Elma Murphy
RASV staff member - Elma Murphy has been involved with the Royal Melbourne Show almost her entire life. She grew up on a sheep and cattle farm, and attended the Show every year with her parents.
Elma Murphy has been involved with the Royal Melbourne Show almost her entire life. She grew up on a sheep and cattle farm, and attended the Show every year with her parents. When Elma was 15 years old, she got a job as a junior clerk working for the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV). As she remembers it:
I answered an advertisement in the paper, and I went in to an interview in Temple Court with Mr Woodfull, who was then the Secretary of the RASV, and he must have liked the look of me because he hired me on the spot.
Elma first started working at RASV in 1954 and retired almost 50 years later in 2002. ‘It must have been good’, she laughs. ‘I was there for 50 years so it couldn’t have been too bad.’ Elma was involved in a range of different roles during her time with RASV. In the early years it was a fairly male-dominated workplace, and Elma remembers her role as a junior clerk included animal registrations, checking litter notifications and dealing with correspondence, as well as doing ‘the tea run’.
The Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria was a great place to work for Elma. ‘It had a real family feel’, she recalls.
We had an active social club in the early years. We used to have a Staff Ball every year, there were picnics, councillors and staff would have a cricket match on the arena every year. The staff, really, socially got on very well.
Towards the end of her career, Elma started stewarding at the Show, something she continued even after her official retirement in 2002. For her dedication and commitment to RASV and the Show, Elma was awarded honorary life membership of RASV in 1987 and was further acknowledged as a recipient of the President’s Medal in 1993.