Ray Walker
At age 74 and having spent more than 40 of those years working with the forest industry as trainer, safety officer and all-round legend Ray Walker is hanging up the keys of his trusty Nissan Patrol to head into retirement. Source: Timberbiz
Week after month after year Ray criss-crossed Tasmania bringing his cheerful but sage advice to contractors and their staff on their jobs, averaging 60,000 to 70,000 kilometres a year.
“I was reasonably hard on tyres early on, but the tyres got better as I got older, or I might have slowed down a bit,” Mr Walker said.
“For all that he never lost a point on his licence, in fact only had a couple of warnings from the constabulary – one for crossing the centre line and one for going a bit quick.
“By geez I must have been lucky,” he said.
Mr Walker is proud of being inducted into the AFCA Hall of Fame for services to the industry. The AUSTimber expo in 2016 at Traralgon required him to take a trip out of his beloved Tasmania.
“I had to go to New Zealand about 1980 and I swore I’d never go far again,” he said.
“Tassie’s as good a place as you’d get so I didn’t see the point in travelling too far from home. They got me over there under false pretences anyway.
“They got me up at this presentation do and I didn’t know what to say.”
Mr Walker reckons he’ll have no trouble filling in his time in retirement, already having a job two days a week looking after a couple of grandchildren he dotes on.
His brother has a 500-acre bush block in the Midlands and Mr Walker comes in handy for any chainsaw work.
But he says he’ll be using a nice modern chainsaw machine rather than some of the collection of old models that once had him feature on an ABC TV Collectors show.
In fact, his collection is dwindling, as he’s given away some of the competition hot saws or parts thereof and old machines.
“It was something I was going to be tinker within my retirement, but I kept putting off retirement and I don’t have the inclination now.”
And the reason he stayed so long in the industry?
“It’s only for those northern ladies I call them that I lasted as long as I did – Karen Hall, Denise DeBattista, Debbie Tickner, Eva James and Sandy Hodge,” he said.
“Being the age I am I was never very savvy with computers and stuff and they used to keep me going. I wouldn’t have lasted anything like as long if it wasn’t for them.”
AFCA and the whole of industry thanks Mr Walker for his huge contribution over the years and wishes him the best with his retirement.
