ONE of Dennis O’Hoy’s favourite phrases is, "Oh that’s easy".
How did the clan come to be in Bendigo? "Oh that’s easy", he says, and unwinds a long thread of family history from Wah Lock Lea in Hong Kong’s Guandong province to the goldfields of Bendigo and on to the modest suburban home where this retired teacher is working on something huge and ambitious: a multi-faceted family history that will take in everything from Chinese dynasties to the White Australia policy.
How did he come to spend 39 years teaching the history of ceramics at what eventually became Bendigo TAFE?
That’s also easy, apparently, the trajectory of young Dennis from Bendigo High School through teacher training, with a couple of years at Bendigo Pottery along the way, marriage, kids, and so on down the years.
None of it progresses in a straight line. "That’s what my children tell me, too," he says. "I never answer a question directly."
Even when he must confront, when asked, some of the more painful moments, Mr O’Hoy tries to make it sound "easy". Nevertheless this irrepressibly positive, energetic man is momentarily sapped by some of those memories.
There is, for example, the phone call from his wife Win when he was on study leave in London, telling him that so much of his beloved family history had been swept away when council went against the agreement they had with the O’Hoy family and knocked down the old shops that stood where the Dragon Museum now stands.
"There were some real villains in council in those days," Mr O’Hoy says, his voice losing its customary verve.
Gone was a treasure trove of bric-a-brac, a store of memorabilia and all the trappings of a century of commerce.
For a collector like Dennis, this was more than unfortunate; it was wicked.
But he moves on, quick as a flash, upbeat again, telling another story, this time about a big red sign that sits, pride of place, in his cluttered study.
That sign disappeared from the site of the Sun Ack Goon store during that demolition. When an acquaintance alerted him to its whereabouts, he was quick to telephone to see if he could buy it back.
Met with a rather curt refusal, he resigned himself to its loss, but five years later, another phone call: the woman who had ended up with the sign (it was being used as a workbench) had decided she wanted to renovate her kitchen, so agreed to sell it back to its rightful owner.
You can see by the light in Mr O’Hoy’s eyes as he talks about recovering that sign and restoring it, how much his family history means to him.
Equally important is the history of Bendigo, a city he loves with a passion.
For his services to Bendigo, and to heritage in Victoria, Dennis O’Hoy was awarded the inaugural Ray Tonkin Award (named after the former executive director of Heritage Victoria) earlier this month.
At the award ceremony, Heritage Council chairman Daryl Jackson paid tribute to Mr O’Hoy’s 40 years of work.
"He has been instrumental in building Bendigo’s heritage tourism from the grassroots," Mr Jackson said, referring to Mr O’Hoy’s "pivotal role" in setting up the Bendigo Trust to manage first the historic goldmine, and later the trams and the Joss House.
What is remarkable about this heritage award Mr O’Hoy points out himself: as a young man, he thought heritage was old hat, and once wrote an essay advocating the demolition of old buildings (such as Bendigo’s now much admired Town Hall) to make way for the efficient banality of modernist architecture.
Outside his own cream brick veneer up behind View Street on Bendigo’s west-side, he laughs as he draws an imaginary line along his boundary fence and says, "it’s heritage-listed, up to here". On a small block over the road, he recalls there used to be a worker’s cottage: that went, at his behest, to make way for a modern house for a relative.
Somewhere along the way, the heritage penny dropped, and Mr O’Hoy became tireless in not just his quest to preserve Bendigo’s history but also as a collector.
On the day we talk, he is still aglow from a purchase he has just made, "hitting the jackpot" he calls it. He has bought a whole tray of badges, "very rare", and has set about doing what appears to be the thing that he most loves to do in the whole world – cataloguing them.
His memory is prodigious, and he is very proud not just of the way he can "take you out to the cemetery and talk about every grave", but also flummox you with facts and figures, until you are slightly punch-drunk with information.
On his kitchen wall, among all kinds of memorabilia (including his pride and joy, the newspaper banner proclaiming that the battle to save the historic trams had been won) is a note from a former student, suggesting a lecture by the "cute" Mr O’Hoy was more entertaining than informative.
Part of the performance is to divert the subject away from himself: his wife warned him, when he accepted his award, not to talk about himself.
"I’m overdone," he says, pointing to a pile of DVDs for which his expertise has been sought as our thirst for history grows ever stronger. And yet, the questions keep coming: across the Easter weekend he was visited by journalists from Hong Kong, seeking to interview him.
He is only 73, but Mr O’Hoy is getting a little agitated, as he confronts the couple of big boxes sent to him from Hong Kong recently, which contain piles of papers documenting yet more of his family’s convoluted history.
With a laugh that turns slightly manic, he says he wants to get on to doing an encyclopedia of Bendigo pottery, but that will have to wait until the family history is complete.
Should keep him out of mischief, you think, but then again…
"I was always in trouble at school," he remembers. "I won’t say I was a rebel – but I enjoyed life."
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