General News
16 August, 2025
Former Yaapeet teacher part of video stories project
IT’S been just over five years since John Ramsden’s wife died, but her connection to Yaapeet will be further immortalised in a few weeks, with Flerina’s time as local primary school teacher the subject of one of 100 short videos he’s been working on.
John, who lives in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs and often spends his spare time creating quirky videos for family and friends, produced a 97-minute film on his wife’s life in the months after her death from a rare form of blood cancer in mid-2020 – and the project subsequently inspired him to create a few shorter story videos – and then a few more again.
“The genesis of this was the death of Flerina, and which caused me to do a documentary called ‘The Girl in Pink Overalls’ as a tribute to her,” he said.
“It was about our life together, and for the kids particularly – and as a result of that, the kids asked me to do some stories of my own life, and so I did one or two, and I suddenly realised that it was going to be 100 (videos) – and that was four and a half years ago!”
He said there was obviously a number of those stories that feature on his life with Flerina – “probably four or five stories, but one of them specifically focuses on the little country town of Yaapeet that she was at for a year in 1979 as a teacher in the primary school there”.
In late 1978, 21-year-old Flerina Lake from Reservoir in Melbourne’s north had finished her teaching studies and thereafter received a letter from the Education Department informing her of the location of her first post.
John said she was completely blindsided by the contents.
“Actually, when she opened the letter, she was surrounded by friends (and) she started bawling her eyes out, and they said, ‘What's wrong? What's wrong?’, and she said, ‘I don't even know how to pronounce it!’”
After struggling to find Yaapeet on the map and then recovering from the shock of realising it was “a long way from Melbourne”, John said she was making plans for a very different kind of work – and life – than she had anticipated.
Set up to live in the local residence for the teacher, one thing she had to deal with early was driving on rural roads.
“People told her she needed to get a decent car because she was going to be doing a lot of country travel,” he said.
“She bought a blue Gemini SLE back in the day (but) she did actually roll that car on the dirt road coming into the back of Yaapeet when a car came over a hill, and it caused her to go to the side of the road.
“It disappeared on the other side but she rolled the car and finished upside down, and had to crawl out of that. She had to walk into the town from there, and she was pretty sore.”
One of the townsfolk, ‘Duck’ (Dale Eastman), from the footy club, decided for her own safety she needed lessons on how to deal with the local roads.
“So he took her out into a paddock in his car – and then proceeded to roll it – and they were both upside down in that one as well,” John said.
That wasn’t the end of the coincidences, as unbeknown to Duck, he sent his car – also blue – to the same repair shop in Horsham Flerina had sent her car to.
“(The mechanics) just read the thing and said, ‘yep, it’s clear – fix the blue car from Yaapeet’,” John said – and proceeded to mix up the jobs.
Duck was also one of the people on the telephone exchange, back in the day when the timed calls had to be manually connected by an operator – who John said would often listen in.
“Unfortunately, I fell in love with her that year, and I lived in Melbourne, so that made things difficult – and we would catch up with each other via the exchange,” he said.
“I’d have to ring Yaapeet 7, and it would be Mrs Dillon or Duck on the other end.
“They'd say, ‘connecting you now’, and then they come back every three minutes and say, ‘three minutes – are you extending?’ and we would do that. So that's how we communicated for that year. It was very expensive. She wrote a letter basically every day too.”
The two local operators would handle the call length extensions differently, with Duck – quickly getting to know them both – not bothering to interrupt for “about three quarters of an hour”, but Mrs Dillon’s interruptions – “it was right on the three minutes every time” – including the occasional telltale noises on the line betraying the eavesdropping.
“We loved Mrs. Dillon, but we also knew that she was listening into some of our conversations as well, so we had to be a bit careful about what we said,” John laughed.
“We did set her up (one day) and I told Flerina just to follow my lead.
“So I started pretending on the phone that there was something in the back of her car, and (whether) the police had any idea of what it was – and we could hear Mrs Dillon's breathing getting harder and harder. I said, ‘if they find out, we'll both be in jail’, and she gasped, and then hung up the phone.”
