Clarrie Smith/Saleyards
This plaque is located outside the Senior Citizens Hall, cnr Victoria and Parrott Sts.
The Cobden saleyards instigated the start of Clarrie Smith’s career. When he was 15, he mounted his horse, took his dog and went droving.
“I got a job with Dennys Lascelles in Cobden a couple of days a week. I would go to the farms and bring their cattle into the saleyards – one of my runs was from Glenfyne, 14 miles away,” he reports.
“There was nothing else, I had to do something to try and make a bloody quid,” says 80-something Clarrie from South Purrumbete.
A few months later, his auctioneering career got underway. “I came into the saleyards one day and the boss said, ‘You are going to sell the calves today’, that was the start of it,” he says. “It just went on from there.”
Proudly, he explains how he was the first local auctioneer to allow ‘the pick of the pen’ without buyers identifying the animals first. Buyers could bid and then the highest priced bidder could select what they wanted. This was contrary to the local practice of buyers identifying certain animals before bidding. It caused enough of a stir to make headlines in the local paper.
But Clarrie insists this practice, in many cases, made a 20-30 cent/kilogram difference to the value of an animal.
He remembers the regular ‘fat market’ at Cobden was on a Friday. “We used to run
them in the ring one at a time to sell them,” he reports.
“One night after a special sale, we had 20 or 30 bulls and, as they were sold, we let them run down and out the back into a big yard. Then they got fighting and what did they do? They knocked the fence down and went up the street.”
Cattle, in the streets of Cobden, weren’t an unfamiliar sight in the 1960s. They were allowed to graze by the roadside.
“We would tell everyone to shut their gates on Thursday night for the Friday market, all along the street to the saleyards right in the middle of town,” Clarrie says. “Some wouldn’t shut their gates and the odd cow would get in, churn their garden up and the residents would come out with the broom going crook.”
Clarrie says the tradition of cockies coming to town for the weekly sale is now a thing of the past. “In Cobden, Friday was their day out.
“They would all go and sit around the ring having a chat and, when the sale finished, half a dozen would go over to the pub and another half a dozen would stand on the corner and talk. It was a good social day out. In those days the sales didn’t start at 9am, they’d start at 1pm, after they’d done their shopping” he says.
After working as a stock agent for well over 70 years, and employed by Charles Stewart & Co, Clarrie enjoys his work. “You meet a lot of good people, there’s always something different cropping up,” he says. “The socialising is pretty good.”
The Cobden saleyards were delicensed and ceased operations in 1974. Part of the site was taken up by the Senior Citizens rooms, officially opened in April 1980.
