By Jed Lanyon
It’s the end of an era for a local butcher shop as longtime butcher Eric Duff announced his retirement after serving the Healesville community for 50 years.
Family owned business, The Beef Joint, will soon be sold as Mr Duff hangs up the apron in the coming weeks.
Mr Duff left school and started as a butcher’s apprentice in 1956, eventually opening his own butcher shop in 1971 following the passing of his mentor Alex Christie.
The 79-year-old told Star Mail he has enjoyed serving his loyal customers over several decades and that the decision to move on wasn’t easy.
“It’s a bit strange and a bit different, it really is. From the day I first started butchering as an apprentice I’ve enjoyed the people and I’ve been a community working person for a long time.
“One of the hardest things will be missing the companionship of people coming into the shop. They’re not customers, they’ve been really good friends,” Mr Duff said.
The lifelong butcher prides himself on the top quality meats sold from The Beef Joint.
“We’ve only sold grass-fed products, we’ve sourced very good products and we’ve stayed that way all this time,” he said.
Mr Duff explained one of the best things to happen to him while running his shop was his son, Ben, deciding to join the business to work full-time, which he’s done for the last 20 years.
“He’d been coming to the shop since he was three. He’d help set up, went to school, come after school. The whole family, at some stage, have worked with me at the shop.”
Ben Duff described his father as his best friend and his teacher.
“It’s been the best thing, it really has… To work alongside him has been really fantastic,” Ben said. “I don’t have many words to describe how good it’s been.
“He’s the hardest working bloke I’ve ever met in my life. 65 years of butchering and it’s full-on hard work, heavy lifting, long hours, long days… He’s a little bit slower these days but he still pushes on and keeps going.
Ben said his father has a strong presence in the community, not only for his butcher shop on Main Street, but for being involved with many local organisations and serving on the chamber of commerce and as Justice of the Peace.
“Whatever we were interested in, he sunk his teeth into, while also running the butcher shop full time,” he said.
“I was speaking to someone about this the other day and they said it’d be interesting to see how many people in Healesville have had something signed by dad as Justice of the Peace. He reckons half the bloody population have had one thing or another signed by him.”
Mr Duff recalled trading following the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009, where he learnt about the monumental impact the fires had on members of the community.
“So many people were devastated… The amount of people that came to the shop, then we found out their palace had burned, that they had lost family or had nowhere to go or no one to talk to,” he said.
“I suppose for quite a while we were a sounding board to let them unwind and to get it off their chest.”
Mr Duff shared his plans for his next chapter in life.
“Let’s hope this Covid finishes up so we can at least go interstate. We’d like to go overseas and maybe do one more trip.”
After so long in the trade, Mr Duff has seen all the fads of the industry come and go as TV cooking shows try to put a new spin on old recipes.
“The TV chefs would be talking about this aged beef… We’ve been doing it for bloody 30 years beforehand! I find now people talk about things they see on TV that I had sold 50 years ago when I first got started.
“They see it, they re-tag it as this new fandangled that we’ve invented, but it’s not, they’ve just read an old recipe book. But it’s been good because it’s got a lot of people interested and thinking that they can do these things themselves.”
Ben shared how the butcher industry has changed over a generation when a butcher was typically a farm owner and ran an abattoir and the ‘paddock to plate’ experience was more than a trendy term.
“Back then it was a real paddock to plate experience. But it wasn’t known as paddock to plate then, it was just what you did,” he explained.
“Now all of a sudden we have this cycle that has gone around again where a lot of butcher stores, people and TV shows are prompting that paddock to plate experience.
“They want to know the provenance of the product, is it grass fed? Is it grain fed? They want to know more information about it. Back when Dad started, that was all you were doing because that was the way it was done.”
When news of Mr Duff’s retirement came through to locals, some of their most loyal customers decided to start buying in bulk and freezing their meat products fearing they will soon no longer be able to get a hold of their favourite cuts.
“We’ve had customers who would come in and buy bacon at 300 grams, they’re ordering five kilos. We’re going to be flat chat for the next few weeks,” Mr Duff said.
