Biggest toy for oldest boy

By Peter Sweeney
LONGWARRY North couple Jack and Rosie (Rosemary) Pearson were passengers on a bus cruising through the American state of Montana 30 years ago when Jack noticed a newly manufactured self-propelled hay baler in a massive yard owned by agricultural dealer New Holland.
Soon after Jack cruised up to the coach driver, explained his interest in the machine and wondered if the driver could turn around.
“No, cannot do, we’re behind schedule,” Jack was told.
About 20 kilometres further on and the driver stopped for morning tea. Take two from Jack.
“You will end up with a good tip, a nice meal and a bottle of wine tonight if I can go back to that depot for a few minutes,” Jack said.
He could see the driver work his mind like he would work the gears on his coach.
A couple of minutes later, the driver assembled the travelling party and told them to “hurry along” as something had cropped up and he had to return to Montana.
Jack made a beeline for the NH dealership, where he was told the baler could be his for a little over $20,000. He decided against it, but the baler remained in his mind.
Fast track to just two years ago, when the Pearsons were closing their hay baling business and selling machinery.
Wanting to remember his near-on 60 years of making hay for a living – but more so to recognise the role a self-propelled baler had played on his bank balance – Jack hopped on eBay and went hunting for a 1425 baler with an air-conditioned cab, just like the one he had seen from the bus window nearly three decades earlier.
He got a reply – from a bloke in, of all places, Montana. The man told Jack he knew of a baler in an outlying area which was under snow, and it would be a month before he could see it.
Jack was sent photographs via email, liked what he saw and this time “went for it” for $15,000 American or just a little more Australian. Today, the hay baler, sporting the red and yellow colours of NH, has made itself at home in one of Jack’s sheds.
It is the only one of its type in Australia.
“It’s my toy,” Jack, whose steel hip makes more noise than any toy, says. “I take it out the paddock now and then. Self-propelled balers made us – but they weren’t as modern as this one.
“I didn’t have air-conditioned ones and used to come home with dust all over me.”
Born in Bunyip, Jack Pearson lived for a year in Newall Road, Longwarry, before he moved to his present address. Rosie hailed from Yallock, which once had a church, hall and school, but has been “swallowed up” by Bayles. Ironically, the couple met when playing tennis at Longwarry North.
“I’ve been here 78 years, just about know the place by now,” Jack says.
“The place” is about 130 hectares, which the Pearsons lease out to “John Nelson, a milking man”.
Jack initially milked cows, before starting a hay baling contracting business with friend Roy Berryman in “1948 or 1949”.
When they married at Drouin in Melbourne’s Olympic Games year of 1956, the Pearsons branched out on their own.
Mr Berryman, who still lives just “down the road in the same house”, ventured into photography, starting the well-known Roylaine Studios. His son now owns the company and there are quite a few outlets in Gippsland.
A 1949 International T, pulled by a Farmall A tractor, was the first piece of machinery used in Pearson-Berryman hay-making contracting business.
When it comes to machinery, particularly hay balers, Jack’s photographic memory is just as impressive as Mr Berryman’s camera equipment.
“We bought from Lacey Equipment in Williams Lane, Warragul,” Jack says.
“The place (Lacey) was managed by Vin Rowe, whose son (Graham) now runs Vin Rowe and Son machinery in Warragul. I got an International 52 hay baler, which proved good.
“Then I acquired a New Holland Super 77, which was traded for a NH 78 and that’s when business started to pick up.”
On August 25, 1965, the Pearsons paid £3877 ($7754) for a New Holland 1281, a self-propelled baler.
“In the first year, we made 135,000 bales of hay and our total income was £13,000, or $26,000. We owned that baler for 25 years, and it made 1.25 million bales of hay. We sold it for nearly as much as it cost us.
“It was the machine that made us, that’s why I was keen to get one like it. Around the time I first went looking for it, bigger round bales were becoming more popular (for weather and carting reasons) than the smaller, square ones.
“At one stage, we owned five (Gehl) round balers.”
The little, if any, relevant information Jack cannot recall is kept in scrapbooks of memorabilia, including invoices and receipts going back decades.
A bill the Pearsons forwarded to a client on February 5, 1976, had them charging 18 cents per bale to rake and bale. “I think we were charging 13 cents a bale a decade earlier,” Jack says.
These days, when not busy with their twine and netwrap business (see side story), the Pearsons take an active interest in grandsons, Jeromy and Joel White.
The brothers run agricultural contracting businesses – including hay baling – with Jeromy at Drouin and Joel at Longwarry North.
“They wanted to come in with us, but it was better for them to be on their own,” Jack says. But, no doubt, the lads would have watched grand-dad for many years and seen the best way of doing things.