Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Dad [Richard Clarence EBSARY] was born in Bute; worked at one stage after he was married [age 36 -mum was 26], in the munitions factory in Mitcham [SA] – only a family story and my fading memory to ‘confirm’ that.
He was known to have many musical bones – could pick up, a trumpet for instance and play the tune he had just heard, sang well as a baritone-bass --most of his life in a church choir.
As a farmer’s young [middle] son he was in charge of the wagon team of horses –both wagon and horses heavy duty. He fell off the back of the wagon one day and his knees were never much good after that.
I wonder how that slowed him down when he worked on repairing the roads with an older brother. I don’t know the timing of both so he may have been OK mending roads and the fall came later, he raced a horse and a whippet while living at home with his parents and sibs.

He played tennis and later bowls.

Much later he helped out in town in the mechanic’s shop that my maternal grandfather set in place after he had moved his family into town from Mt Gambier.
Aa few years later, grandfather and grandmother moved to Kimba [Eyre Peninsula, South Australia] to assist my uncle with opening new farm land – mum stayed in town because she was not needed on the new farm, had a good job and a place to board -- in my Dad’s home in the old farm along with Dad and his parents and siblings [some of the 9 had left the farm by then].

Dad loved words, poetry and reading Shakespeare and would pen for fun a poem every so often.

In the early 1930s he bought a business in Urania where he had so many hats- I loved to hear about them many years later.
Dad’s hats included, [Methodist] Sunday School & Kindergarten superintendent +keeper of the maintenance required for that church, the church hall and the town hall and the tennis courts because he had only a small distance to walk to them all and of course he knew who to call in when something needed attention, because he lived in town with only one other family in the middle of mainly barley growing and beef cattle farms.
He was also the dispenser of various fuels, insurance agent, postmaster, manual telephone manager, fire boss -able to summon all at once by plugging in all required fire fighters in the manual ‘phone exchange and send farmers to where they were needed, now I can’t recall the others
the poem:
At one meeting the ladies of Urania decided they would do something different as well as the usual decorating wedding breakfast etc and all made an apron that was different to anyone else’s. Then they decided they were so clever they had to show their aprons in a parade.
They asked Dad to be the compere and tell a little about each apron as each was on show.
I was only 6 at that time but I listened to, and read, his poem so often ever since then -and I can recall most of the aprons, as long as I read Dad’s descriptions.

Researched and written by daughter Kay MASON (Ebsary)