Australia’s forgotten farming genius – Headlie Taylor | Landline | ABC Australia

never in the field of crop farm endeavor was so much achieved by just one person for the benefit of so many [Music] among the dazzling gold of ripening canola and the vivid green of maturing wheat crops sits handy like many of the towns in the grainsbelt of southern new south wales it's barely a blip on the map its massive silos speak of the importance of grain and the town's museum tells of henty's most famous son [Music] today is a red letter day for henty the much anticipated unveiling of a sculpture to honor the pioneer inventor headley taylor we've been watching it and hearing about it for so long and be great to see it headley taylor is hardly a household name though to many he's a mostly unsung australian hero never in the field of crop farm endeavour was so much achieved by just one person for the benefit of so many this day was the culmination of almost four years of hard work and fundraising i salute headley taylor and the sculptor we're about to see as a salute to the creative human endeavor and spirit of yesteryear which still means so much to us this year and beyond this terrific sculpture hard way they used to have to make the cogs years ago among the crowd was headly taylor's only surviving son john now in his 92nd year everyone was thrilled by the life-sized bronze i think it's a wonderful sculpture that's been put on display here today it really shows the essence of the man he's there he's at his anvil the determination on his face the strength of the man the focus the journey to install hedley taylor to its rightful and prominent place in australian history began in early 2014. this all started from a landline program originally and someone said we should do a sculpture and we said why not that someone was former grain grower and machinery repairman kerry peach they make monuments of everything why can't they make a monument of hedley taylor we're in front of a header back in 2014 the vintage machinery collector realised his dream of holding an open day on his farm showcasing the history of grain growing beginning with genuine horsepower this day long cavalcade was a trip through time with kerry's own collection providing a vivid display of how harvesting has progressed over the years i don't forget that day because it was 2014 and it was 42 degrees yeah i suggested that they should have a monument made of headley taylor and not thinking that this would ever adventure but it did and i'm really wrapped in that because famous people need to have monuments and they need to be recognised landline was also in hinting on that occasion to attend the annual agricultural show 2014 was a special year after all it was there exactly a century earlier that hedley taylor was at last able to demonstrate his much revised and modified but now successful grain harvester in far off western australia then governor malcolm mccusker who also happens to be a grain grower was more than a little taken by the landline story i saw that and was immediately inspired by the story i'd never heard of hedy taylor before but i didn't realize that really it was through hedley taylor that the combine harvester was produced the good governor made a sizable private donation to the cause much needed because what was proposed a life-size bronze sculpture would cost close to a hundred thousand dollars once people started to understand what it was all about and what this great australian had done that caused them to say well i'll put my hand in my pocket too over time the cause and the fundraising gathered momentum from a field of 14 up-and-coming melbourne sculptor paul smits was selected to undertake the work paul's a perfectionist to get it right and we're just so proud to be having him to do it this is the model on which the bronze cast will be made i think it's um important we go through what actually still needs to be done it's to tell the story rather than just a person standing there so it's it's got to create [Music] what hadley did and tell the story so it's going to be his anvil which is the centerpiece of what he started working from so rather than move it physically paul smits got a little inventive in the headley taylor museum in hente is the original anvil used by the inventor paul smith employed 3d scanning and printing to get an exact replica things like the anvil the cog the tongs the hammer they were all 3d scanned paul smits didn't have much to go on just a few old photographs of a young headley taylor so he sourced period costume and employed a model who was the exact build and dimensions as the inventor then he had to devise a pose that conveyed a sense of power and movement is he bending steel is he hammering something on top of the anvil was he left-handed was he right-handed what tools was he using was he using a small hammer or a large hammer it's yeah just dependent on really what he was doing at that time and we decided that hedley was working on a cog specific to the head of harvester [Music] hedley taylor's invention the header harvester would change the face of global agriculture so why was it such a game changer well this is what preceded it a harvester known as a stripper this one was built in 1886 if you had just a stripper well you couldn't strip down crop because you couldn't pick it up there was no knife to cut the the heads off and it just it just hung in the crop in the in the comb and you couldn't get your grains so crops knocked down or tangled by storms couldn't be harvested heavy taylor was determined to find a solution well bruce this is a really amazing bit of australian heritage headley taylor's very own blacksmith shop yeah it's amazing what he could make out of a little blacksmith shop like this amazing technology which he changed and built into his headers hadley taylor's personal motto described his struggles his first two machines were expensive failures wouldn't have been easy but neil desperatum which was written on these machines which translate to do not despair or some people say never give up as a community as the whole of australia we are hadley an enormous debt from what he did because he in the process he went back couple of times and his brother horus and gordon helped him out and he had a friend in aubry who financially helped him out too the design of the third machine represented a momentous technological leap these modifications that hedley put into his machine of the knife section cutting off the grain rather than beating it adding in the spirals which gathered the grain and pulled it in and also he incorporated a level lift so that the machine would go down and not point downwards so the grain would not fall out at the gathering point at the front so it was always level and pointing