FAMILY HISTORY: 31 JANUARY 2017

Robert Peffer definitely finds something worth celebrating this Australia Day

Robert Peffer, of Canobolas Eggs, was the keynote speaker at Molong’s Australia Day celebrations last Thursday. Molong Online is pleased to be able to reproduce, in whole, his very eloquent speech about what it means to be an Australian living in Molong in 2017:

Thank you for the invitation to talk to you this morning. When I was first asked if I would speak here I had no idea what I would talk about but it seemed to be too good an opportunity to pass up. A whole hour to tell a bunch of fellow citizens everything that I think is wrong with this country and what “they” should do about fixing it!

Actually, I was asked to reflect a little bit on our family history and explain how it is that Peffers came to be in Molong, in the light of the passing of my grandfather, Ivo Peffer, in April last year. In looking through the family records, I learned a lot. For a start, I saw a lot of stern-looking people in the old photos, especially in the wedding photos! This morning I’ll just skim through a few highlights and add a couple of more recent observations of my own.

I am regularly asked to spell my surname and people want to know if it is a German name.  Well, the Pfeffer (that is, P F E FF E R) name dates back to the 14th century in Bavaria, Germany but our Australian connection goes back to 1863 when the first Pfeffers started arriving in Brisbane. There is some variation within the family about how to pronounce the Pf version of our name but for simplicity, I’ll treat the first F as silent and later explain where my line of the family lost it altogether.

One Rudolph Pfeffer migrated here with his family in May 1863 and on 22 September 1863, his parents Josef Michael and Magdalena Pfeffer and a number of his siblings also set sail from Hamburg, presumably with the hope of finding new opportunities in a young country.  Among these siblings were my great-great-great grandfather Franz Viktor, later anglicised to Francis Victor Pfeffer. Great-great-great-great uncle Rudy allegedly met the family at the dock in Brisbane with words to the effect of: “Why did you come out here to this country? Now we all have a problem.” Probably not the first thing you want to hear on arrival in a new country after four months on a boat.

That was 153 years and one week ago on the 19 January 1864.

I won’t go into great detail about everything that followed, but there are a few little things I’d like to touch on. Francis Victor Pfeffer became a naturalised Australian in 1875 at the age of 33 and settled on land in the Fassifern Valley west and south of Ipswich, near where Boonah and Kalbar are today. While he was setting up his own farm, he would walk the 40 miles to see his young family every third weekend. He and his wife Fredericke ended up with 10 children and, despite this, that 120-acre farm provided them with a modest living. One day, when he was taking corn to Ipswich, a stranger rode out of some trees and offered to swap his horse for Francis’s if it could successfully pull the load up a hill. The trial succeeded and the exchange was made. The stranger turned out to be Red Adams, a bushranger, so there’s a fair chance the mare was stolen. It would be nice to think that it never occurred to great-great-great grandfather that he might be receiving stolen goods but ...

Out of that prolific first generation of Australian Pfeffers, their second son Frederick Pfeffer bought and worked a farm from 1898 to his death 81 years ago, this past Tuesday in 1936.  He and his wife Auguste had 12 children! All of them lived to adulthood, which was quite an accomplishment in itself at that time, and still is in much of the world today.

Their second son, Frank Edward Pfeffer, my great-grandfather, took the first ‘F’ out of the Pfeffer so that the girl he liked would marry him. Nancy Morgan’s father was a veteran of WWI and there was still some hard feeling in her family, apparently, towards German-sounding names in 1929. Either they were holding onto the past or showing impressive foresight about the direction Germany would take in the 1930s. Frank died before I was born but he must have been an interesting man, to have been a minister, President of the Baptist Union of NSW for a time, and also operating a real estate agency for many years. I know he was particularly keen on the establishment of building societies to assist returned servicemen to buy their own homes after the war.

The second son of Frank and Nancy Peffer was one Ivo Riley Peffer, born 6 February 1932 in Marburg, west of Ipswich; passing away on 5 April last year at the Molong Hospital, in a room with a view of his beloved Vale Head.  He was laid to rest in the Molong cemetery, and if you stand beside his grave, you also have a nice view of the farm. Conveniently, Grandad and Grandma built their house on top of that hill over there so a lot of things can be said to happen within sight of our farm – but don’t think we’re just up there spying on everyone! There’s plenty enough for us to do just minding our own business.

