“Spearwood is where my roots are and it’s where my home is.”
Those are the words of legendary West Australian ‘spud king’, the inimitable Tony Galati.
Not only was Tony raised in Spearwood, attending Spearwood Primary School and the former Hamilton Senior High School, he spent the first 24 years of his life working his Italian parents’ market garden on Yangebup Road.
It’s not hard to see that this Quintessentially Cockburn character was heavily influenced by the responsibility that comes with being the firstborn son of Italian immigrants, where family duty and hard work go hand in hand.
He began helping his dad on ‘the farm’ from an early age, recalling how lucky he was not to lose his finger after helping throw onions into the petrol-fuelled mechanised topper and tailer. He was six-years-old.
“Dad moved pretty quick. He jammed a screwdriver into the machine to stop it, and that saved my finger. If it had have been like today’s hydraulic equipment, I would have lost my arm,” Tony said.
“I just wanted to follow dad around and do everything he did, so I was putting the onions in the machine, just like him.”
His father was Francesco (Frank), and his mother was Carmela, Sicilian immigrants who along with many other European families, helped shape Cockburn’s well-documented market gardening history.
Frank and his brother Sebastian were among several Italian families allotted five-acre parcels on Yangebup Road in the early 1960s which they paid for with the earnings of market gardens that only became productive once the vegetation had been cleared.
Tony also recalls he and his brother Vince copying their dad by removing that vegetation with gelignite.
While his dad only tended the market garden afterhours, working fulltime at either a local quarry, Jandakot Woolscourers, Robb Jetty Abattoir or as a sandblaster and spray painter in Naval Base, Tony added gelignite to a large tree stump to free up more growing space to help add to the family’s coffers.
Two sticks didn’t move the stump but six caused a massive explosion, with the brothers collecting its splintered remains from hundreds of metres away for days. Tony was about 10 and it was another occasion he was lucky not to be the victim of misadventure on the isolated property.
In those days Spearwood was “like a country town” and Tony and his brothers would often pass the time counting traffic; imagine just one vehicle every 10 minutes on Rockingham Road and one every one to two hours on Yangebup Road.
The family stopped producing crops on the property in 1994 when it became too small to accommodate modern tractors, after producing around 70 tonnes of produce each season. The land was eventually developed for housing after Tony’s parents passed away in 2019.
Tony shared a treasure trove of tales during a meeting at the O’Connor warehouse of his family business this month, where despite sitting down to share his stories, still worked his phone in the hunt for affordable top quality white and red grapes for his many stores.
Wearing his trademark dark blue sleeveless shirt, black shorts and boots, and sporting a curly mullet and his famously abundant eyebrows, there were plenty of laughs from the man with an otherwise serious public persona; he is rarely photographed wearing a smile.
Despite the burden of family and work responsibilities which began as a young child as he helped raise two younger brothers and two sisters, the stories of his childhood and youth immediately brought out a mischievous sense of humour and irony.
He knew what it felt like to smell like onions at school. As a primary student his days began at 5.30am when his mother woke him to milk the goats. He would then rotate rows of reticulation valves to water fields bursting with onions, beans, tomatoes and of course, potatoes.
From very humble beginnings, potatoes were where it all really began for Tony.
His father insisted he and his brothers plant Delaware seed potatoes with the eyes pointing down into the soil, to ensure a successful crop.
It was a finicky process and one day, in a fit of rage towards his strict father, the rebellious youngster planted them with the eyes facing up.
“I started to get really nervous that they wouldn’t grow and dad would not be happy with me,” he said.
“I even thought about going out there in the middle of the night to replant them, but they started to sprout and grow just like all the others. That’s when we realised it didn’t matter how they were planted.”
Today there are 17 Spudsheds between Australind and Wanneroo and with Bunbury and Geraldton stores opening next year, it’s a far cry from the $12,000 income from his firm’s first year of operation in the early 1980s.
The family’s first tractor, a Fiat 415, now proudly sits in the foyer of the first Spudshed store which opened in Baldivis in 1998. The arrival of the orange workhorse was so exciting eight-year-old Tony and his younger brother abandoned school at recess to see it with their own eyes.
“It was like a dream coming true, to have our own tractor and I was driving it not too long after that,” Tony said.
“Things were very different back then and I can’t imagine my own children or grandchildren doing any of the stuff we did, but that’s for the best. It’s all phones and computers these days.
“I did my dad’s business accounts from the age of about 12, he didn’t know how to do it and didn’t speak any English, and I eventually did my uncle’s accounts too. I learnt a lot of stuff out of necessity but there was not much time for playing about.
“By far, my favourite place to hang out was Coogee Beach. I’d do all my work early on the weekend so I could go to the beach. It was a feeling of freedom with your mates, to be there swimming in that water and not working on the farm.”
The beach was only for swimming, there was definitely no time for fishing. In fact, Tony went fishing for the first time ever in 2021, snagging two 10kg red emperor and in a spot of beginner’s luck off the coast of Dampier.
Alongside his sense of family duty, an instinct for fairness also blossomed, giving rise to his three-decade fight for justice in the WA potato industry, resulting in the eventual disbanding of the State Government’s restrictive and entrenched Potato Marketing Corporation (PMC).
“It was an unfair system and people like my family, our friends and others trying to make a living from growing potatoes, were suffering because of an outdated system that was based on favouritism,” he said.
“We were forced to only grow allocated amounts of potatoes which made it unprofitable and forced people out of business.”
Tony gave away a lot of free, ‘illegally-grown’ potatoes, with the PMC taking him to court for growing over his allotted tonnage for his stores. Eventually the State Government changed legislation, disempowering the PMC in a victory that tasted better than locally-grown hot chips.
Last month Tony and his son Seb journeyed to Sicily, to see where his mother was born. It provided a meaningful insight into the similarities of their lives in Sicily and what they achieved in their Spearwood market garden.
They were able to meet uncles, aunts and cousins and experience for the first time the simple but rich joy of eating together as a family, enjoying an abundance of proudly homegrown produce.
Tony still works seven days a week, often at Canning Vale markets sourcing produce from as early as 3am but is learning to strive for a bit of balance, too.
He is in constant contact with his large and growing family of four children and 12 grandchildren, as they also juggle the family business of providing good quality affordable produce and groceries to WA families from their stores via a network of farms and warehouses, including in Wattleup.
Tony is being coached by fellow Quintessentially Cockburn legend, former MMA world champion Soa Palelei, and aims to get in the ring for daily boxing practice, often training with his sons.
He recognises the need to stay fit and healthy. The ‘spud king’ wants to continue enjoying the fruits of his labours alongside his family as their business empire continues to grow and prosper, after taking root in Spearwood six decades ago.
Caption: Tony Galati pictured outside his godmother's Spearwood home where his father Francesco first lived after arriving from Sicily in 1954.