Love in the time of a country dance: the story of George and Valerie Lockman

Their story began in what may seems to many a different world to today.

Growing up in the lean years during and after World War II, George and Valerie remembered paying for new shoes or clothes with government-issued coupons.

From the age of 13, George, born in 1936, worked as a truck man in the nearby Cornish Hill gold mine. As a young man, he later found work as a bushman felling timber outside Daylesford.

Valerie, born in 1939, was meanwhile raised on a dairy farm beyond town and later worked mending fabrics for a local textile factory.

They met one evening at the Musk Vale Country Dance.

The year was 1954, and the dance was one of the few nights on the calendar when George, Valerie and their friends could dress up and meet.

The other was the picture theatre, which screened a film once a week.

George had to be quick to ask Valerie for a dance before his mates asked first.

“You had to be pretty smart to get the girl you wanted — with all your mates [there],” George said.

It was something Valerie could confirm.

“He always made sure he was there to ask me [to dance] first, before anyone else,” she said.

Valerie said she thought George was pretty special from the moment they met.

“He was pretty good-looking and a good dance partner.”

In the early days of their courting, Valerie rode her bike to work. Her route, much to George’s delight, took her past his family’s home.

“I made sure I was sitting on the seat out the front of the house when she went past. I started waving, and then I’d give another wave,” he said.

And then one day, George said, the sky clouded over.

“I invited her in out of the rain,” George said.

It would be the first of many such serendipitous weather events.

“It was often raining,” Valerie said.

Soon the couple began dating. But before things could go any further, George was called away to begin his National Service training.

George, then 18, later moved to Puckapunyal to complete his 176 days of training.

George said the discipline of his military training changed him.

“The whole group of us that went all came out improved, well-mannered gentlemen, I think,” George said.

Upon completion of his training, George returned home to Daylesford.

George and Valerie later married at the Daylesford Methodist Church.

Their marriage coincided with the year of the 1956 Melbourne summer Olympics. The couple remembers family, friends and neighbours crowding wall-to-wall around one of the few television sets in the neighbourhood.

A year later, in 1957, the newly-weds’ first child, Helen, was born.

At the time, George and Valerie operated a slate quarry on their Daylesford farm.

It was a time when Valerie, armed with a permit, would ride a bus into town to purchase gelignite and chargers from the hardware store.

She would then travel on the same bus back home to George and the quarry — explosives and all.

But the end of the decade saw the beginning of a tumultuous time for the Australian economy. At the time, the nation was experiencing what has become known as the ‘credit squeeze’ — a minor recession.

Unemployment soared. In the 1961 election, the LNP under Robert Menzies narrowly avoided defeat at the polls by an ALP led by Arthur Calwell.

Searching for opportunities, the young family relocated that year — of all places — to King Island in the Bass Strait.

While Valerie remained for three weeks in Daylesford, George went on ahead. Because Facebook Messenger or text messages were hardly thought of back then, the couple stayed in touch through letters.

George found work in a Tungsten mine and Valerie took on the task of raising three children while working part-time as a teacher aide at a nearby school.

The produce from their dairy farm supplied the King Island Dairy company for several years.

For their 25th wedding anniversary, George and Valerie’s family sent the couple on a holiday to New Zealand.

In 1988, with the kids grown and moved away, George and Valerie returned to Victoria. They bought acreage in Cobram East and ran a mixed dairy farm for the next several years.

The couple visited Tasmania for their 40th wedding anniversary.

“A lot of our friends we’d made on King Island were in Tasmania,” Valerie said.

“We had a lovely time there.”

And, for their 50th and 60th wedding anniversaries, the couple celebrated in style at Sporties Barooga.

During that time, Valerie worked at the Cobram council while George found work at Pullar’s Orchard.

After their retirements, George and Valerie bought a block of land in Barooga and settled there during the early 1990s. They built the home they live in today.

From then on, both George and Valerie have involved themselves in multiple pursuits.

George played a role in the Barooga Cemetery maintenance volunteer group. Valerie, meanwhile, found herself involved with the CWA and the Ottrey Lodge as a volunteer visitor.

Valerie also spearheaded the Cobram Barooga Yarn Bombing Project, of which many Cobram Barooga locals will have heard and seen around Christmas.

The couple’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren live across the country. A grandchild, who followed in George’s footsteps, now works in a Western Australian mine owned by Gina Rinehart.

After 68 years of matrimony, Valerie and George found the most important thing to marriage is more simple than some might think.

“Sharing everything is one of the most important things,” Valerie said, “whether it be finances or what you are doing or rearing your children. You’re a partnership once you’re married.”

It was a sentiment George echoed.

“There’s no such thing as ‘his’ or ‘hers’,” he said.

“If you’re going to have your motorcar and your house and your this and yours that, your marriage will never work.”

The couple celebrated their 68th anniversary on Saturday, October 12, with lunch at the Barooga Hotel.