Pete Loughnan was in his early teens when the local butcher spotted him doing his newspaper round.
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Realising the young Redan footballer knew his way around the area, he offered him a job doing deliveries. He started wrapping the sales and washing the shop, before doing his five years of apprenticeship and becoming a qualified butcher.
Almost 60 years later, a lot of chopping, sawing, wrapping and chatting has gone under the bridge – or rather, over the meat counter.
Pete has decided it’s time to finish up, and will close his butcher shop on Pleasant Street South on Australia Day this year. He says the combination of working 6am to 6pm and the imminent sale of the building by his landlord meant it was time he retired.
Not that he’s 100 per cent sure about what he’s going to do. On the day The Courier visits, a stream of customers and locals pop in – not only to buy Pete’s products, but maybe to sit on a chair and talk about life in the streets nearby.
It’s a way of life, of shopping, of sharing, that’s being rapidly lost. The concept and pleasure of sitting down and forming a relationship with a local shopowner is disappearing, along with the shops themselves.
“I’m 72 now. I’ve been here since I was 15. This was my first ever job; I’ve had three bosses, and then I took over in ‘78 or something. I actually worked here before I was 15 – I left school at 15, I went to Central Tech.
“I had a paper run around here for the local shop, and the old bloke’d say on Saturday mornings ‘Do ya know where missus so-and-so lives?’, and I’d go ‘yeah I do her papers’, and he’d go ‘you’d be helpful around here because ya know where everybody lives.’”
The deliveries led to odd jobs for the butcher, and then to the apprenticeship. Peter Loughnan says a butcher in those days had to know how to do everything.
“You did the lot then,” he says.
“You learned how to serve, you learned how to break your meat up… in those days you’d make your own snags, do your own cooked meats, make your own savs (saveloys) – you did everything. You’d make your own dripping, which you can’t buy now; they had the big coppers out there to cook up the dripping.”
A 100+ game player for his beloved Redan, Peter Loughnan was later president for a few years, and saw the club through some rough patches. A picture of the 1924 3rd 18 team is still lurking in the back of the shop, as are the giant timber chopping blocks, worn with great grooves from decades of meat being broken up and sliced.
Peter Loughnan says there is no way he could have been successful without the support of his wife Pat, who has done the accounts and paperwork for him.
“It’s a really hard job, and she has always been there,” he says.
“It’s a real partnership.”
And belying the old joke about the butcher ordering four beers holding up two fingers, Peter says he’s only had a few ‘nicks and scrapes’.
“I’ve had a few stitches over the years, but you weren’t allowed to cut yourself! You couldn’t go to the hospital because we were too busy! You just bound her up and kept going, and hoped she stopped bleeding!”
When Ballarat still had a Victorian Inland Meat Authority processing plant in Alfredton, Peter Loughnan said he couldn’t count how many butchers there were in the town.
“I think my number at the VIMA was 52 or 53, so there were at least 70-odd butchers in Ballarat. Now the supermarkets have killed it all, but you can’t ask anyone at the supermarket about a particular cut, or how corned beef is made, the brine and colouring. They don’t know.”
He says he’s had the pleasure of serving three or four generations of families.
“That’s the secret of it. If you look after somebody, they’ll look after you.”
