AAA News

• Man of the land wove tales that hooked tourists

  Tuesday, 11 August 2009

  RODERICK CHARLES McKENZIE DYER, GRAZIER, PASTORALIST, BUSH PILOT

  17-7 1925 — 20-12-2008

  ROD Dyer, whose entrepreneurship transformed him from a sheep farmer in the Victoria's Western District into a pioneering pastoralist in the Kimberley, has died of kidney failure at his home in Hamilton.

  His experiences in the northern region of Western Australia opened his eyes to the prospects for tourism, and in 1977 he launched Air Adventure Australia to cater for small groups.

  Rod, who learnt to fly at the Ripon Aero Club at Ararat, in no time used his humour, engaging irreverence and flair for story telling to expand his tourist clientele. Many from overseas became repeat visitors.

  Rod, who was born to Charlie and Bertha (nee Wise), spent his early years at Elmhurst, and secondary school years as a boarder at Scotch College. In World War II he served on the escort sloop HMAS Warrego, and after the war he ran the sheep operation that his father started at Woodside, Buangor, where he achieved the world top price for merino fleece. Sheep and cattle operations at Pleasant Hills, near Digby in Western Victoria followed, and later sheep operations at Branxholme and Wickliffe.

  When new methods of pasture development and livestock health treatments took off in the 1960s, Rod became a questioning innovator and was awarded an honorary doctorate by CSIRO. Also in the early '60s, he joined his friend Tom Robertson to take up the lease of Ellenbrae, a 400,000 hectare property in the heart of the Kimberley. They developed the property using their knowledge in tropical agriculture, and Rod was the first to introduce Brahman cattle into the region.

  His capacity for friendship was such that many of his mates were taken up to Ellenbrae on a "working holiday", and they helped put essential facilities in place as the property developed.

  Ross Smith, an old friend and fellow pilot, sometimes went up at Rod's request to tell a few yarns to a planeload of tourists. One evening, as the group sat around a table under canvas with the meal about to be served, a possum interrupted proceedings: it fell off a tent-pole and landed in a large pot of potato soup. Not missing a beat, it jumped out and landed in a second pot. As the tourists sat in shocked silence, Rod turned to Ross and said: "That must have taken a bit of organising!"

  But his flying experiences were not always associated with laughs. In the late 1950s, Rod and a friend (an ex-navy pilot) created an Australian record for the longest aerial spraying run of more than 11 kilometres, in a Cessna 182, to combat an outbreak of red-legged earth mite in the Western District.

  The words from The Old Timer, a poem by Philip Rush, read at Rod's private funeral by his daughter Cathie, characterise a remarkable man: His face was carved like the craggy cliffs as the weight of years he wore/ And his hair stood white as the breaking waves on a wild Australian shore/ His deep-set eyes were the faded blue of the Outback's summer sky/ And his hands were gnarled as a twisted gum, and he paused ere he passed me by. Rod is survived by his partner Roz Lawson and his children Kris (Ekselman), Derek, John and Cathie, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

  Source: http://www.theage.com.au/national/man-of-the-land-wove-tales-that-hooked-tourists-20090226-8j87.html

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