Les Waight is well-acquainted with many family histories in Ballarat. As the scion of one of the best-known monumental stonemasonry families in Ballarat, he’s chiselled the names of our deceased into granite headstones and ledgers since he was 15-years-old.
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The Waights go back to 1935 in the stone business, after Les’s grandfather (Les senior) first worked on the King George V memorial which stands at the intersection of Sturt and Armstrong streets today.
“My grandfather started with a firm called Barrow and Son, and he always told me that was his first job,” Les Waight says.
“It was two years of labour, learning his apprenticeship. I think he decided that was too hard, and he went out by himself.”
Eighty years later and Les Waight Monumental Masons are now Ballarat Memorials. The story of how that name came into the Waight story bears telling in itself.
“Back in those days there were about 30 masons in Ballarat,” says Waight.
“There were no lawn sections in the cemeteries or crematoriums, so everyone had a headstone, and all the masons knew each other of course. You’d go to a cemetery and there’d be a mason there doing a grave and another mason doing the grave beside him.
“My grandfather met the daughter of the sexton of the Ballarat cemetery – the sexton lived in the cemetery then, in the house just inside the gate – and he married her, so she became my grandmother. Her brother Harry Doncaster was a monumental mason as well. He had the business of Ballarat Memorials.”
Les Waight’s great uncle Harry was known as ‘Hack’ to his mates in the 19th Infantry Training Battalion, in which he was a lieutenant during WW2.
Doncaster was an officer assigned to the Cowra prisoner of war camp in NSW in 1944. On August 5 of that year, the Japanese inmates staged a mass breakout. A thousand prisoners stormed the fences, and 359 escaped. Helping to lead the recapture in surrounding farmland, Doncaster was ambushed by a group of the escapees and fought them to the death.
Les Waight says the Japanese overwhelmed him with numbers and stole his officer’s pistol to shoot him. He fought on using his fists and a rock he had grabbed until he died, one of four Australians and 231 POWs to do so. His business is now called Ballarat Memorials, honouring Harry’s sacrifice.
There are just two monumental masons left in Ballarat today, a sign of the increase in lawn burials and cremations. Years ago, Waight would do almost 100 fully-made gravesites with granite ledgers (grave covers) and headstones a year. Now it’s just 12. It remains a physical job, nevertheless. Waight still hand-carves lettering in some of his work, and the physical effort of shifting hundreds of kilos of stone into position remains, even with mechanical assistance.
“In my grandfather’s day they’d use horses, drays and poles – he’d tell me about the ropes dragging the stones up. Cranes are a bit of a luxury,” Les Waight laughs.
“But to hand-carve a letter might take an hour these days, well that’s $70 to $80. The cost is too great, so for new work we use plotted sand-blasting.”
Much of the granite used in modern headstones and graves in Ballarat comes from Harcourt. When grave-building was more common, an order would come in, the mason would go to the quarry, place his requirements, wait for it to be quarried and delivered, cut and polish it and make the grave. It might take two months.
Now stock is kept on hand, especially for sections of cemeteries that require a uniform appearance, such as lawn sections. People can still bespoke their choices however, and often they will base their designs on something Waight has already made.
When it came to his own apprenticeship in the 1980s, Les junior found he had skills to teach his lecturer in masonry, born of work in the family business.
“There was no apprenticeship school. They sent me down to Melbourne and I sat in the Collingwood library while they found me a teacher. We were sitting there with a hammer and chisel, teaching the teacher what we knew.”
He does gravesite restorations and statuary work, rebuilding leaning obelisks and columns, digging up and replacing the foundations of sinking graves, repairing Ballarat’s marble marvels.
“Sometimes you need to dig down past the coffin to natural ground, to rebuild the foundation properly. A grave might not show that it’s badly made for years.”