By Parker McKenzie
As the curtain falls on the life of Leigh Colin Chandler, friends and family travelled far and wide to ensure he had one last full house at the theatre he lovingly built.
At a memorial service at The Basin Theatre on Monday 19 September, which Leigh founded with his friends and family, the outpouring of love, affection and humour tells the story of a man who touched so many across his life.
The Basin was always his home, attending primary school there and Ferntree Gully Tech nearby. He travelled to the UK in his youth and around Australia in a caravan after meeting his wife Caroline and her two children Kirsten and Eboni, and their son Jesse after marrying in 1984.
“We talked all the time and loved each other completely,” Caroline said.
“We married in the garden where we are about to place Leigh.”
He built many great things, a skill he learned from his father.
“When Leigh returned to Australia, he started work with dad and decided to renovate the cabin which dad had built decades earlier,” his brother John Chandler said.
“He made mud bricks to use in the building and milled pine trees felled by the Salvation Army down off Sheffield Road. The mud bricks are still standing, even surviving a fire that destroyed the back of the old house.”
At Bear Gully in South Gippsland, he put his hands and skills to work by building Wirrega: a seven-bedroom mud brick tourist facility where he met many friends.
A cohort from Kakadu in the Northern Territory travelled the length of the country to a place where Leigh had hosted them many times, playing the didgeridoo before the memorial service and speaking from the heart on behalf of those who couldn’t make the journey.
While some in mob knew him as dad and his wife Caroline as mum, his stepchildren knew him by another name.
“Ralph — as we called him — in his Cuban heeled RM boots and his dog George came into our lives around 40 years ago,” Kirsten Brunton said.
“You may wonder why we call him Ralph. Not long after he and mum got together, I asked him what his favourite name was: he said Ralph, it was as simple as that.”
His children spoke of their father with a wicked sense of humour and mischief, which he instilled in all of them.
“Leigh, my dad, my best friend,” Jesse said.
“I’ll miss him always.”
He taught them how to pick Boronia plants, work the farm and how to build. Leigh was accomplished and knowledgeable, and he didn’t mind sharing his wisdom and experience with those he met along the way.
“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground,” one speaker remarked, sparking tears from the gathering of Leigh’s family and friends.
They spoke of performing alongside him on the very stage they were now wishing him goodbye, and of his iconic performance as Atahualpa, the king of the Incas in Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun — directed by his mother Edna — when the theatre first opened.
Leigh died on Sunday 28 August at age 69 but will live on in the hearts of those who remember him. Attendees made the short walk after the service, where his ashes were placed at his family home, his forever home, in The Basin where he belongs.
