Celebrating Keith’s life: Keith Hartin’s daughter Sharon Beckman, wife Beth, daughter Jennifer Sargant and cousin Mary Ryan.
Keith Hartin had an ability to bring people together, so it was fitting that his book, 85 Years in Church Street, did just that when it was launched by his family at an afternoon tea on Sunday.
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Café Three620 hosted the event which saw Mr Hartin’s daughters Jennifer Sargant and Sharon Beckman and wife Beth fill the restaurant with the smiling faces of his long-time friends to unveil the 140-page book.
Following Mr Hartin’s death in 2021, Ms Sargant, a librarian, honoured a pledge she made to her father on his deathbed by collecting the stories he had written and compiling them into book form.
“One of his dying wishes was for me to get the book finished. It’s taken me a couple of years, but it’s now done,” she said.
Full house: Kyabram's Cafe Three620 was packed with Keith Hartin’s friends, who attended an afternoon tea book launch of his memoir 85 Years in Church Street.
Ms Sargant said her father was an avid diary keeper and would often write notes about his memories and thoughts.
“Before he died he said to me, “we have to get that down’’,” she said.
She described the A4 landscape book, which has a photo on each page and the attached story opposite, as a memoir of love, laughter, loss and growing up in simpler times.
“It is a compilation of his lifelong stories and memories of living in the Kyabram community,” she said.
The title, 85 Years in Church Street, is in reference to just how much time the respected Kyabram citizen spent in the street. However, he never actually lived in Church St.
He started work at the Kyabram Preserving Company when he was just 14 years old, attended school only a stone’s throw from his eventual workplace at St Augustine’s College from the age of five and, after meeting the love of his life, converted from Catholicism to the Anglican faith when he was married.
He actually lived in Albion St when he was a child and raised his family on Oswald St, before moving to Hawkins St.
Ms Sargant said she put the stories into some sort of chronological order and, while the book wasn’t in the slightest a history of Kyabram, it did reflect her father’s experiences in the town where he was born in 1936.
“It’s his stories of volunteering, his sporting activity after the war (football, cricket, boxing, table tennis and bowls) and his everyday life,” she said.
“He had a go at everything. We had a lot of photos, it is 140 pages of A4 landscape.
“It’s quite an easy read, because one side of every page is a picture and the other side is the story.
“We printed 150 copies and we have sold most of those.”
Ms Sargant said the book launch was a wonderful day, because it brought a lot of Kyabram’s age demographics together.
“Generally you get together at a funeral, but I didn’t want it (the book launch) to be a morbid affair,” she said.
“We treated it as a celebration of everyone who had known him.”
Mr Hartin had seven siblings and was a passionate Kyabram man, something that shone through with the amount of people who attended the Sunday book launch.
"Like he was, these people are so passionate in Kyabram. They are such a tight-knit unit and very resilient,“ Ms Sargant said.
“We can learn a lot from our older people.”
Mr Hartin started off putting his stories into a binder book 20 years ago, with his daughter describing him as computer illiterate.
“He had a wonderful memory and loved the history of Kyabram. He worked closely with Eileen Sullivan (a former schoolmate and long-time historian of the town),” Ms Sargant said.
“They knew the history of Kyabram right back.”
In the book’s forward, Mr Hartin said the idea to write his memoir came to him while visiting Bright.
“This book is about my memories from an early age, into the late age of 84,” he wrote.
The launch brought together family and many friends from various aspects of his life, with Café Three 620 filled to capacity as everyone enjoyed a Devonshire tea and many laughs.
Copies of the book are available to purchase by phoning Jennifer on 0438 778 430.
