Andy Utri grew up on a small farm—about 24 hectares—in what was then a part of Austria but is now in Croatia. In 1954, when he was 29 years of age, he and his wife Ilse immigrated to Australia to seek a better life.
‘I wanted a roof over my head and a shower when I got home from work,’ says Andy, who was a builder.
Andy and Ilse lived in St Albans, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, for 20 years before moving to central Victoria because they wanted a bit of land. They lived on 35 hectares off Spring Flat Road near Heathcote. Wild Duck Creek ran alongside their property. Andy built fences around the property and ran a few cows. As soon as he had finished building a home in which he and Ilse could live, his back went.
Andy smiles ruefully at the sudden onset of his back injury. ‘I was a builder for many years and never missed a day of work because of a bad back,’ he says.
Not that it gets him down. At 81, with a tough upbringing that included having his left pointer finger amputated after a doctor’s mistake when he was ten years of age, his air of quiet wisdom suggests he’s seen life’s good and bad. His response to the back injury was to sell the land and head back to the city. In 1988, he and Ilse moved into a retirement village in Keilor, on Melbourne’s north-west fringe, where Andy resumed a habit from his rural property. Every morning, like farmers throughout Australia, it was his ritual to check the rain gauge.
In early 1990, a summer thunderstorm left 70 millimetres of rain—almost three inches—in his gauge in the backyard of his retirement villa. George Herbert, a nearby resident, who had been accustomed to keeping a lookout for the weather when he was working at Melbourne Airport, began asking every morning whether there had been any rain.
Further questions from residents prompted Andy to begin noting the rainfall on a chart that he put up in the retirement village’s mailroom. In 1999, after a decade of noting rainfall figures for his fellow retirees, a Bureau of Meteorology representative asked whether he would be interested in joining the hundreds of volunteers around Australia who record official rainfall figures for the national weather bureau.
Every morning at nine o’clock, Andy pokes his