Men of Many Talents
Edward (Ted) Russell Rotherham FRPS, APSA, ARMIT, EFIAP moved to Warrandyte with wife Shirley in 1959 purchasing an old timber cottage in Till’s Drive, once the home of John Till the manager of the Caledonia Gold Mine. They retained the old cottage as part of their house while Ted built other rooms out of sandstone from the old Presbyterian Ladies’ College and a variety of reclaimed materials from demolished buildings elsewhere. (Photo right of Ted and his son with large sandstone blocks).
Ted trained as an industrial chemist before World War II and was a keen bushwalker. After serving in New Guinea and Bougainville with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), he turned to teaching and it was during the course of his teaching in country schools he gained a love of nature and natural history photography. This led him to take a position as lecturer with the photography department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) where he worked until retirement in 1983.
Ted specialised in natural history photography and was a member of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Another of Ted’s special interests was the photography of reptiles. For his folio of photographs of Australian snakes he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. His work was exhibited extensively overseas, and he was a Fellow with the Royal Photographic Society, Associate of the Photographic Society of America and its European equivalent. He also served on the committee for the Melbourne Camera Club for many years. He was the photographer and co-author of definitive books on Australian flora including Flowers and Plants of Victoria 1968, Orchids of Australia 1970 and Flowers and Plants of NSW and Southern Queensland 1975. His beautiful photographs illustrate Ellis Stone’s 1971 book Australian Garden Design.
Ted was co-founder of the Warrandyte Historical Society and served as President and committee member over the decades. His work for the Society included photographic documentation, writing books and articles including All Over Bar the Shouting, History of Warrandyte’s licensed premises. He, together with wife Shirley, received the Royal Historical Society’s Award of Merit in 1998 (Photo left).
Ted undertook many tasks, photographing wildflowers, building his house and working with the Historical Society which overlapped and took up a great deal of his time and energy. But Ted was one who put all his energies into the projects that interested him. It is thanks to this single mindedness that he achieved so much and that future generations will benefit, not just in Warrandyte, but across a much wider audience.
Mervyn (Merv) Albert Naughton (1909-1988) was an innovator, a mostly self-taught man who established a renowned business manufacturing high quality rifle for Australian and overseas markets from his Warrandyte home.
Born and raised in Adelaide he developed a keen interest in guns and shooting. He worked with a well-known gunsmith before travelling around Australia. During World War II he worked on anti-aircraft guns in the munitions factory in Maribyrnong before joining the old established Melbourne gunsmith firm Alcock and Pierce. About the same time he started looking for land on which to build a house and travelled up the Yarra eventually arriving at Pound Bend. The Hutchinson family had just subdivided their land into 80 or so blocks along the river so Merv bought quite a lot of them (about 10 acres).
He and wife Lois started building their solid concrete, Modernist house he designed about this time (now State Heritage listed). The bottom level was the factory area with a strongroom for storing pistols and test firing range. Merv started his firearm business converting surplus army rifles to sporting rifles by replacing the military barrels with commercial ones. He also loaded cartridges with both the rifles and cartridges sent to wholesalers. He and Lois occupied ground floor rooms until the upper floors of the house were completed sometime around 1953-4.
Merv’s dream had been to produce a gun of his own devising and creation, and he worked on an accurate but economical sporting rifle in the 1950s. He then manufactured the ‘Fieldman’ rifle from 1962. He outgrew the ground floor factory and built a single storey Mt Gambier stone factory next to his house. He did his own tooling and designed and built (or modified) much of the machinery. By 1970 six men were being employed producing more than 150 rifles a week, many of which were destined for the export market. For a time he was the only manufacturer of firearms in Australia.
Merv was very bushfire conscious and had designed his house accordingly. He was an active member of the Warrandyte Fire Brigade for years and allowed his workers to turn out for fires. His diesel generator which powered the factory and a riverside pump supplied water to his house and he was able to supply water to neighbours when the 1962 fires swept through the area. He also devised an incendiary launcher for fuel reduction burns and backburning for the Forest Commission, was an instructor on firearm safety and a member of the Government Firearm Advisory Committee.
A competitive footballer and tennis player when young, he was a keen photographer with an interest in astronomy and physics. He started a camera group for the Warrandyte Arts Association in 1962. He wrote an unpublished book challenging aspects of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. A quietly spoken, warm hearted man he was well known in the neighbourhood for his Land Rover vehicles and red setter dogs. His death was a real loss for his neighbours, friends and Warrandyte as well as the shooting fraternity in many countries.
©2023 Text by Valerie Polley. Photos: Warrandyte Historical Society