Our People
2 June, 2026
As I Remember - Una Allender
LAKE Bolac and its surrounds have been home to Una for almost her entire life and she may well be just as well-known there as the Lake Bolac Eel Festival, of which she is a founding organiser.
Una’s family is also well-known.
Her grandfather created the tomato sauce company Leggo’s, a name that actually comes from Cornwall.
“It means flat rock or ledge in Cornish,” Una said.
He moved to Australia and settled in Bendigo, where he began as a young lad “hawking his mother’s relish and pickles on the goldfields.”
“I didn’t meet him, but I know he was a leading businessman.”
He built up the business until the Fairfield factory was sold during the depression. Una has a detailed knowledge of her family background and tells of the privileged life her mother and siblings enjoyed growing up.
“Mum wanted to be a florist or a P.E. teacher. She was not allowed. Instead, she learnt shorthand.”
When her mother was in her early thirties and holidaying in Lorne, she met Una’s father, a farmer.
Once they married, her father leased Prettytown North, “right out in the middle of nowhere, between Beaufort and Streatham. This was where my mother was taken to live.” This was such a different existence to what she was used to. The tiger snakes were her first surprise, as was learning to cook.”
Una was their only child, born in Mortlake, although her father’s two brothers and their families lived close by.
Una attended Lake Bolac Primary School and strongly recollects her two friends, Margaret and Margaret.
“We had a cubby behind the school fence. In amongst the tall thistles, we would go in there and hide. We took all our special things: boxes, tins, jars and blocks of wood. Until the fathers held a working bee and slashed the weeds. They found all our precious things.”
The trio also pushed each other academically.
“We would not be happy with less than a 9.5.”
They were fortunate to have a teacher named Rod Hall, an excellent amateur tennis player who had tried out for the Davis Cup. He coached them and then tennis became something Una continued for many years to come.
However, when asked about other sports, Una exclaims she was “hopeless!”
“I hated athletics and I never got selected. When I had my own children, I made sure they didn’t have to go through that.”
Una spent her first two years of secondary school at Lake Bolac High School, where she had two excellent teachers, Joan and Ian Paine. “They both had high expectations.”
She also had piano lessons with Miss Violet Sing.
“Practice… well, I never did. I was wrapped over the knuckles many times. I just refused to practise. So that led to me getting really good at sight reading.”
Next came boarding school at Morongo Presbyterian Girls’ College, now The Geelong College. To this day, Una remains in contact with some of the friends she made there and attends reunions and alumni high teas.
While at Morongo, Una remembers attending regular Masses said in Latin and having to dress correctly in shoes and stockings each evening for dinner.
“Some of the food was okay, but some of it was very ordinary. Liver for Monday lunch. Then straight after that we had a science class where we were dissecting animal livers. Yuck! Breakfast was often what we called ‘puff balls’, which were deep fried and served with gravy, and we actually really liked them.”
There were regular dances held with boarders from other schools. Classes were streamed.
“If you were in the ‘A’ stream, you were headed for university. If you were in the ‘prac’ stream, that was for general”
Una was in the ‘A’ stream and gained a place at Melbourne University to study Agriculture.
“There were 70 students in my year. Twelve of us were women.”
Una has many fond memories of her university years in the 1960s.
“We were all members of many societies and clubs. I was in the Environmental Society and the Choral Society. It was a lot of fun.”
She also played tennis.
“We had to work hard, though. We had lectures all day, then our study all needed to be done at night.”
There was a large component of plant identification and taxonomy, and the entire second year was spent at Mt Derimut on the university farm.
Una graduated in 1970, closely followed by marriage and then her husband being called up for National Service.
“Me? I tried to get a job in Melbourne, but there was a freeze on employment. There weren’t any graduate positions.”
Their first army posting was to Bendigo, where Una gained employment with Mayfair Farms. She worked with pigs, carrying out artificial insemination and studying disease and survival rates in piglets.
“It was very interesting work.”
Next, Phil was posted to Townsville. Una’s next position was also with pigs, studying the parvo virus for James Cook University.
Becoming an army wife, however, was something quite different.
“For someone with a social conscience, awareness of women’s rights and equality, being an army officer’s wife was unusual for me, being expected to mind my p’s and q’s.”
Una recalls one particular dinner at the Officers’ Mess where, as soon as dinner was finished, it was “no ladies, port and cigars”.
After a short stint overseas, they settled in Canberra, where they welcomed their first son.
In 1976, Una and Phil were “called back to the farm. My father needed help and Phil was keen to take on farming.”
Una’s father welcomed both the company and “being looked after”, as her mother had passed away some years earlier, when Una was just 18.
Their three sons also enjoyed a farming childhood. Una speaks animatedly about having a child’s car seat welded onto the back of her motorbike so she could take two-year-old T.J. with her while mustering or back-striping for lice.
Alongside the hard work on the farm, Una continued playing tennis and also took up golf at Lake Bolac. She served on kinder, primary school and secondary college committees, and assisted in digitising the school library.
Una was also part of a successful hockey side known as “the housewives team”, which made the grand final every year.
By the early 1990s, Una had once again added to her career, working part-time with Landcare as a project officer. She was later offered a position by a local stock agent who wanted to establish a soil testing laboratory and asked Una to run it.
“I’d never done that before, but I had to have a go.”
Through contacts with the CSIRO in Adelaide, Una travelled there for training, one week at a time, learning how to analyse soil samples.
Una has continued to educate herself throughout her life, completing short courses at Ballarat University in library and information services. She also used her background as a Landcare project officer to facilitate the Upper Hopkins Land Management and Ararat groups, assisting them in securing research grants, funding and event management support.
This eventually led to a “sliding doors” moment in 2004, when Una participated in the first ‘Healing Walk’ along the Hopkins River from Warrnambool to Lake Bolac. Organised by singer-songwriter Neil Murray, the walk “aimed to connect attendees with the land and Traditional Owners”.
Una could see the need for someone to help organise something more and, from there, the Lake Bolac Eel Festival was born.
“The first year of the festival, everything went wrong. But it all worked a treat.”
There was to be a concert, but a thunderstorm arrived. Una describes how the dancers and singers later performed at dusk and how deeply moving the experience was.
The festival was then held annually for the next ten years before becoming the biennial event it is today.
Although still involved as a member, Una has now “taken a step back” and retired from her role as a pivotal organiser.
There is little doubt that, without Una’s passion, knowledge and care for both the land and its people, the now-famous Lake Bolac Eel Festival would never have evolved into the deeply meaningful, diverse and connecting event it has become.
Read More: Lake Bolac