MEMBER PROFILE -  COLIN GAYLARD

Colin is one of our Meeting Attendance Officers.

I was born in Melbourne in 1942.  At that time my father was in the RAAF and when I was about eighteen months old he was posted overseas for almost two years. While Dad was away my mother and I spent an equal amount of time with my two sets of grandparents.   Mum’s parents lived in Bendigo and Dad’s lived in Colac.  I was to live in both of these places again later on.

After the war my father got a job with the State Electricity Commission in Sunbury.  We lived there until 1950 when the family – by this time I had two sisters - shifted to Colac and I attended Colac State School and then the Colac High School.  Eight people from my form six at Colac High were offered studentships to become primary school teachers.   Seven were offered places at Geelong Teachers’ College and one was offered a place at Bendigo. That one was me.  I have no idea why I was sent to Bendigo but I really enjoyed my time there.

After graduating from Teachers’ College in 1961, I was appointed Head Teacher (and only teacher) of Wurdi Boluc State School, at the ripe old age of 19 years and 1 month.    There was no electricity in the Wurdi Boluc district in those days and the school did not have a telephone.   Luckily the children there were very well behaved and kind to the brand new teacher.

After a year at Wurdi Boluc I was appointed Head Teacher at Mt Wallace and I stayed there for three years before getting promotion to my old primary school at Colac.

It was at this time that I was able to get very involved with basketball and tenpin bowling.   I had first become aware of basketball during the 1956 Olympics when I saw it on a very snowy television set in a shop window.    It was love at first sight and a few years later, in 1959, while I was still at school, I attended the foundation meeting of the Colac Men’s Basketball Association.

In future years, at various times, I held every executive position of the Colac Basketball Association and I am now a life member of that organisation.  I was also involved in the Colac Tenpin Bowling Association for many years.  I began bowling in 1963 and bowled in leagues and tournaments for over 40 years.

From 1973-76 I worked at the Point Lonsdale school and in 1977 I was appointed to Elliminyt Primary School near Colac.  I was principal there for six years.  It was during my stay at Elliminyt that I met Marlene and we were married in 1983.

Sometime around 1979-80 I bought my first computer, a Tandy TRS 80 Model 1 with 4k of memory. Bigger and better computers followed and I learned to program in BASIC. When Windows arrived I wrote programs in Visual Basic, firstly for tenpin bowling scoring and record keeping, then later on programs for children to use at school.   Although I am just an amateur programmer two of the programs I wrote have been produced commercially and are still available.

The remaining sixteen years of my teaching career were spent as Assistant Principal of Colac Primary School.   I was acting principal for about a year so I went from pupil to principal at this school.  

After I retired from full-time teaching I worked as a Casual Relief Teacher for about five years and I also had a few casual jobs with the Australian Electoral Commission.