Leonard Rex Wildermuth (Lex) Memorial Page

Dad was the seventh of nine children and grew up on the family dairy farm in Nudgee Rd, Hendra. I could only find one photo of him as a child, but that all changed when he met Mum. From then on, there were a million photos.

They first met at a dance in November 1949 when Mum was 16 and Dad was 17. Uncle Micky Mears was going out with Mum’s older sister Joan and they were going to a dance to raise money for the Meeandah Riding Club. Uncle Mick asked if Mum and her other sister Valma would like to go too, so off they all went. At some point in proceedings, they played the party game Forfeits. All the girls had to put something of theirs in a bowl and Dad picked out Mum’s brooch. Their forfeit was to go out and count the stars, but Mum wouldn’t go outside with him. They met up later in the kitchen and had a chat. Mum thought he was nice, but she wasn’t really expecting to see him again.

Not long afterwards, Uncle Mick was supposed to take Mum horseriding, but something came up and he couldn’t go. He asked Dad if he would take her instead. I think there might have been a bit of matchmaking going on. Mum was expecting her soon-to-be brother-in-law, but Dad turned up instead. So that became their first impromptu date. Years later when the movie ‘The Man From Snowy River’ came out, Mum told me that the way Tom Burlinson sat on a horse really reminded her of Dad when she first knew him. Dad conveniently left his hat behind on that first occasion, so he had an excuse to go back to collect it. Mum’s mother asked if he would like to come for Christmas dinner, and Dad said ‘yes’, but could he bring his little brother. Uncle Woods would have been about 14 at the time and everyone was surprised when ‘little’ brother came through the door and he was taller than Dad.

Dad and Uncle Woods were always close and they had many adventures together over the years. They made trips out to Richon, a cattle property out past Taroom where their older brother Jack and his family lived. Mum went on some of those trips too, and I remember going there for a couple of holidays when I was still in primary school. I learned to ride a bike there, and took the first photos on my brand new Kodak Instamatic camera.

Uncle Woods was in the army and he was stationed in Wodonga for about 20 years. We had many holidays visiting them and lots of memorable family camping trips with nine of us in one tent. Even though my Wodonga cousins lived the furthest away from us, I actually saw them more than my Brisbane cousins because of all those holidays. I always thought of them as my four younger sisters.

But back to Mum and Dad’s budding romance. They were at Mum’s house one day. Mum was sweeping the floor and Dad was sitting at the table fiddling with something. He casually said, ‘We might get married, hey?’ Mum said she was so shocked at how casual he sounded, she just said, ‘Yeah, alright’ and kept sweeping. They’d been going out for three years, were engaged for three more, and were married on the 10 December 1955. They just celebrated their 69^th wedding anniversary last month, so they were together for 75 years.

Dad started his working life on the family dairy farm. After he met Mum, he went to work at Brown and Broad’s timber mill, where Mum and her father worked. He was still there when I was born in 1961. He then got a job at Humes Pipes where he spent the rest of his working life, except for a stint as a house painter for a couple of years in the 60s. I’d like to share a couple of anecdotes to give you an idea of the type of father he was.

We’ve always been a down-to-earth family and I’ve never had much time for people who are full of themselves. When I was in kindy, there was a kid who was always bragging about his father the pilot. This kid was really getting up my nose, so I asked Mum what my father did. Mum said, ‘Well you know that big pipe in the playground at kindy?’ Now this was one of those big cement pipes that had been brightly painted, and it was one of the favourite things in the playground because you could climb through it and over it. Mum told me that Dad made pipes like that. The next time she came to pick me up, the teachers told her they’d been in stitches. I’d stood guard over that pipe at playtime and wouldn’t let the snooty kid in, declaring, ‘My father made this pipe’. Definitely better than having a father who flew planes.

The other story happened when I was about 19. Dad hadn’t been home from work long when a woman rang him. Her son, who was a young man at the time, was late coming home and she was worried about him. This young man was a bit of a homebody and Dad had taken him under his wing at work. Dad assured the woman that he would be okay, but it didn’t sit right with him. He knew this lad wasn’t the sort of person to just go off somewhere without letting his mother know he’d be late. He told Mum he was going to go back to Humes and have a look for him, and Mum went with him.

Everyone had knocked off, but Dad could see that the young man hadn’t signed out. One of the fellow’s jobs was to drive the dump truck down to the waste site to empty the rubbish. It was a fair way from the factory and he had to drive along the side of a creek to get there. Dad headed down that way and as he got closer, he could hear someone yelling out. The dump truck had gone over and the young man was pinned underneath it. Dad managed to get him out and fortunately he only suffered bruising and a very hoarse throat from calling out. But this wasn’t far from the mouth of the Brisbane River. There was swampy ground around there and the creek would have risen as the tide came in overnight. If Dad hadn’t found him, the young man would have drowned. Dad didn’t make a big deal of it, but the next day, the young man and his father turned up at our house to thank him. They were so grateful he’d gone back to look for him and ended up saving his life.

I was proud of Dad for making cement pipes like the one in the kindy playground and I was proud of him for not brushing off that lad’s mother, but taking the time to look for her son. Dad was a man of few words, but he was kind and generous to a fault. He was so happy when I married Tim and he has been the best father I could ever have asked for.

When Mum and Dad moved up here in 2019, they technically had two rooms next to each other. But before we even arrived, they requested that both beds be put in the same room to make as their bedroom, while the other room became the sitting room. Towards the end when Dad was very unwell, the doctor was concerned that Mum wasn’t getting enough rest and they offered to move her into the other room, but Mum wouldn’t leave Dad even though she was getting very little sleep. She was with him right up until his very last breath.

Whenever I came to visit Dad, he would always stand in the doorway of his room and give me a big wave goodbye when I got to the end of the corridor. As the hearse drives away today, please join me outside if you would like to, so we can give Dad a big wave. I love you, Dad, and we’ll miss you, but we’re glad you’re at peace. Safe in Jesus’ arms.