backwards so there's claims that it was somewhere between 20 to 25 percent of grain could be saved that those figures speak for themselves the mccain name is illustrious and elemental to this story and to the success of the header dougal mckay's great grandfather machinery manufacturer hugh victor mckay was for a long time australia's largest industrialist his sunshine stripper harvester dominated the market when mckay saw headley taylor's invention in a field of wheat at henty he struck on a joint venture he came up and saw the demonstrations and the trials in 1916. he walked around and he looked at this machine and probably being a reasonably astute businessman could see the benefits of the machine could see how they could be incorporated into his own machines and was quick to negotiate get headley down to melbourne try and do some negotiations to buy his patents and probably being a forward thinker to tap into his ingenuity and have him come and work he was such a modest man and such a a patriotic australian who said i don't want this to go overseas i want this to be manufactured here in australia and he found a manufacturer hv mckay who did just that hedy taylor signed a two-year deal with mckay he went on to spend the rest of his working life 35 years on a mere handshake agreement a pretty amazing partnership that must have happened between the two men each of equal respect and together the synergies they had they created something special and bruce amazingly in 1917 so just when he'd invented this machine the farmers here already were proclaiming it as a world-changing invention they knew its significance they managed to get hedly back after one year at sunshine to thank him for what he had done for them they all knew it was such a great thing it saved their income it saved their farms and it put the grain industry in australia on the map that was especially true in 1920 well it was a year when there was wild storms right across the eastern seaboard we had massive crops looked like a bumper harvest great profits for farmers flattened by these storms hedley taylor invented the helitailer crop lifter which attached to the front of the machines it would gently lift up the straw and the heads so it could feed properly into the front of the machines and farmers that were going to be thought they were in despair delighted that they were they were still harvesting some 30 bushels i think 10 bags to the acre back in that day which is a huge yield so the factory worked day and night they produced nearly on a thousand machines and to get them out into the field all fitted with heavy tailor crop lifters and the crop was saved [Music] this sculpture has also been a collaboration between two men in a northern suburb of melbourne ewin coates had the job of casting in bronze the finished work i loved working with paul because we worked on so many projects together so i think we kind of second guess each other he's done some modelling for me and vice versa pouring molten bronze is a tricky affair hence the protective gear it's very heavy and very hot about 1100 degrees celsius we pull it out of the of the furnace probably at about 11 30 let it cool down take the slag off and pour around that range it depends on the the size and shape of the object we're pouring this is one of the largest components of the statue the mold for the anvil and there's enough molten metal for a couple more of hedley's body parts people often say you bronze something as if you spray it in bronze but it starts off of course as a sculpture which has to be molded then has to be made into a a hollow wax and then has to have a second refractory mold around that and then that has to be put in the kiln and burnt out and then flipped and poured and so it's it's really the expense of casting is mainly in the labor and the process and funnily enough not the bronze once cooled the mould is broken and out of the clay and fiberglass padding emerges the as yet unrefined face of hedley taylor then the moulded parts are welded together the joints smoothed out to be seamless in late august the taylor family arrived to check on progress this is looking good it's a little bit different the last time isn't it certainly yes how much more have you got got to do probably 90 there so um some welding of some pieces that you can't see underneath the cape over four decades headley taylor conceived and manufactured dozens of inventions next to the header his next most important was the auto hitter first made in 1924 here is the latest development in australian harvesting machinery the auto header this is a self-propelled machine cutting a strip of crop 12 feet wide traveling under its own power like a motor car and with a crew of two one man to drive and one to bag the grain on the platform he had its own motor which did away with horses the machine takes pride of place in kerry peach's big collection it's a 1925 auto header and it's got a 12 foot front on it and it's got a fortson engine on it where you're sitting alongside the oven all day it's also got an automatic lift on the comb you push the lever forward and it goes up and you pull it back and it comes down and you have at what height you want it i've got quite a few of the machines that have been built headley taylor's idea kerry peach has even hoisted one of his sunshine brad harvesters onto a pedestal this sculpture will both be a tourist attraction for hinti and at last fully honour a great australian because it's a good story because it's a story that australia should know about and because the young people today should know about this story it's it's an easy story to sell it is a great story [Music] today's headers with immense horsepower and monolithic size still owe much to their smaller more modest forerunner and to an extraordinary inventor who forged a machine that changed the course of world history we've got statues back in west australia i'm sure in in victoria new south wales statues of star footballers uh and they deserve it but i think at least as much as deserving a man like hedley taylor who did so much for australia and indeed the world in agriculture he just loved inventing and he was australia's greatest agricultural inventor without a doubt it's a really a great piece of art and it'll be there for eternity you

Channel: ABC Australia

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Rating: 4.9845591 out of 5

Keywords: ABC, Australia, ABC Australia, Landline, ABC Landline, Headlie Taylor, Header, harvester, harvesting machine, agriculture, agriculture in australia, history, farming, rural, invention, crops, machinery, wheat, land, management, landscape, bush, inventor, tinker, blacksmith, statue, art, trade, John Deere

Id: JyH99PMdNFI

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020