Golf Vic Vol 60 No 2 2019

was a cleek – that I used to go around with,” Reg recalled. “I loved it.” He followed his older brother Ted into competition golf at the Harrow Golf Club, which sits midway between Horsham and Hamilton, but by then the Great Depression had taken a firm hold and the family had to leave the farm. Reg moved to the city, to Heidelberg, and recalls playing golf in the 1930s at a course on Plenty Road. By then he’d started working in the shoemaking industry, a trade that was to occupy all of his working life, albeit with one major interruption. In 1939, aged 20, he was among the first to volunteer for the newly formed Second Australian Imperial Force and in May 1940 boarded a troop ship bound for the UK and eventually the Middle East. It was some troop ship. “The Queen Mary,” Reg said. Before being switched to wartime duties, this Cunard-White Star Line showpiece was the largest and fastest ocean liner in the world. “I was a signaller and was lucky enough to spend a lot of time on the bridge of the Queen Mary during the voyage to England.” The following year, 1941, Reg found himself in the Libyan desert with the Second AIF’s Ninth Division, helping defend the besieged deep-water port of Tobruk, a prize target of the German and Italian enemy forces. “We were young, fit soldiers; ‘Jerry’ couldn’t move us. They tried to blitz us with tanks but we gave them a hell of a thrashing,” Reg recalled with some relish. From where the signallers were stationed, they could see right across the harbour, and Reg has vivid memories of watching German Stuka dive-bombers screaming down to unleash their deadly cargo on the supply ships and port facilities. The Rats of Tobruk held the enemy at bay for five months before being withdrawn by sea in late August. Tobruk was relieved two months later, although the town eventually was lost to the enemy in June the following year. Reg later fought in the desert at El Alamein, then in New Guinea, before returning home in 1945. After marrying, he briefly lived in Bentleigh and has memories of playing golf at first light on the public course at Brighton. “Beautiful time to play,” he said. Upon moving back to the northern suburbs, he joined Latrobe GC, but the pressures of work left him little time for golf and he relinquished his membership. “Come back when you like,” Reg was told, but that undertaking apparently was forgotten when he reappeared, after having established his own sho- production business, in the mid-1960s Around that time, at the local RSL, Reg met Jack Harris, then president at Rosanna, who suggested he join his club. And so, in 1967, he began playing golf on a course and at a club that for 50 years has given him immeasurable pleasure. He can’t really remember how far he used to hit the hickory-shafted clubs but the modern-day clubs have helped prolong his enjoyment of the game. He’s only just started using a set of clubs made especially for him by clubmaker Geoff Waldron, a fellow Rosanna member. “I reckon the golf has been a big part of living so long,” Reg said. “Out in the fresh air, playing with friends, keeping occupied; what could be better?” A fine testament, perhaps, to the ‘Game for Life’. BABBA MIA As Reg Ballard was reminiscing about playing golf at Harrow in the late 1920s, he recalled a story that revolved around a club trophy called the Babba Mia Cup. It seems a local landowner Miss Isabella Edgar decided to sponsor a new event at Harrow, the Babba Mia Cup, named after her property. It was first played in 1924 and in 1928 was won by Reg Ballard’s brother Ted. The winner in 1935 was one A.W.Corney but after that it disappeared. The story is taken up by Harrow Life Member Alan Grant, who recalled how one day in 1990, Ted Ballard called in at the club to renew his aquaintance with the Babba Mia Cup. “We’d never heard of it,” Alan, then Harrow secretary, said. The committee asked Grant to follow it up and after a meeting with Ted, he got into contact with the Corney family, who confirmed the cup was in their possession, but no one knew who it belonged to. They were only too happy for Grant to come and get it, so after 55 years the Babba Mia Cup returned home. “The committee decided it wouldn’t be played for again, but it has pride of place in the clubhouse,” Grant said. “I reckon the golf has been a big part of living so long. Out in the fresh air, playing with friends, keeping occupied; what could be better?” Rat of Tobruk Reg and his medals. 34 Golf Victoria