Category: News Articles

Words by Anthony Sawrey, with permission of The Local
Research by Clunes Museum

On November 27, 2021 a plaque was unveiled at Collins Place, Clunes, honouring the memory of Francis Joseph Collins, Shire Councillor, inaugural Clunes Tourist Development Association president and prominent local businessman in the decades after WW11.

One of four children, he was born at Ballarat in 1913 and grew up a big man with a shock of red hair, nicknamed Meggsie after the Ginger Meggs comic.  A keen sportsman, Frank, as he was known, played in the Ballarat Football League for Golden Point Football Club (also known as the Rice Eaters) and by 1939 was the club president.

Clunes native and well known Geelong Cats player Bob Davis mentions him in Woofa, the book on his playing career: “One of the most influential ‘Rice Eaters’ was Frank ‘Meggsie’ Collins, a local footballer who taught all the kids special football and training skills. And when I was coach of Geelong, I adopted many of his techniques.”

At the end of the 1930’s Frank decided to move to Sydney. Unable to take part in military service due to poor eyesight, he qualified as a chemical engineer and remained in NSW until 1949 when he returned to Victoria to take over running the National Hotel in Clunes.
“I came here and thought I would stay a few years, that was in 1949,” he said in an interview in 1986.

In the same year he purchased the Swan Freezing Company which sat on the site known today as Collins Place. Formerly serving as a Salvation Army hall, knitting mill and Clunes Auction Market, the large weatherboard shed was converted a freezing works and commenced operations in 1948, purchasing rabbits from local trappers as well as supplying ice to businesses and homes.

Today most people tend to think of ‘rabbiting’ as something the rural poor did as a desperate measure to keep food on the table during hard times. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality was Australians were estimated to have consumed 27 million rabbits a year during the 1940s alone. Around places like Clunes where the creatures were in plague proportions, trappers could earn over 20 pounds a week when the average wage in 1950 was six pounds per week.  Frank continued in the rabbit buying and ice making business until the 1960s, but as chicken gradually replaces rabbit on household tables, he decided to close the factory in 1969.

But the rabbit freezing business was only a small aspect of this man’s contribution to the local community. He was involved in the setting up of the Clunes Swimming Pool, and was a member of both the cricket club and the Clues Magpies Football Club.  He coached there from 1949 to 50 and was also President twice in 58-61 and 66-69, a period when the team was very strong, making the Clunes Football League grand final 13 times for five premierships.

His daughter Cathryn, one of five children, also recalls that Frank was known as Father O’Collins for the popular barrel he used to run on Sunday mornings to raise money for the Clunes footy and cricket clubs.

In 1967 he joined the newly formed Shire Council of Talbot and Clunes, serving until 1985.  A tireless advocate for the advancement of Clunes, he was also instrumental in forming the Clunes Tourist Development Association and was its first President.

But Collins Place, with its rose garden and lawns, is arguably Frank’s most significant contribution to the fabric of his beloved Clunes.  The old freezing works were demolished in the 1970s with the site being given over to hockey and basketball for many years. But upon Frank’s retirement in 1985 he donated the land for the creation of today’s park which was completed in time to commemorate the Australian bi-centennial in 1988.

Words by Tony Sawrey, with permission of The Local

The shop at 49 Fraser Street, Clunes has been in existence since the 1870s. Its first tenant was John Lemmon, a saddler and today of course it now holds the newsagency owned by Craig Drewer. But its life as a barber shop and billiards hall for over 40 years and the larger than life character of “Flash Les’ Davis is where our story will focus.

Les Davis was born in 1903 and grew up in Ballarat where he had a barber shop on Sturt Street. He married Ethel Jones in 1927 and they had a son Robert in 1928 – later to become famous as AFL footballer Bob “Woofa” Davis.

In the 1930s the family moved to Clunes where he took over a small space and continued his trade. But Les’s business portfolio was a little more diverse than just shaving hair and trimming moustaches.
His early days in Ballarat were taken up with refining the art of playing billiards and running an SP bookmaking operation out the side of his barbershop. Illegal starting price bookmaking emerged around Australia in the 1930s when the advent of phone and radio allowed for the results of a horse race to be immediately known.
SP Bookies would take bets fixed to the starting odds or price of a runner which finalised just before the barriers opened. While the bookie and gamblers could get an idea of how the odds were moving in the hours before the actual race, the official starting price could only be known afterwards and thus determining the final payouts.
It seems like a complicated way to make a living but before the rise of regulated and taxed off-course betting shops such as the Totalisator Agency Board, or TAB, SP bookies were everywhere and hugely popular with generations of punters.
It was natural enough for Les to continue his bookie operations when he opened his barber shop. And it was rumoured that the ladies who worked at the old manual telephone exchange in the old post office tipped him off whenever the Vice Squad were planning a surprise visit.
Over the years the place developed into quite a hangout for people in town. And not just for his barbering skills or bookie activity but due to the billiards saloon he had out the back with tables salvaged from the nearby Club and National hotels. He also had a lending library installed mostly with western and cowboy novels.
Ethel had died in 1948 in Queensland which tends to suggest that she and Les had parted company by that time. Son Robert was carving out quite a career as a professional Aussie Rules football player and was playing for Geelong Football Club. By 1955 Les had remarried to Elsie Filby who remained with him until his death in 1983 at 80 years of age.

By all accounts he was a “colourful character” with all the dubious connotations that come with the term. Known as Flash Les he liked to flash a fat roll of notes and was an old fashioned ladies man who could sing onstage and was always chosen to MC concerts and socials. That’s him pictured above, reclining front and centre, at a town social in 1938.
In Just a Boy from the Bush Lloyd Jones describes him as “Bookmaker and barber, polished and witty, as gentleman of those callings usually are”.
Maureen French, writing about her experiences of Clunes in the early 70s recalls being serenaded by Les from his shop as she did her shopping. And Christine Rowe, whose father was friends with Les, remembers as a kid the barber shop being a man’s place that you were not allowed to go into.