A friend to all

Warragul’s Kent Street has seen big changes in recent years, but the biggest one for many years was the recent departure of Tony Schuravel, who had lived there since 1967.

His neighbours are still singing the praises of a man widely known as Mr Fixit.

Mr Schuravel and his brother Alec established Alecton TV Service at 8 Queen Street in 1967, the year colour television was introduced to Australia.

“Television sets were very expensive,” he told the Gazette before his departure for a life of fishing and relaxing at Waratah Bay, on the South Gippsland coast. “The prices were always quoted in guineas. That way they could rob a bit more off you without you being aware.”

Later on the business expanded and he and Alec travelled the breadth of Gippsland fixing milking vats washing machines and refrigeration units, including at many hotels and the West Gippsland Hospital.

Neighbour Maxine Forster said Mr Schuravel had been extremely kind since she had moved in to the street about seven years ago.

“He’s fixed that many things for me around the house, and he’s always giving me vegetables and lemons and limes. He’s been there for everyone. He’s been a very good neighbour.

“I’m going to miss him very much.”

When his neighbours talk like this, Mr Schuravel invariably makes a joke of it. “Whether it’s true or a fantasy is not for me to say,” he said sardonically.

It’s not just the neighbours who are missing him; so are the birds - butcher birds, magpies, galahs and currawongs - that visited his place each afternoon for a feed of the best mince steak.

Before he left, he asked his neighbours to take over feeding them.

He first came to Kent Street in 1967, when he bought a little cottage. “When it rained you had to put out the buckets,” he said.

After 12 years, he bought the cream brick house next door and had lived there for the past 36 years.

Now he’s sold the double block - two houses on 1500 square metres - and moved to Waratah Bay where he and Alec co-owned a holiday house for many years.

“There’ll be a little bit of fishing, a little bit of maintenance, which it needs. But there’ll be plenty of trips back to Warragul to see Mum.”

“Mum” is Gena Schuravel, who is aged 96 and lives in Drouin. Mr Schuravel ascribes her longevity and good health to “eating her own fresh vegetables, a good outlook and hard work”.

“When she was 92, I talked her into putting away the scythe she used to cut the grass at her place.”

Now he mows her lawns and she cooks him Sunday lunch.

Mr Schuravel was born in 1941 in the Ukraine, at the height of the Second World War.

“I was 18 months old when the Germans bombed our place. Then the Russians came through and blew up the Germans, then the Germans came back. We had to more or less keep missing them as the front moved.

“It was winter and the winter in Russia is not like the winter here. It was hard times.”

Fortunately for them, when the fighting finally ended they were in Bavaria, in American-occupied Germany. In a refugee camp, they waited their turn for the chance to emigrate to a new life.

In 1949 the family - his parents, Gena and Jacob, Tony, then aged eight, and Alec - came to Australia as refugees.

“People asked my dad ‘Why do you want to go to Australia? There’s nothing there except Aborigines and kangaroos”.

Dad said, “That’s good. I want to get away from bombs and machine guns.”

Like most refugees, they started off in a refugee camp at Bonegilla (“there were no kangaroos and no Aborigines”) before moving to Drouin.

Tony went to school knowing barely a word of English. Ask him whether that was hard and he refuses to dwell on the difficulties.

“It was the French they tried to teach me that was diff icult! English wasn’t hard. I’d picked up a bit of German in Bavaria and a lot of English words were very similar.”

Jacob worked on the railways where everybody spoke a different language so he never completely got the hang of English.

Gena, however, got a job at Millers factory in Warragul, where she worked with Australian girls and soon mastered Aussie English. Mr Schuravel said she never stopped thinking of her home in the Ukraine.

“Mum was homesick from the day she left. Dad said ‘We’ll go back if you like but there’s nothing there. Everything’s been destroyed.’

“Dad loved Australia from the moment we landed here.”