Michael Pound’s long and fascinating life has been closely connected to an agricultural career of great diversity and skill. He also embraced house restoration, landscape renewal, community involvement, and life as a family man. To all, Michael is known as a “really good bloke”.

Michael, now in his 90s, has had a long history with Shoreham, an association that was established long before he and his wife Margaret permanently moved to their 1960s house, “Grange Lea” in old Shoreham.

Margaret was a direct descendant of the Dowling family, who settled in Stony Creek (Shoreham’s original name) in the 1860s. Margaret’s father Christopher West purchased 125 acres from the James Byrne estate in 1952 to fatten cattle and undertake other mixed farming.

Michael often travelled to Shoreham at this time to assist Christopher with the many tasks associated with the farm.

This continued till 1982, when most of the property was sold due to the new road (Frankston-Flinders Road) dividing the property, Farming became untenable. Michael and Margaret later purchased the remaining few acres with creek frontage.

Michael has a lifelong love of agriculture. After finishing school, he completed a course in herd testing and dairy supervision and joined the State Department of Agriculture. He was then seconded to the CSIRO to assist with the testing of cattle for pleural pneumonia, a severe respiratory disease.

In this line of work, he spent a lot of time travelling around the state giving advice to property owners.

In his 20s, he “went bush”, spending several years working on horseback on large cattle stations.

Later, he obtained a job with Dalgety’s, a large Australian and international pastoral company. This involved long trips throughout Australia and visits to such countries as France, Vietnam and South America. His mission, using herd testing, insemination and embryo transplants was to improve and expand the genetic base of cattle in Australia and in the countries he visited.

By this stage, Michael had married Margaret and they had three children, Bernard, Jeremy and Angela. Michael was away from home a great deal and decided that this was not compatible with his role as father and so he resigned from Dalgety’s, sold their house in Croydon and moved permanently to Shoreham.

In his 60s, he worked at Redhill Estate for more than 10 years part-time, promoting their wines around the Peninsula. Michael continued to explored his love of agriculture by joining the committee of the Redhill Show on which he served for many years.

After a long and arduous major renovation of “Grange Lea”, which was in a dilapidated condition after being used as a hay shed, Michael and Margaret then embraced the difficult renewal of the steep banks of their section of the spring fed Stony Creek.

Community involvement in Shoreham was always important to the family. They were involved in tennis, Thai Chi, entertaining family, grandchildren and others. They loved their proximity to the Pines beach with swims, walks and exploration.

Michael still engages with all things agriculture by closely following ABC TV’s Landline and notable rural papers such as Stock and Land and The Weekly Times.

Michael Pound has lived a long, rich and varied life. This short article covers only his important endeavours. Shoreham is fortunate to have characters of the ilk of Michael as part of its community.

Local Profile: Michael Pound, a life in agriculture

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