Reminiscing: Greg Shilling last week with two tins of KY canned fruit. He spent 30 years at the cannery and was involved in providing information for the book, which will be released in December.
Kyabram Cannery has played a part in the lives of many residents of the town, for Greg Shilling it was 30 years of work at the factory that inspired his involvement with the Kyabram Fruit Cannery Centenary book.
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With the book set to be released on December 3, former workers such as Mr Shilling are looking back at their time at the processing plant.
Mr Shilling’s three decades at the cannery started in 1975, with warehousing, labelling and storage. He was one of the workers involved in providing stories for the book.
“The canned fruit was processed for three months, roughly December through to the end of February. And then all the cans were stored in our warehouse, and I was in charge,” he said.
“And then throughout the year, we would label the cans. The cans were always unlabelled and so you could have labelled it two or three different ways depending on where it was going to, overseas or domestic.”
Mr Shilling said the products would be shipped across the globe, particularly to western Europe.
“We were known around the world with the KY brand, KY fruit,” he said.
“And I have heard that there are people who are writing in now about all this centenary thing that's going on saying I can remember being in Denmark back in 1950 and astounded to see a can of KY.”
He talked about “fruit season”, which started mid-December and went through to mid-March. It was the busiest time for the plant, which would attract workers from across the country.
“It was full-on nearly 24 hours a day,” he said.
“When I started there it was it was about 18 hours a day and would start at 6am and would finish about midnight, roughly. It was very busy for those three or four months of the year when the fruit was being processed.
“People would come down from Queensland, all over the place to work that season because it was good money, long hours. There was a lot of local people who worked for that three months to make some money then after the fruit is finished, there was only the permanent work then in the labelling and packaging of the fruit.“
Mr Shilling said during the fruit season the cannery would employ around 1000 people whereas during the off-season there would be around 100 permanent staff doing maintenance and labelling.
He talked about his early years at the plant where he would start at 3pm and would not finish work until every can that came out of the processing area was counted.
The Kyabram Fruit Cannery meant a lot to the community, providing jobs and stimulating the economy. Mr Shilling talked about his feelings when he found many of his co-workers had lost their jobs.
“I was lucky to stay on at the time,” he said.
“Some people were in tears. Some people just didn't know what to do. Many went to work that morning and by mid-afternoon they didn’t have a job.
“So at the time my wife said to me, she couldn't quite remember me coming home that night. And I said the town's in trouble.”
The fruit processing and canning departments were closed down after the intervention of IXL in December 1981, which brought its jam and spreads production to Kyabram.
It was then taken over by an American company, J.M. Smucker, in 1989, which was a positive for those employed, including Mr Shilling, who became the purchasing manager.
Branding: KY was a well known name in the canned fruit market and the new book will tell the story of the cannery’s long history.
