Now at 95 years old, local dairy farmer Denzil Thomas reflects on a life spent living and working in the Northern Rivers and continuing a generational farming legacy.
Very few can still remember riding into Bangalow on a horse and sulky. Or rushing out of a film at the A&I Society Hall as the hotel and bank on Bangalow’s main street burnt down.
Nor can many say they were baptised down the road in All Souls’ Anglican Church, married there 24 years later, and the church organist for 78 years!
Denzil Thomas can recall these tales and many more, as we sit one summer afternoon in the living room of his Possum Creek family home. Originally purchased in 1918 by his father Harry, an English dairy farmer, the home is a time capsule in itself, with the original dairy still standing down the path.
Many generations of the Thomas family have been raised under its roof and the rich layers of history and memories are palpable as one walks through the rooms.
I ask if Denzil has ever thought about leaving the farm, which is met with a quick response: ‘No, no. It will stay in the family. My boys won’t think about selling it. It was always a happy home. All my kids were brought up in this house too. We love the place and I’m so glad that they want to keep it too.’
He smiles warmly while grabbing a carton of Norco milk from the fridge, and sets it down beside our tea and biscuits.
NORCO supplier
Like his father before him, Denzil was a loyal supplier to Norco. He remembers having to move ten-gallon cream cans down the road with a wheelbarrow for when the Norco cream carrier would come by and collect them and take the cream off to be processed into butter.
Cream was the main, and most valuable commodity at the time for dairy farmers and it took ten gallons of milk to make just one gallon of cream.
The family dairy is the beating heart of this home. Much like the house, it has retained its original charm, structure, and has seen four generations of Thomas family farmers over the last 100 years.
Old wooden beams hold up the corrugated tin roof and the cement floor beneath Denzil’s boots is dusted with loose hay.
He reminisces, looking around the very room he began working in as a boy 89 years ago. Here Denzil, youngest of six, would sit beside his parents and siblings while manually milking their cows until buckets were full and the job was done.
He recalls, ‘It was pretty tough farming. Hard work. All hand milking’.
‘I remember we all used to get up with mum and dad at six o’clock in the morning. Me and my older brothers would all milk before going to school.’
The children would all walk down to the quaint Possum Creek Public School, which has since become home to renowned restaurant, The Hut.
By 1946, Denzil was graduating high school and his siblings had left the farm seeking different, and in some cases, more profitable paths.
However, dairy farming was where Denzil felt he belonged and had a duty to serve. It was now solely up to him to keep the legacy of dairy farming running through the Thomas family.
Denzil began working full-time in the dairy with his father where he continued learning the trade.
He delights in telling me, ‘Dad was a strong milker and he timed himself one day. He always milked into a three-gallon bucket, a really big bucket, and he filled that bucket in three-and-a-half minutes just with hand milking!’
Before settling in Possum Creek, Denzil’s father first owned a milk-run in Sydney.
He would wake at 2am to milk 25 cows by hand. At 5am, he would harness up a cart and start delivering the milk all around town. Then at 2pm he would bring the same 25 cows in, milk them, and do the afternoon delivery.
All-consuming work
There is then no doubt that by 1942, when the Thomas family got their first milking machines, there was a sigh of relief.
Although there was still no electricity on their farm until 1950, these machines were a lifechanging advancement to their daily milking practices and in Denzil’s words, ‘it made the milking so, so much easier.’
For decades the dairy remained and functioned the same. It wasn’t until 1995 that the next major development arrived.
Denzil added a much-needed extension, which saw a large shed housing rows of modern milking machines installed. This impressive renovation enabled them to milk more than 90 cows an hour, which was a far cry from the previous six cows at a time. Here Denzil spent most of his days, continuing to work hard, long hours until he was 89 years old.
Closed in 2019
In early 2019, Denzil was forced to make a heartbreaking decision. Owing to lack of financial viability, the family dairy had to be closed and so ended an era.
Not only in the Northern Rivers, but also in the broader Australian agricultural landscape, many multi-generational family businesses have since collapsed.
Denzil reflects on this stating, ‘there were a lot of dairies, it was all dairy country around here at one time and now there’s hardly any. There’s only three left in the area and I was one of the last four in this area. There were originally nine.’
Farming continues
As for the future of their family dairy, Denzil and his son Geoff keep the door to the dairy slightly ajar by agreeing to leave everything as it was.
As Denzil puts it, ‘All that equipment could be brought back into work again in case [dairy] ever got to a profitable stage. It wouldn’t be too difficult to have to sell our beef herd and buy a dairy herd I suppose.’
Despite hurdles and hardships, the lineage of farmers in the Thomas family remains as strong and dedicated as ever.
The same driven and devoted approach toward life, work and farming instilled by Denzil’s parents has been passed down the generations to Denzil’s own children and grandchildren.
His sons David and Geoff are life-long farmers who also worked as young boys in the dairy alongside their father through to their adulthood.
Now both in their 60s, they have dedicated their lives to working the land of the Northern Rivers and in service to their community.
The generations of farmers continues with Geoff’s son Charlie, a determined and successful fourth-generation farmer who also works with his father in their business, GCT Rural Contracting, on properties across the Northern Rivers.
With roots first put down here over a hundred years ago, the Thomas family continue to keep the spirit and tradition of multi-generational farming alive… until the cows come home!
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