A living legend reflects on life

• Scottsdale’s Edgar Roach reflects on a hectic working life that has taken him across the state.

By Daisy Baker
November 04, 2020

There are few jobs Scottsdale’s Edgar Roach hasn’t tried his hand at.
After leaving school at 14, he followed work around the state, with stints as a bushman, timber splitter, sawmill operator, stockman and at one stage a wool presser on a shearing gang.
The first few years of his life were spent living near Camden, then his family relocated several times to Notley Fern Hill, Underwood and Youngtown before settling on a farm at Upper Blessington.
After leaving school at 14, Mr Roach took a job as a dairy hand on the North West Coast.
“I earned 10 shillings a week and my keep when I started and it was milking by hand – there were no milking machines back then,” he said.
“I spent three years as Calder at the back of Wynyard and then I came home from there and started working in a sawmill and went to live back on Mt Barrow Road on Dad’s farm.
“The sawmill was on the other side of Mt Barrow from where I was living, right over the other side, called Carneys Creek and it belonged to Chesterman and Co in Hobart.
“I used to ride my pushbike up over the mountain and down to Camden and stay the weekend with the parents of the boys who had the sawmill.
“From home to Camden was about eight miles but it was uphill, and the first part was really uphill,” he laughed.
All up he worked in sawmills for 20 years, moving from site to site with the wood supply.
“They were only small mills in those days and they used to close up when they ran out of wood,” he said.
“You cut out a lease or a coupe as they call them now. It was a certain amount of the forest and you only took the trees that were first grade and you left all the rest so the young ones kept on growing and you could go through in about 30 years and harvest them.”
During his time at Carneys Creek he spent two years working down the West Tamar cutting casing for apple cases.
“That’s when there were still, I suppose, 50 orchards on the Tamar River, apple orchards and pear orchards.”
He then took a job at Roses Tier Sawmill, which was considered a big mill with two benches, and a set of breaking down saws, two circular saws one on top of the other going around.
Mr Roach worked at Roses Tier for 11 years in total, taking a break in between to do work as a tree lopper.
“I had to cut them off 22 feet above the ground, take the head off them. They had to be 16 or 18 inches in diameter,” he said.
When the hydro line was being put in between West Locer corner to Upper Blessington, the Hydro boss called on Mr Roach to help out, tree lopping.
“On the Monday morning they arrived on the doorstep and they had the first little automatic chainsaw I’d ever seen in my life, a set of spurs and a safety belt.
“That was two month’s work. I would lop around four trees a day and it was hard work.”
He first passed through Scottsdale during a three-week stint driving a stock truck for his brother Max.
Mr Roach came back to Scottsdale to live at the end of 1963, helping develop the new potato division of Kraft Foods after they bought out Dew Crisp and started freezing foods.
He then worked for Bert Farquhar in the mid 60s for 18 months in Tomahawk building fences.
“They were going to make soldier settlements out at the back of the Tomahawk beach so they cleared all the ground and worked it up,” he said.
“Well Mr Farquhar bought the first block and called it Wyambi.”
After Mr Roach finished the work, he returned regularly on weekends to go hunting.
Once again, he followed work, moving around the North-East splitting logs, working in sawmills and farms.
He fell in love with the area so much that he returned to Tomahawk when he retired at 67.
“I’ve lived a fairly hectic life,” he laughed.
Mr Roach’s is enjoying life at a slightly slower pace these days but his work ethic and personality has earned him the title of ‘living legend’ among some locals.
Mr Roach celebrated his 90th birthday on October 22, with lunch at the Bridport Hotel alongside around 70 family members, some of whom he hadn’t seen for years.
Mr Roach didn’t want any gifts for his birthday but instead requested a trip to the new Camden Dam – his first home – where he enjoyed the view with a glass of wine and some fruitcake baked by his dear friend Audrey Burrows.