John got to know the town personally too, as he would come up “every second weekend”, and as a teacher himself even once or twice helped out at the school.
“It was a bit of a journey” in his old Wolseley “with no proper brakes and windscreen wipers that didn’t work”, he admitted.
One trip involved watching the grudge women’s footy match with Rainbow (for which John shot Super 8 film footage he used) – and the smiling blonde the object of his affections actually had what he called a “very, very competitive” streak in sports.
The footage shows the vivacious blonde running out in the number 7 guernsey later involved in hard attack at the footy (and opposition players), fights – and subsequent intervention from the coach, Duck – and her kicking the winning goal in the last minute, not holding back with the triumphant celebration.
“A beautiful Christian young woman,” John laughed of her setting a less-than-stellar character example for her students.
Footy wasn’t just the only thing to alter her attitude to life in Yaapeet.
“When she got there, (when) animals came across the road, she would duck and weave so she didn't hurt them,” John said.
“(But) when a mice plague came a little bit later on, she found herself actually going for as many of them as she could. So she became a little bit of a country girl – you know, knock them down, squash them.”
He said Flerina was made to feel very welcome by the townsfolk and simply “loved that year” with home-cooked food from local women – “they just fed her like crazy” – and even Duck and his brother, Ferret (real name, Larry) delivering a massive milkshake bucket from their parents’ general store.
Resident Yaapeet historian, Claire White OAM said she worked with Flerina at the time – “she was the headmistress and I was the assistant” – and added she was “extra special” and “effervescent” despite having to make considerable adjustments to living in a small rural community.
“She did a great job and left her mark on a lot of people,” Claire said.
Flerina made such an impact she was asked to contribute to the book compiled in 2008 for the school’s 90th anniversary, where she noted a long list of memories of the community, including “nicknames for everyone”, “dust storms that left everything red”, and having a “shocker of a game” with the otherwise undefeated B-grade netball team in the grand final to lose the one game that mattered.
The “wonderful students”, of course, featured prominently – many by name – where she remembered on arrival they “looked as scared as I felt”, visiting them in their parents’ homes to experience “country hospitality sharing both meals and their lives” and being given a surprise 22nd birthday celebration by the school community after spending Easter in Melbourne.
Flerina also remembered “watching Rod Mathews run endlessly around the school ground” – Rod went on to win the Stawell Gift in 1999, with the achievement immortalised on signage at the northern end of of town.
Of the somewhat regular stream of teacher changes, Claire cheerfully said, “I don’t know if it was my job to break them all in” and added it was “good to record” all the memories, with Flerina’s organising of the end of year school concert a highlight for her.
“She'd done dancing and callisthenics and all that sort of thing,” Claire said.
“For the concert at the end of the year, the kids did a lot of all that sort of stuff.”
Claire also thought John was “good value” when he visited – “it’s a long way from Melbourne to here for courting purposes!”
Despite the friendliness of the town, a long tenure was not to be: ‘Miss Lake’ left after just the one year – with her relationship with John becoming more serious, she applied for compassionate transfer back to a Melbourne school; they were married in 1981.
John said they both went back to Yaapeet regularly in the years after, and they attended the school’s 100-year reunion in October 2018, where Flerina said of her experience to the crowd, “it was just a wonderful, wonderful year, the kids were awesome … it had a great impact on my life”.
Diagnosed with the extremely rare (less than 1 in 300,000 people) Blastoid Mantle cell lymphoma in 2019, John said watching his wife’s health decline was very difficult for him, his three adult children and nine grandchildren, “but to watch the godly manner in which she died and her love and concern for all of us in her last days was something I am still challenged by and will never forget.”
With his 100 videos nearly all finished (intended originally as a gift to his family and friends in gratitude for his life from God), John has been busily planning an official launch event in Melbourne on August 23, their wedding anniversary.
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