MAX Clutterbuck has never been afraid of hard work.

His rugged hands show a long history of hard yakka with the tip of one finger missing from an accident with a woodsplitter. 

He said just about everything he has ever done has been dangerous work including working with bees.

Max was born in 1932 and raised with his eight siblings, on a farm about halfway between Victoria Valley and Mirranatwa.

 Max began working with bees as a 12-year-old with his siblings on the farm, where they used to chop hives out of the gums or cut the limb off and put them into a bee box, that as kids they had manufactured themselves.

“We had red gum, yellow box and messmate which is like a stringy bark,” he said.

“We learnt that the bees follow the blossom around, so we’d shift the boxes around depending on what was blossoming.”

Max recalls going camping at Rocklands’ Dam when it was being built. 

He and his siblings took some bees to get some yellow gum honey, because they knew there was plenty of yellow gum north of Cavendish.

“Some of it we could sell but mostly we just gave it away.

“Honey was good to barter with because it was valuable and not many people had it.”

A tough generation

MAX’S father was an orphan by the age of four. 

“I don’t know what happened to his parents, but he was raised in a boys’ home until he was 10 to 12 years old and then he was adopted by a single lady from Victoria Valley - a spinster who basically used Dad as a live in slave; it wasn’t a happy time for him,” Max said.

Max doesn’t recall hearing that his father ever went to school except perhaps when he was in the orphanage, but after he was adopted, his father recalled being treated harshly by his adoptive mother. 

Max’s father did all the work on the property; it wasn’t a large property, but it was during the depression years and they lived on next to nothing. 

When the old lady died she didn’t leave anything to Mr Clutterbuck senior, who by then was a teenager.

Somehow, he managed to get work and survive and eventually purchased a bit of land from a Crawford gentleman that became the family property ‘Fordleigh’ - a different Crawford family to the current Sierra Park Crawfords.

Max said his father had a mortgage on it that took him 25 years to pay off, with a bit of help from a good friend, Milton Napier.

“My mother was Millie Hansford from Melbourne and she hadn’t really been educated either so was sent to various places to work and was working for Charlie Fry in Victoria Valley, which I suppose is how it all came about,” Max said.

Childhood adventures

MAX’S parents were married around 1924.

There were 11 children born but the first two girls died in infancy, with Max the fourth-eldest child.

“I spent my childhood trapping rabbits,” he said.

“That’s what you had to do to survive, we ate the rabbits and sold the skins.”

Max and his siblings were taught to work from an early age, with numerous responsibilities entrusted to them including milking cows, raising poddy calves and going around the sheep when the ewes were lambing.

 “We had to milk cows, getting 16 of them in before daylight, between four of us, before we went to school and again milking in the afternoon when we came home from school,” he said.

Max has many wonderful memories from his childhood, particularly when he got up to mischief with his siblings.

“One time, when Mum and Dad went to town and we knew they’d be gone for a while, we hooked a couple of the poddy claves up to our ‘billy cart’ and let them loose in the paddock – they’d take off at a 100 miles an hour tearing all over the place, which we thought was pretty funny,” he said.

“Dad must have forgotten something and came home earlier than we thought and saw the commotion, but he never said anything.”

Max and his siblings attended school in Victoria Valley that was just over the road from the ‘old’ Sierra Park property closer to Dunkeld. 

There weren’t many kids at the school, Tom Napier senior was one of them and then it shut down after the war. 

“My siblings and I all stuck together when we were going to school, you know, we looked after one another quite a bit,” he said.

“We rode to school every day – it was 10 kilometres one way.

“Stan was the ringleader, kind of in charge and we all rode to school together, but we were usually late because one of us would have trouble with our bike in some way, the chain would come off or something and one of the others would have to dink the sibling without a bike, but if it was too wet, we wouldn’t go at all.”

Max said that as a matter of fact, he and his siblings weren’t compulsorily required to go to school because they resided beyond the distance within which it was compulsory for them to attend.

“I remember once, when I was about nine years old, the school inspector came to the school and of course, we arrived at school after he had arrived and he yelled, ‘you’re late!’,” he said.

“I recall my older brother was indignant at the inspector remonstrating about our punctuality and he abruptly retorted, ‘you shutup, we have a distance to come to school!’.”

Max recalls that the poor inspector didn’t say another word.

“Stan and Frank, my older brothers, got through to about the age of 14 at school,” he said.

The memories Max recalls from school were also throughout the war years. 

He said they used to buy food and petrol stamps to contribute to the war effort and that even though they didn’t have much they’d scrape a shilling or a pence together to give to the war effort.

“Things weren’t too good, we weren’t too sure who was going to win, you see, we thought that the Japs were going to take over,” he said.

“I remember when the war ended, we just got on with life.”

In total, Max only went to school for about five years and after the school shut down, he began school by correspondence.

He said learning by correspondence wasn’t very successful, because there was no one to really help. 

“Dad was working and Mum was very busy as well and given neither of them had any real education, it wasn’t really going to work,” he said.

Into the workforce

MAX’S first job was as a shearer. 

His father had been a shearer and eventually built a shearing shed at home so Max and all his brothers just naturally learnt to shear. 

“Whenever we were shearing and there was a spare hand piece, one of us would just grab it and have a go at taking a bit of wool off the top of a sheep’s head, before the next bloke grabbed it, or an older brother would go and stand next to a shearer at Sierra Park and watch and learn,” he said.

