Peter Cuppens

Story

On the 21st of September 1954, a 26 year old Dutchman named Peter Matthew Cuppens, alighted from a DC3 aircraft onto the chilly tarmac at Essendon Airport. Travelling halfway round the world, he had left behind his parents Petrus, a railway worker, his mother Josephine, and eleven brothers and sisters, to see out a new life far from his birthplace of Weert in Holland.

Initially Peter went to the migrant camp at Bonegilla in Northern Victoria, before moving to Melbourne and then on to Keilor, where he lived in the de-licensed Racecourse Hotel in the Keilor Village. His first job was as a fitter and turner with the Victorian Railways but he later found employment at the Wallace family’s Keilor market gardens where he revelled in the freedom of outdoor work. His next position was as a bus driver carrying passengers from Keilor to Moonee Ponds, and it was here that he first set eyes on Patricia (Pat) Maude who was to become his wife when they married in 1964. Sadly their firstborn Mark died in infancy, but they were blessed with four more children, Leesa, Kellie and twins Scott and Troy.

To support his growing brood Peter became an owner-driver working for Reid’s Quarry in Niddrie, just a short drive from the family home in Airport West. The family’s next move was to a farm at Kyabram where they fattened pigs and raised beef cattle. Peter supplemented his income by driving a milk tanker for the Murray-Goulburn Co-op. Later they tried their hand at dairy farming which the children enjoyed, helping with the chores when they weren’t at school in nearby Lancaster and Shepparton. The Cuppens family spent seventeen happy years living in the Victorian countryside, but in 1985 returned to Melbourne and built a house in Niddrie. Peter found work at a door factory in Coburg, however his penchant for the outdoor life soon saw him working as a green-keeper at the Doutta Galla Bowling Club.

Retiring in 1994 Peter and Pat watched as the long-disused quarry opposite their home, where Peter had worked many years before, transformed into the Valley Lakes Housing Estate. With time on his hands and his children having left home, Peter bred canaries and finches, played golf, tennis, and lawn bowls and pottered in his hillside garden. On the 15th May 2008 Peter passed away at Gisborne in his 81st year, lovingly remembered by his family and friends as a kind, loyal and industrious man, and a proud Australian.

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