Dale embodies spirit of Dowerin GWN7 Machinery Field Days volunteers

After 55 years of involvement with the Dowerin GWN7 Machinery Field Days, few people could be said to embody the town’s proud volunteering spirit more than Dale Metcalf.

Come August 25, the 83-year-old farmer and former Dowerin Shire president will be wandering the site, chatting with exhibitors to make sure the event is “running like a well-oiled clock”.

“I’ll just be finding out what their feelings are, what they want, what issues they have, and how happy they are to come back,” Mr Metcalf said.

“There is a culture in Dowerin of supporting and looking after each other, and the froth has really come to the surface over the years with Field Days.”

Although he has been involved with the event since the 1960s, it was in about 1970 that Mr Metcalf started working with the catering committee and as a cashier, where his razor-sharp mental arithmetic was put to good use.

“There was all this mucking around with calculators, but I could add it up without holding the crowds up,” he said.

“From there, it just gradually grew that I became the manager of the money for all the food outlets.”

Mr Metcalf and his wife Norma have seen many changes, including the introduction of cash registers and security guards, the latter he only begrudgingly accepted.

“Security has always been to me a damn nuisance because as soon as you’ve got it, people are aware of what’s happening,” he said.

“When I was walking around with my little plastic bag — and that could have $4000 in it — no one knew that I didn’t have jocks and socks in there.

“I was never worried about ever being attacked, because if anyone did attack me there were that many people around that the person wouldn’t have got out of the Field Days site.

“The first year we had security, the bank had a red car that the bank manager was driving, the security guy was sitting in the front and I’m sitting in the back.

“As you drove around, the kids would be calling out ‘oh, there goes the money machine’.”

More broadly, Mr Metcalf said the number of machinery manufacturing exhibitors had dwindled over the years as a result of amalgamations.

He also observed “financial planners and investment gurus” lose interest when the public realised “some of them were just here to cash in and skim a commission”.

Apart from those few changes, Mr Metcalf said the Dowerin Field Days event had stood the test of time.

He could not remember any that stood out above others, although there was one incident about 35 years ago that still played on his mind.

“One day, very early in the day, there was a woman with a couple of kids and they had obviously come a fair distance and she had just been to the ATM,” he recalled.

“She paid for breakfast and I gave her the change, and when I checked it after, I realised she’d given me two $50 notes and I only gave her change for one.

“I waited all day for her to come back, but obviously she didn’t twig what had happened, and I always felt so guilty about that that it’s stuck with me.”

A low point, of course, was last year’s event being cancelled due to COVID-19.

Organisers opted to pull the pin months in advance after deciding the risks were too great and numerous to proceed.

“We cancelled very early in the year, not long after COVID started to run rife,” Mr Metcalf said.

“There was no point because we didn’t know what the outcome would be; it might have been OK, but we couldn’t take the chance.”

Judging by the word on the street and number of exhibitors, excitement is building for this year’s event — although Mr Metcalf said it would be a bit different.

“I’m told there’s a whole lot of new exhibitors this year — small ones — but we’re not going to get all the big ones from the Eastern States,” he said.

“There’s a few quite big machinery manufacturers that are not coming; they can’t come from Queensland or New South Wales with COVID.”

For those new exhibitors, Mr Metcalf had the following advice: “You expose your business and your product here at Dowerin Field Days, then you’ve got 12 months of potential sales.

“But if you come here just thinking you’re going to have a one off and a big cash bonus, you’re not on a winner.”

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