by Flick Ruby

A step ladder was the first Coop purchase I made within days of arriving here, almost eight years ago. Tim, the manager at the time, carried it to my car, which made such an impact because, at that time, kindness from strangers was almost shocking to me. Soon after, I became a proud member of this institution, the Cobargo Cooperative Society, community owned since 1901, and felt relief at the thought of never entering Bunnings again! Pretty much every few days since Tim hit me with that kindness, I’ve found the tools, hay, hose fittings, plants, chook food, petrol as well as the help and advice I need at the Coop from folks I now call friends. They all help me carry stuff to my car, and the feeling of that being special hasn’t worn off.

Last time Dan threw some dog food into the back of my car, I twisted his arm for an interview and between one interruption for him to drive the forklift and another to locate some wire for a customer, I found out his family goes back a long way.

‘I grew up in Sydney and moved here almost twenty years ago to get out of the city and have kids. But I’ve got a family history here too. My grandmother, who lived into her 90s, was born in her grandparents’ house called Fair Verona, on Gilberts Road. Her grandparents were the Gilberts, and beyond them, were Tarlintons. That house was burned in the fires, but I did get to see it a couple of times before we lost it. My grandmother was a Gannon who married a Williamson, so my lineage goes back to the early settlers of Cobargo. I spent a bit of time down this way as a kid and was put on the bus by mum and dad to stay at the dairy farm in Brogo. So, when I moved from Sydney, I felt like I came home. Mel and I have been in Yowrie for ten years now.

‘When I came into the Coop to ask for work, it just so happened that they did have a casual job going for a couple of days a week. It was a life saver because I had developed some pretty bad RSI that I couldn’t shake from the landscaping and tree planting business I had been running solo. Within two years, Tim was ready to retire, and he asked if I wanted to manage. At first, I didn’t know if I could be responsible. Imagine if I screwed it up! Who wants to sink a ship that’s been running for 120 years? It was a big step up for me but there was so much pointing in this direction that I just decided to trust and say yes. Now I can see that everything in my life has led me to being here. For me, it’s a privilege to work here. That’s how I see it.’

The Coop is so much more than a farm supplies store, it’s a community hub and where many of us go to get all our projects to the next stage. And now we can also slip out the back and borrow a giant tool or specialised gear that we could never afford from the Tool Library. I asked Dan how the Tool Library came to be parked out the back at the Coop.

‘Geoffrey Grigg had been talking for twenty years about the idea of a tool library, and Scott Herring also had the idea in his head. It wasn’t till the horror and loss of the fires that it really became something that could happen. IHG, one of our biggest suppliers, approached us (or did we approach them? I actually can’t remember how it all just came together!) and a big donation of tools and a container arrived from the Independent Hardware Group and off it went! The Tool Library takes up a fair bit of our usable space so there was plenty for the Board to discuss, but it just seemed like such a perfect fit for our ethos of community support to have it here. Some discussion was around it possibly taking away sales, but everyone agreed that our community needs this now. It was a no brainer. We had lost 400 homes and twice as many sheds and tool sheds.’

When I asked what change Dan has seen over the period since the fires, he paused. ‘The terror that everyone went through is huge. The greatness and the beauty of what has happened since is also huge. I believe that fundamentally there is always equal positive to negative, so the bigger the negative, the bigger the positive. It was hard not to see overwhelming negative at the time, but now I can see so many amazing things that have grown out of that traumatic experience. I really feel like it’s reinvigorated this community, and it also reinvigorated the Coop.

‘We’re not here to make billions of dollars. That doesn’t make sense. Those profits come out of our own community. We exist solely to provide services to the town. Since the fire, I think people have recognised and remembered again that this is a community-owned store. That feeling of what we are and what we do and why we’re here has grown since the fire because of how we’ve acted. We could have profited from the adversity but, instead, we lowered margins on a lot of essentials like all the fencing or plumbing supplies so we could make it as affordable as we could. And we’ve got some changes in the pipeline that are going to really cement that in.’

Photo Dan Williamson at the Coop by Sidonie Barton

Listen to some of Dan’s interview with Flick Ruby and Jacob Round on The Triangle Community News podcast.