Milestone Celebration: Beacon community celebrates 90-year-old Ray Miguel as he finishes his 73rd harvest

A lot has changed since Ray Miguel finished his first harvest more than seven decades ago. Wheat bags, open air tractors and clearing trees by axe were the norm when he started working on his uncle’s property at Wialki at the age of 17 in 1949. Now freshly 90, after celebrating his birthday on December 15, the Beacon resident has just wrapped up his 73rd harvest, with no plans to give up his job on the chaser bin any time soon. A bumper turnout of community members joined dozens of family and friends from across the State for a Saturday night full of celebration a couple of days after Ray’s birthday. Ray has been an integral part of the family’s harvest efforts this year, only taking a quick couple of days off from his chaser bin duties to spend his birthday with his wife in Perth. He works 8am to 5pm, following his son Noel and grandson Ryan in the headers and delivering the grain to the waiting truck. “I was 17 when I did my first harvest, and every year since I have been here,” Ray said. The farming veteran is quick to describe his early harvests as a backbreaking form of “all day hell” — spent sitting in open air tractors in the blazing sun. Just seven bags of grain would fit on the tractor, and trucks would be loaded by hand. “On a hot day, you would start at daylight and then finish at about 7pm,” Ray said. “We would take the bags to a dumping area, and we would load the bags onto a truck. “We would cart about 60 at a time... it was really slow going.” Born in 1932, just seven years before WWII started, Ray lived in Fremantle with his family. As the Japanese started making their way across the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, Ray was working as a young paperboy – delivering newspapers in Perth. His father Charlie was captured in Germany and spent two years as a prisoner of war before returning to the family home in Fremantle. The Miguel family ended up in the Wheatbelt when Ray’s father and mother Elizabeth packed all of their money in a bag and took the family up to Wialki for six months. At the time, Wialki was a hub for the area and Ray’s father was working as a railway ganger in Mollerin — about 60km west of the town. After six months, the family moved back to Fremantle — but their connection with the Wheatbelt was set in stone. Ray finished high school at CBC Fremantle, taking up running and football as hobbies. His love of football was founded in Fremantle and ended in the centre of Beacon. After finishing school, Ray took a job in Perth but the pull of life on the land was too strong. At the age of 17 he took up a job working for his uncle at Wialki. For the next five years, he helped with cropping and with the farm’s 8000 sheep. A big part of Ray’s job was picking up dead wool. It was a job that paid five pounds per week and helped pay for his first car. The chance to run his own farm arose unexpectedly when an abandoned farm between Snake’s Soak (halfway between Wialki and Bencubbin) came up for sale. The undulating property was abandoned by a farmer who had joined the war in the 1930s. The bank wanted 600 pounds for the 2840 acre property, just 600 acres of which was cleared. But three hundred pounds in five years was all Ray would pay. With a borrowed tractor from Mukinbudin, Ray started farming at the age of 21 in 1954. He set about clearing the land with an axe, and planted his first crop using a Fordson Major Crawler in 1955. It would be 10 years before he had an enclosed tractor cab. Football, farming, family and his wife Ruth have been the four major loves of Ray’s life. He played for Mukinbudin from 1948 to 1959, and was the inaugural captain of the Beacon Bombers Football Club — which reformed in 1976 after a seven-year recess. Ray chuckled when he recalled the last game he played for the reserve side. “I got one free kick, one goal and one broken rib,” he laughed. “I never played again after that. Silly old fool.” Ray has been proud to see his children continue to farm in Beacon, where there have been four generations of Miguel’s farming — including his two sons Noel and Luke, and grandson Ryan Miguel, and four grandchildren. Together, they run more than 8000 hectares east of Beacon, towards Wialki. Ray and Ruth did toy with the idea of moving to Mandurah permanently. But they found they missed the family too much and moved back to Beacon for a few years. Ruth, who has dementia, now lives in an aged care facility in Perth and every three weeks Ray makes the three and a half hour journey to see her. Ray is keen to tell some funny stories when Countryman catches up with him, sitting in a ute at the Beacon community crop about 15km north-east of town. The funny stories have been vetoed by his family, but are full of laughter and cheekiness – which says a lot about the kind of bloke he is. After spending more than seven decades in the Eastern Wheatbelt, Ray can’t think of anywhere else he would rather be. The little community on the north-eastern Wheatbelt is his home. “I love my friends up here… there are so many lovely people,” he said. “It is amazing to see the gear up here now, it is so different to what we started with.”