In 1977, Ken Midson and his wife Pamela moved to Brigh­ton to live in a small cottage near Polonia Bridge. This was the beginning of Ken’s life and times in Brighton, raising a family and running successful businesses.

His hard working approach to life continues until this day. Ken is a carpenter/joiner by trade and started his own business at the age of 19 years. Ken started Brighton Block and Pavers in 1984 and has had a lifetime of building housing developments in the Brighton area, as well as several of his own homes along the way. Ken was attracted to the semi-rural nature of Brighton, a place of open space and full of opportu­nities. In the 70s, he saw that Brighton was ripe for develop­ing and needed developers.

Ken loves the relative quietness of Brighton and believes it is a great place to bring up kids. Ken and Pamela raised their three children in Brighton, where they felt safe walking anywhere they wanted to go. They attended the local primary school and have gone on to run their own successful businesses and careers.

Ken strikes you as a man who will never slow down despite already being ‘retired’ for quite a few years now. He likes working hard and has dedicat­ed much time and resources to working as a volunteer with Need for Feed Australia as one way of living his philosophy of ‘paying it forward’.

Need for Feed was established back in 2006/7 by Graham Cockerell, a Lions Club Mem­ber in Victoria, who had lost his father years before to farm-re­lated suicide. He didn’t want to see other farmers and their families go through the same heartbreak during times of nat­ural disaster such as drought, flood and fires. Graham had given away one small truck­load of his own hay to a group of farmers burnt out in East Gippsland back in 2006/7.

When he saw the scale of the destruction and spoke to those affected, Graham returned home determined to do some­thing about it. He talked to his Lions Club, got them on board and rounded up a group of mates to get involved with the fundraising and finding more hay. The rest is history, now in the 17th year, Need for Feed takes great pride not only in being managed 100% by volunteers, but also two years ago being adopted as a national project of Lions Australia.

Ken noticed Need for Feed advertising for drivers on ‘good old Facebook’ eight years ago and has been volunteering with the organisation ever since, taking loads of hay and food hampers all over Australia for those farmers most in need. When asked by people why he does it, Ken replies in his usual pragmatic way ‘because I can!’, He has taken hay as far as Central West Queensland and throughout NSW, travelling in convoys of up to 40 trucks.

Ken admires the generosity of some of our local farmers like the Geard family of Broad­marsh who, when he puts out the call for hay, do not hesitate to donate – they have given up to 48 large bales at a time to go to the mainland for those affected by disaster such as the most recent floods of 2022. He also mentions the generosity of Toll Transport who freight the trucks loaded with hay to the mainland from Tasmania free of charge.

Ken enjoys being on the road. He and Pamela often take their campervan around Australia for 2-3 months at a time on small adventures. One such adventure led to purchasing a pub in Muttaburra in outback Queensland with a popula­tion of 85 people but a steady flow of tourists. Muttaburra is the geographic centre of Queensland and is most famous for when local grazier, Doug Langdon, uncovered the fos­silised skeleton of a dinosaur. The Muttaburrasaurus Langdo­ni was a land-living, plant-eat­ing dinosaur that roamed the earth 100 million years ago.

Ken and Pamela were attract­ed to the town as a place that is quintessentially Australian and the way communities used to be, where everyone knows everyone and helps each other out. It is all about community spirit, exactly what attracted Ken and Pamela to Brighton all those years ago.

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