Because nobody had any means of travel, all the brothers took advantage of the shearing season and shore on properties around Victoria Valley.

“I rode a pushbike to the first place I shore at about eight miles away – that was at Cec McArthur’s,” Max said.

Max also had begun to cut posts from timber to make money.

He purchased his own swing saw, bench, chainsaw and also used an axe and said he did that for years - mostly with his brother Harold, with whom he said he stuck pretty close.

The next generation

MAX met and married Brenda Coates from Cavendish and they’ve been married now for 65 years.

They initially lived in Hamilton and then went to Portland, where they purchased a small dairy farm with acreage, as “Brenda liked cows”. 

They then sold that and bought into a farm partnership - predominantly sheep - with Brenda’s father and brother at Cavendish and lived out at Bulart.

Their four children, Geoffrey, Lynette, Sandra and Sharon, went to school at the Bulart Primary School. 

“I still cut posts to make extra money on the weekends as a I had a portable mill and needed to keep working, that was in the 1980s,” Max said.

“I bought a post-driver to drive the posts in, cut timber and did fence contracting for about 30 years.

“It’s dangerous work, you had to have someone with you when you were fencing, not the kind of job you should do by yourself.”

Max did a lot of fencing around the district but particularly did a lot of work at Yarram Park for the Baillieus, whom he said were very good people to work for - Bob Potter was the manager.

Max and his family eventually built a house on Coleraine Road just out of Hamilton where they ran a few sheep and Max did some work with red gum timber.

“I’ve made quite a few beautiful dining tabletops from single pieces of timber,” he said.

“I always kept a hand in with bee keeping though. 

“Stan, my older brother was living in Hamilton and he had bees and I’d help him with them.

“We’ve only been living right in town for three years which is when I got going on the bees again.”

Not ready to relax

NOW nearly 90, Max is still bee-keeping and has his bee boxes at a couple of locations on Hensley Park Road that are fantastic for producing honey and they haven’t required moving them around from there too much.

Brenda is also quite knowledgeable on bee-keeping and the process involved in producing honey from the years spent working with Max.

“You have to move them around a bit because they can get a bit stale if they are in the same area for too long,” Brenda said.

“There’s plenty of blossom on that road, because of all the cultivated gardens.”

When people ask Max what sort of honey he has, he describes it as Hamilton honey, because there are so many varieties of blossoms in the vicinity of his hives. 

“I had another site out on Payne’s Road, but Powercor had to trim some limbs for fire safety, you wouldn’t want a limb to fall on a box of bees, they’d all come out and attack you; they can kill you,” he said.

“Never go near them unless you’re equipped, always have a smoker, wear a veil and full-bodied clothing and gloves.”

Brenda reiterated the very real danger there was, when working with bees.

“Bare skin is a no-no,” she said.

Max and Brenda are in agreement that bees are like people - some are aggressive and some are not. 

“My bees seem to be genuinely used to me but you’ve always got to be prepared,” he said.

He explained that every box or hive of bees had only one queen and that it wasn’t really any different to a normal household.

There are nurse bees that look after the young ones and worker bees that go out in the field.

If the queen bee dies, they choose another egg from the worker bees, the nurses feed it with royal jelly until it’s ready to be the queen bee and then it does its job, which is to lay eggs.

“You can buy queen bees from breeders,” Max said.

“If you have an aggressive hive of bees you can breed them out by buying a new queen bee from a reputable breeder.

“Just like a mongrel breed of cattle that are difficult to deal with, you can breed out the aggressive ones, likewise, you can do the same with bees and breed a quieter blood line.”

Max and Brenda travelled to Geelong recently to purchase a queen bee.

“We went and picked it up in a little cage, like a match box and put it in with the colony and all the frames are now filled with new larvae,” Max said.

“It’s quite a hierarchical system. 

“Every bee has a job, the nurse bees look after the health of the hive, but the queen bee controls everything”.

In Spring, when everything is flourishing, the bees multiply and sometimes the older queen bee may decide that the hive is becoming over populated, so some of the bees have to go.

The older queen bee will leave the hive with a swarm of bees, only about half of the population, filling up on honey before they set out and while the scout bees go in search of a new home, they will temporarily colonise somewhere. 

That’s why you might see a swarm of bees in a tree or corner of a house for a couple of days and then they’re gone again.

The bees left behind replace the old queen by hatching out a new egg - usually within three days of the old queen leaving. 

The new queen will then become fertile and the whole cycle starts again.

Max has observed that sometimes in good crops of canola, for example, bee boxes can over-populate too quickly.

“Bees also go mad for Persian clover,” he said.

If the bee hives overpopulate too quickly, the process can be helped along by manually splitting the bee boxes. 

This is done by removing the old box and replacing it with a new one in exactly the same position as the original box. 

The bees will be none the wiser and return to the same site as before.

Unless, of course, the box is shifted more than two or three kilometres away, then they won’t return home because it’s too far for them.

Max said the weather also had a lot to do with honey production and bee populations. 

“In winter you don’t make any honey, you have to feed them and keep them going with a bit of sugar syrup and they can also feed on the combs,” he said.

Max said the hardest part of producing honey was extracting the honey from the boxes and pouring it into the pots, because the boxes were heavy to lift when they were full of honey.

 Max still sells his honey from his pots on the veranda of his home, under the label ‘Max’s Hamilton Honey’ and is not yet ready to retire.

“I’m not old enough.”