Tom Eastlake and his family have been at the forefront of Cherries in the Wombat and Young districts for generations.
The Eastlakes have grown cherries since the 1960s and up until more recently Tom was President of the Cherry Association.
He took time out to talk about the upcoming Cherry Festival which commences on Friday.
He said, “Cherries have always been part of the fabric of Young. Even now if you travel across the State or even Australia and it’s surprising when you introduce yourself from Young and if you say you are a farmer the next question will be “do you grow cherries”? There is a level of National recognition as well about cherries.
“You still see that now, cherries are grown all over the country, but there’s a lot of brand recognition for cherries, particularly when they start to appear on the shelves, people ask “are these from Young?”.
“It’s a little bit of a national consciousness on cherries. That has been built up over a number of years and even with new areas that have come in to cherry production it’s interesting to see other areas not actually having that brand recognition that this is where cherries come from that Young does.
“It’s important to the town and the Cherry Festival is the biggest single event, I would argue and someone might take exception to that, in terms of visitors to the town, it still marks the biggest single event on the Young calendar.
“It’s very important to Young, but also to surrounds as well, because the cherries aren’t just grown in Young.
Where our orchard is we’d be Wombat, which is the old Harden Shire, now Hilltops Shire.
“For the Cherry Festival most orchards would have some sort of public presence, whether it be roadside stall or attending farmers markets and the Festival is a big driver of that customer interaction every year. It’s one of our biggest days in terms of sales for the year.
“To us it marks a bit of a dual purpose as it’s a celebration of the industry in Young but also marks the preparation for cherries at Christmas time where it’s another part of that national consciousness and we are unique in that in the world because we are southern hemisphere and cherries are inextricably linked with Christmas. We produce it as a summer fruit crop as we produce all through summer throughout the various regions in Australia but the Cherry Festival also marks that Cherries – December – getting ready for Christmas and mark that ramping up of people buying and consuming cherries as they come into summer.
“The Auction is done as a cherry charity auction now rather than the first case because you have to plan for these things now. So you have to mark the date, this is when we are going to do the auction, and some years is difficult when the season is late and
you’ve booked the first case auction and everybody has rocked up and there’s no cherries in the market.
“It’s a sensible move to move it into early-mid season, so it’s still early season and it’s still done after the first month that the crop was picked, good cherries on the market and it speaks into cherries as part of our national identity in summer and it uses the cherry brand to drive a valuable fundraiser for a particular charity.
It can rotate from year to year but really drive a contribution to a charity, which is a good thing to be part of from an industry perspective.
“You don’t necessarily need to tell people, hey cherries are on the market, although there’s probably an element of that, where you get some recognition that cherries are in season now, but it is something people look for and it’s probably one of the most common questions I get is “Has the cherry auction been and how much did they make?”
“That is a recognition of something that happens every year, but to bring some prominence to a charity that we can all get behind is a good thing as an industry as well.
Friday is a big day and Saturday is a big day. It’s really a weekend event now. It’s a big weekend for the Young area.
“It starts Friday night and a full program Saturday and Sunday, but realistically that’s one of the great things about the Festival
why it’s important to growers is it brings a lot of people into town, brings a lot of interaction with it, raises the profile of the cherry industry, but it spills over into the proceeding week and we’ll start to see interactions with customers ramp up basically from today (Tuesday) into the weekend and we will tail off a little bit, but really that momentum endures throughout December.
“People come up to pick their own cherries and there’s that spark that “Oh, cherries are on in Young”, and they come up
for the Festival or people might miss the Festival but say we better go pick some cherries or go buy some and travel up to
Young and get some before Christmas occurs.
“It’s a good little spark that kicks things off as we come into December.