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Looking back: Young boy’s memories of a visit to the cannery - circa 1960

By Contributed

Feb 4, 2022

Note all of the KY fruit boxes: A section of the Kyabram Cannery in action with all the industrious seasonal workers.

Randal Kohn has fond memories of his childhood visits to his grandparents in Saunders St, Kyabram, in the mid 1960s. As a young boy he was lucky enough to be shown through the cannery a few times by his grandfather Ralph Gartner. Ralph was the chief engineer at the cannery until 1965.

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Randal, a city boy and son of Joy Kohn, nee Gartner, thought the cannery was an amazing place — noisy and smelly — with everyone and everything on the move.

Two things particularly stood out for Randal in his memory of the place: the pile of fermenting peels out near the railway siding (completely objectionable on a hot summer day) and the deafening loud rattle of empty cans running in cages around the factory, each one pushed along by its successor as it gets injected into the line.

Randal’s mother, Joy, visited the cannery often as a child in the early 1940s. She would sometimes deliver dinner (now mainly referred to as lunch) to her father Ralph Gartner if he did not have time to get home for his midday meal.

The fruit season was a busy time in Kyabram each year, with a large number of itinerant workers staying in the town and surrounding areas to pick fruit in the orchards and work in the cannery.

The photo is believed to have been taken by Ralph Gartner, chief engineer of the Kyabram cannery at that time in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Photograph contributed by Randal Kohn.

Compiled by Eileen Sullivan, Kyabram Historical Society voluntary Librarian.