Kevin Richardson reminisces about driving milk tankers through the flood waters on the Terragong Swamp to make sure Australians could get the best quality butter ever made in this country
Kevin Richardson was destined to spend his life under the cranes and furnaces of Port Kembla. His apprenticeship papers were lined up, his grandfather had vouched for him, and the general manager of the steelworks had smoothed the way. Then the rules intervened. He was fifteen, not sixteen, and too young to start.
“Go back to school for a year,” they told him.
He didn’t.
Instead, he walked next door.
Kevin’s family lived right beside the Jamberoo Dairy Factory. Fifty metres down the road lived the Boxsells, with Geoff already set on a dairy technologist’s path. Kevin asked manager Wally Boxsell for twelve months’ “gap year” work. One year on the floor, then he would head to the steelworks. That was the plan.
He stayed forty-three years.
Kevin’s working life began in milk reception, the most basic job in the place. But he had mentors everywhere he turned. His father, Bill Richardson, was the foreman and passed on the value of hard, careful work. In the test room, Ned Roach spotted talent early and lobbied for Kevin to be trained properly so the factory would have someone ready when he retired. And in the churn room, the first butter maker, Steve Dare, taught him the craft. Steve was sharp, funny, a bit unpredictable, and utterly brilliant at butter. Kevin learned to trust both the science and the instincts that Steve had honed over decades.
By the time Kevin became the factory’s first laboratory manager, he already understood the principle that shaped everything Jamberoo produced: you cannot make great butter from average milk. The farmers carried the quality first. The factory carried it next.
It was Kevin who helped shape the butter that went on to win Supreme Champion Dairy Product of Australia in 1976. And when Geoff returned from Hawkesbury College and a scholarship to New Zealand with new ideas and the confidence to try them, Kevin was the partner in crime who made the impossible work batch after batch. Together they cultured cream before anyone else did, and together they created the trial product locals, with Jamberoo bluntness, called Stuff. It was spreadable butter long before spreadable butter was legal.
Kevin Richardson in the lab at Jamberoo Dairy Factory in the 1970’s
Kevin remembers the valley in its working days, the swamp full of dairies, the quiet local knowledge that kept trucks moving through floodwater, and the afternoons when neighbours caught up at the pub rather than through tourism menus. He also remembers the characters, the mishaps, and the farmers who handed down wisdom along with their milk.
The flood water can get very high at Terragong Swamp – confident the tankers kept away when it got this high
He never set foot in the steelworks. The factory claimed him instead.
And Jamberoo is better for it.
You can listen to Kevin and Geoff Boxsell reminisce about Stuff here with Mel James on ABC Illawarra
Kevin tells great tales read some of them here
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I remember lots of stories shared with Kevin. He was a great work Mate.
Denis Brennan