeal radio station). We continued to do this until we started tech or high school.”

As the first grandchild, he used to follow his grandmother around the yard that had flowers, vegetables and fruit trees, with chook pens. “Nanna always had beautiful roses, buffalo lawn and would win the local garden competition. She’d come home from working in the ammunition factory and work in the garden till dark. Mum would have to call her in for dinner. I learnt how to grow things from her,” he says. “I still have a bit of a garden.”

Graham received his first pushbike when he was eightyears-old, and did a paper round in the morning before school, and one in the afternoon. “This was so I could help Mum with my education,” he recalls. “I bought my own schoolbooks and uniform.”

His mother remarried and the family moved to a new war service home in Reservoir. He left school at 14 ½ and worked on his uncle’s war service farm in the Western District and also worked part-time in a bakery.

“When I was 15, I asked Mum if I could join the Navy cadets – but she wouldn’t sign the papers. Then I started to go to a Methodist church youth group at the age of 16. When I turned 18, I joined the Army Reserves. I asked the minister there if I could start a Boy’s Club as our area had grown and there were a lot of boys aged between eight to 13 years of age. I ran the club for two years and then left. “After a few years, I still wanted to help others, as I had had it hard. There were others out there struggling too. I asked the boys if they’d like to form a football team. I started coaching them and we had a few games before I got more serious about the Army.”

He debated going to Vietnam, but didn’t -- and acknowledges losing many friends there.

At 21, he got married, started a family, worked three jobs to make ends meet and buy a house. A chance visit to the Sunshine Coast in 1975 following a friend’s funeral in Brisbane, opened up a new world to Graham who ended up moving here.

“It was hard to get a steady job then so I did whatever came along. I finally got a full-time job as groundsman at a local primary school” a job he held for 14 years.

He continues: “I then started doing things to help people who weren’t as lucky as I was. The principal and I joined Apex. The first meeting we went to, the speaker was a psychologist talking about the number of single parents living on the coast. It was a staggering 80 percent, in 1979.”

Ever on the lookout for an opportunity to help others, Graham remembers: “At the end of each school year, I would gather up all the things that had not been used, such as rulers, pencils, exercise books, art paper, as all this would go into a skip and go to the dump. I would take these to my garden shed.

“Over the years, I got to know the kids who came from a struggling single mum family, so I would have packages made up and would give them to these children. They were very grateful. I’d see them come to school with nothing and ask them what they needed. Nobody knew I had this stash to give away.”

“I have been blessed to help others, and although my health is not so good, I hope to be able to go a few more years yet.”

Twenty-two years ago, Graham joined the St Vincent de Paul Society. “I still felt there was more help needed.”

With his wife, Sue, he is part of the Good Shepherd Kawana Conference whose aim it is to assist local victims of domestic violence. “We might put them in a motel for a couple of nights and help have the children educated.” Graham pots up plants for sale at a monthly book and plants sale – painting terracotta pots especially at Christmas time. “Our numbers are dwindling and desperately need more members,” he laments. “I have been blessed to help others, and although my health is not so good, I hope to be able to go a few more years yet.”