Ivo lived in several parts of Australia over the years as his father followed opportunities around the country, including Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales. He was no great fan of school and having a February birthday meant he was back at school for less than two weeks in 1947 until he was 15 and old enough to leave and start working.

Growing up in the years following the Depression and the war, Grandad always talked about how easy it can be to lose it all. I must admit that at times I would look at everything he had accomplished and accumulated in his life and think that he worried about that too much, but he was an extraordinarily driven man and no doubt it was part of his motivation.

The young Ivo acquired a love of chooks somewhere along the way. There was no history of poultry farming in the family but he subscribed to a poultry magazine and in January 1955, just months after marrying Marie, they bought six chooks and started producing eggs.  Initially they set up in various parts of western Sydney before settling for a number of years just near Camden. Each time they moved they got a few more hens.

In the late 1970s the State Government decided to acquire a big chunk of their farm for a road and Ivo looked west. He and Grandma bought Vale Head in 1979 and began the process of building a poultry farm from scratch. At about the same time as they relocated here in 1980, my parents married and moved to Brisbane. As an interesting side note, my father Alwyn Lindsay Peffer moved to Ashgrove, just a few blocks from Grandad’s cousin Alwyn Lindsay Pfeffer.

I know that there are those here this morning who can remember what Vale Head was like before the Peffers arrived, but for me, this has always been ‘The Farm’ and from boyhood I always loved coming here from Brisbane. Our visits were never long but I always had a sense that Molong was a real community in a way that few metropolitan suburbs can claim to be. I always had a sense that there was a lot of history here and that parts of what it means to be Australian were shaped and lived out in places like Molong, all over this country.

Now I’m definitely not saying that living in the cities makes you any less Australian, but people live in cities all over the world and don’t necessarily identify strongly with what we see as Australian values. I don’t want to sound like a walking cliché but the Australian way of thinking about concepts like mateship, fairness, equality and authority are really special and unique. And as rapid changes take place in our cities, there are opportunities for towns like Molong to continue to embody and practice those values in how we deal with each other and how we welcome others into our community.

In 2009, I moved here from Brisbane and joined Canobolas Eggs. I could see an opportunity to be part of something my family was doing and although I didn’t know if I would be any good at egg packing and distribution, I wanted to have a go. In 2015 I had the great privilege to be awarded a Nuffield Scholarship supported by the Australian Egg Corporation. As part of that program I spent 16 weeks in the last two years travelling around the world and learning about agriculture generally in countries as diverse as France, Indonesia, Japan, Israel, the Netherlands and US. I also specifically visited egg farmers in the UK, several countries in Europe, Canada and US.

There are Nuffield Scholars from over a dozen countries around the world and in meeting and mixing with them, in travelling to so many different countries, I have seen a lot of things – I could probably go on for hours but I’ve only got 20 minutes left.

I have looked at the rest of the world and really, out of all the times and places in history I could have been born, I am grateful I live here and now in Australia.

Aside from the things like clean drinking water and sanitation, aside from cars and ATMs and television and great hospitals and any number of other conveniences of modern life, I am grateful to live in a land where there is still opportunity.

This is a land where a poor family from Germany, who worked as labourers in vineyards and on steamboats, can arrive and after a bit of a slow start, still raise dozens of kids. This is a land where a young man could buy six hens and 60 years later he had close to 130,000. This is a land where a young city-raised lawyer can move to the country and start a whole new life.

Now, not everyone in life has identical options available to them and not every opportunity needs to grasped with both hands. But there are countries in the world where if your father doesn’t own land, you will never own land; where if you are a woman, you are a piece of property to be bought and sold; where if you are old, you will not live well or for long.

There is no such thing as a perfect people or perfect country in this life and Australia and Australians do have our flaws and you can read about it in the papers or listen to politicians and commentators, but of all the places in the world that we could be today, Molong, New South Wales, Australia would have to be one of the best. We live in a land where opportunity is not dead, where fairness, mateship and the golden rule of treating others as you would like to be treated are still alive and well in the way that most of us interact on a daily basis.

I know that for my part, that is something worth celebrating this Australia Day.