A life lived in livestock

LOCKIE Campbell was a stickler for the old Aussie traditions.
Many a Yarra Junction local will remember sitting on the counter at Champion & Campbell butcher shop as a youngster as Lockie sliced off a bit of Stras and teased them with it on the point of his knife.
Lockie made the most of life and its opportunities. He died too young at 60 but even then he was doing what he loved most, checking out the cattle at Ricketson’s farm in Don Valley, dogs Lloyd and Snow along for the ride.
Lachlan John Campbell, the only son of Lachlan and Muriel Campbell, was destined to live a life involving livestock – his birth was announced over the PA during the Adelaide Cup on 13 May 1947 where his father had raced a horse he was training at the time.
He was the fourth generation of Campbells in the stock trade and he bought and sold livestock from a young age. He was about seven when his parents separated and Lockie and his younger sister Patty went to live with a life-time friend of their father Hubert Champion and his wife Jessie near Cockatoo.
Although Patty returned to live with their father she said the shelter of a happy home life was what Lockie wanted most and he thrived on the love and guidance he found in the Champions.
He left school at 15 and after completing a butchering apprenticeship he and Hubert opened a butcher shop in Yarra Junction. “As was his nature Lockie got to know every face in the town, all the kids names and stories and if he didn’t know them, he made it his business to find out,” Patty said.
In 1970 Lockie married Wangaratta girl Diane Humphry and the happy couple settled in Wandin, moving to Wesburn in 1974, the year their son, Grant, was born. Belinda arrived two years later.
Patty said anyone who ever mentioned what a lucky bloke Lockie was to have found someone as wonderful as Diane always got the same reply – “You don’t need to tell me, I picked her you know. I didn’t win her in a bloody raffle.”
Lockie and Diane opened their own butcher shop in Yarra Junction a few years later and moved into property development when the landlord decided to increase the rent. They built three shops and took in partners Spiros and Helen Karambalis to build the remaining five to create the Yarra Junction Arcade.
After 25 years of butchering and with Hubert ready to retire from his long-established stock agent’s business, Lockie became a full-time stock and station agent.
It was a passion which took him all over Australia. He loved the travel and the sales and his gregarious, down-to-earth nature won him friends wherever he went. Over the years Lockie was a member of Warburton Masonic Lodge, Woori Yallock and Yarra Junction football clubs, the Healesville Amateur Racing Club and the Yarra Valley Camp Draft Club where he served as president.
In July he was recognised for nearly 20 years of service to the Southern Campdrafting Association where he had been a director.
In a moving tribute, Grant and Belinda said their dad was a born story teller who loved the bush, loved a joke and loved to sing. And, he didn’t mind where he was, he could strike up a tune anywhere.
The days were never long enough for Lockie but he crammed them full of everything he loved and somehow found time for it all – family, he was so proud of Diane and of his children and their achievements, friends, work, the dogs, cattle and horses, a beer and a bet at Healesville races, a cuppa with his mates at the Yarra Junction police station, holidays – reluctantly taken, but always enjoyed, and Jessie, now 95, with whom he loved to reminisce about old times.
It says something about the life of Lockie Campbell that even on one of the most anticipated Grand Final days in Melbourne, more than 600 people, were there to see him off. – Kath Gannaway