As a boy, John Gay would travel with his family from Adelaide to stay with his grandparents, Isaac and Caroline Poulton, who lived in the small Limestone Coast town of Glencoe. He remembers wonderful times running around Glencoe, visiting some of the properties and old buildings in the district. One of these was the iconic Leake Brothers woolshed which was no longer utilised for shearing but used as a store shed.
John, now 92, came back to visit the Glencoe wool shed. He didn’t return with a view to running around Glencoe this time, but with an altogether specific project in mind. John had recently been sorting some family photographs and came across a number of images that he recognised were connected to his visits to the Limestone coast of long ago. He decided that he wished to see these returned to the region and passed to appropriate groups who could make best use of them.
So it was that John, daughter Meredith and son Andrew arrived in Glencoe in January and presented previously unknown photographs of the Glencoe woolshed and the Port MacDonnell wool wash to the National Trust of SA Glencoe Branch. Following this, they then travelled to the Naracoorte Sheep’s Back Museum to donate images there as well.
A short time later at a regular Glencoe Branch meeting one of the members, John Berger, commented on the high quality of the images and suggested we have an enlargement of the wool shed shearers produced for display in the woolshed. This has been completed (2.5 metres wide) and the woolshed now displays a wonderful image that might easily have been lost if not for the interest and determination of John to make the trip to handover these wonderful old images.
