Growing up in Shepparton: where Adrian Campbell is from

A fruit town on two rivers

Shepparton is the centre of the Goulburn Valley, about 180 kilometres north of Melbourne on the Goulburn River, just above where the Broken River joins it. The valley is irrigation country. Water from the Goulburn and the Murray is run through a grid of channels to pears, apples, peaches, apricots, tomatoes and dairy pasture, and for most of the last century the cannery that began as the Shepparton Preserving Company turned the fruit into tins that went around the world. It is flat, hot in summer, cold and foggy in winter, and the sky is enormous.

It is also a town of arrivals. Italian and Greek families came to the orchards after the Second World War, Turkish and Albanian families followed, and more recently Iraqi, Afghan, Congolese and Sudanese communities have made it one of the most diverse regional cities in Australia. Everyone was from somewhere else once, and everyone was judged by whether they turned up to work.

An outdoors childhood

Adrian James Campbell was born there in 1989. It was an ordinary country upbringing in the best sense. Kids rode dirt bikes on the river flats and the tracks through the red gums, fished the Goulburn for Murray cod and yellowbelly, and camped along the Murray at Echuca and Barmah in the school holidays. Winter meant local footy on frozen ovals and, on the television, Essendon. He has barracked for the Bombers ever since and watches them from Indonesia at whatever hour the fixture demands.

A trade

He left school for a plumbing apprenticeship, a practical choice in a practical town. The trade took him onto commercial building sites and eventually north to Queensland, where he worked on a contract at Mount Tamborine Hospital in the Gold Coast hinterland. It also gave him something that has turned out to matter on every project since: an understanding of how a building actually goes together, which he still uses when arguing with contractors about reinforcing steel in Lombok.

What the town taught him

He puts two of his working rules down to Shepparton.

The first is that people will back you if you show up and do the work. In a town where everybody knows who turned up to the working bee and who did not, reputation is built by hand.

The second is that you fix your own problems. Nobody is coming to do it for you. He has leaned on that in business more than once, most heavily in the years he writes about on the record, when two companies failed and the only way out was through. He has written about both habits in What a country town teaches you about business.

Still a Shepparton boy

He has lived in Indonesia for most of the last 15 years and speaks the language fluently, but the habits are the same. He still rides, still fishes, and still watches the Bombers from the other side of the Timor Sea. Friends call him AJ. The outside work page has the rest.

The next chapter of the story is the move north to Queensland and the Gold Coast solar company he started at 19.