Anniversary filled with memories

By Kath Gannaway
ALBANIAN-BORN Sazan Halit was a skinny 18-year-old when he started work at the Upper Yarra Dam in 1955.
When he left the project two and a half years later he’d muscled up and had a lifetime career with the Melbourne Board of Works ahead of him.
“I loved it,” Sazan said last week, in the lead-up to the dam’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
“It made me. I came to Australia when I was two and was from a farming family, he recalled.
“I was a skinny kid when I went there and when I finished up I had grown three inches taller, put on a couple of stones and had been playing pretty good A-grade tennis and top football.”
The fact that he got the job at all was down to the good old Aussie-Albanian tradition of being able to work around a bit of red tape.
When he fronted up for a job he was told the minimum age on the project was 19.
“I went home and dad said, son, I’ve made a mistake on your passport; he did a bit of a fiddle and I was 19 … officially”.
It suited the project managers who were bussing men up from Melbourne to fill the huge need for labour.
The cosmopolitan mix of workers, local and imported, was exciting, and at times explosive.
Many of the professionals, surveyors and engineers, and migrant workers, came from the Snowy River project. It was a way of life. When Upper Yarra finished they moved on to the Thomson.
Warburton, and beyond, must have seemed like the end of the earth to the city dwellers who answered newspaper advertisements enticing them to sign on.
“In those days there was no dole, so all those people from areas like South Melbourne could come up in a bus and get a half a day’s pay and a meal at the mess as an incentive. If you liked the work and the guys reckoned you were OK, you were sent for a medical,” Sazan said.
“You can imagine you had your ex-crims, and then there were the people who came over from all over Europe – Italians, Poles, Greeks, Maltese, Germans, the Irish … it was a different world.”
It was an atmosphere, which suited the young Sazan who relished the chance to join the different groups for some homegrown international cuisine.
“They had their own cooks, the Yugoslavs, the Italians, and it was only two and three (two shillings and threepence) to get a three-course meal. I learned to say things like “pass the bread”, “pass the butter” and can still remember those words now.
The United Nations notion fell down however when it came to the fairer sex!
After a hard week’s work the Saturday night dance in Warburton was a chance for the visitors to let their hair down.
“You would show up at the dance and there’d be fights everywhere,’ Sazan said. “They had eyes on our local girls, and the local blokes didn’t like it.”
Looking back (and without the shackles of modern-day PC) Sazan recalls the Irish workers made a particular effort to maintain their stereotypical image.
It was mostly the Irish, he says, who “ … got full of whisky and liked to play up a bit”.
Sazan will give a talk on the history of the dam as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations.
Included among anecdotes and personal insights of the people and social life, he will talk about the project as an ambitious engineering project.
The dam was built by direct management under the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, using 75 per cent of on-site material.
Melbourne Water will host a celebration at the Upper Yarra Reservoir on Sunday 25 November from 10.30am to 3pm to celebrate the completion of the dam wall.
Activities include historical displays, the launch of a book Upper Yarra Dam – a 1950s construction town, written by Shirley Tunaley, dam wall tours and a sausage sizzle.