General News
25 January, 2025
Dedication to bettering her town earns Dimboola's Jan Ballard an OAM
Dimboola's Jan Ballard receives OAM in 2025.
A role model for community care, Dimboola's Jan Ballard has dedicated years of her retirement to bettering her town.
From maintaining community gardens to championing local infrastructure repair, Ms Ballard's impact is evident across Dimboola.
Fittingly, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal on Australia Day.
"When I retired, I didn't want to just sit around [at home]," she said.
Ms Ballard was raised on a farm in Gerang Gerung, she was the youngest of five children attended a one-classroom school in Lochiel.
She married a train driver with whom she raised two children, one adopted, and regularly cared for an orphaned third.
She worked at the Dimboola Hotel and Dimboola District Hospital.
Even before retirement, Ms Ballard was a giving member of her community.
Her son, Ron Ballard, said she would do as much as possible for the local Girl Guides and Boy Scouts and was a long-serving secretary of the Dimboola Scout Committee.
"Their main money spinner at the time was recycling bottles ... I remember as a kid just getting me in the car and riding around town picking up trailer loads of bottles," said Ron Ballard.
Upon retirement, Ms Ballard noticed a lot of "drab areas" around town and would dedicate two decades to bettering Dimboola.
"If she gets a bee in her bonnet about something, she's just full in. She'll just go at it and go at it until she gets something done," said Ron Ballard.
Ms Ballard is a keen gardener.
"People always loved going around and looking at her garden," Ron Ballard said.
She became Dimboola's Wheelbarrow Lady when she spent hours maintaining the town's public gardens.
"She just wouldn't let it go; it was a thing she took on, and she just went at it," Ron Ballard said.
In 2006, for her work maintaining Dimboola's public gardens, Ms Ballard shared the most prestigious individual prize in national tidy town awards, the Dame Phyllis Frost Award.
At the time, she told The Wimmera Mail-Times, "I was simply doing something that gives me much pleasure. Dimboola was looking unloved, and I just got out there and tidied the place up to show the shire someone could make a difference."
In 2018, Dimboola was named Tidy Town of the Year, a feat Ms Ballard played a significant role in.
Ron Ballard said The Dimboola Town Committee, the group behind the award, was a committee of one for much of the work done to earn it.
When things around Dimboola needed doing, Ms Ballard had a knack for getting them done, even in the face of the council's budgetary restraints.
She said she 'got up to a lot of mischief the council didn't like.'
"She was formidable; she was a bit more determined than a bulldog," Ron Ballard said.
Ms Ballard also helped get repair work done on several pieces of local infrastructure in Dimboola, including a footbridge over the railway line and the VRI Hall.
She'd take a recorder to meetings on those projects and have the legal secretaries who lived next door type it up in exchange for scones.
"The next time they have a meeting, these guys thought that she didn't remember anything, and she'd pull out a typed-up copy of the minutes," Ron Ballard said.
Ron Ballard said the whole family is 'massively' proud to see Jan receive her OAM, but her selflessness in her community work makes her a deserving recipient.
"It was done for a result, not the honour of it," Ron Ballard said.