For more than 40 years Wal Ragg developed subdivisions for Sydneysiders to live and dream on. He shepherded land from the hands of government, farmers, property developers, accountants and inheritors and worked it with care, then gave it back with sewerage, drainage, power and landscaped roads, ready for homes, schools, shopping centres and family life.
He formed friendships and networks, based on trust not contracts. Such trust allowed him to walk onto a site in western Sydney and, on a handshake, start to build the Eastern Creek Raceway. The high pressure was normal, the visibility not so. Most of the time it was the quiet roads, the cul-de-sacs and crescents, that fired his imagination. Home was important to him, as were homes for others. Throughout his long life, he believed passionately that he was doing his bit to help.
Wal Ragg dancing with his wife, Bette.
Ragg was born in Moss Vale in 1928, just a year before the Depression, and stayed in the Southern Highlands throughout his childhood. His parents managed a boarding house, then were tenant farmers on a dairy farm. They were largely self-sufficient, providing their own vegies, milk, rabbit meat and occasionally beef.
When Wal was a boy, he'd get up early, milk the cows, run five miles to school, study hard, run home, chop wood to heat water for the kitchen and bath, do chores around the farm, do his homework by oil lamp, then go to bed and do it all again the next day. Life wasn't easy but he saw how much harder it was for the passing swaggies, who would chop wood in return for a meal and a bed in the barn.
Those early years shaped Ragg's character. He worked hard and valued hard work. Generous to strangers, more attuned to need than desire, disdainful of fripperies, uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, he was never to change significantly.
He did well at school, becoming dux of Bowral Primary School, where his name sits alongside those of his brother Ron, sister Pat and two of Pat's children, Linda and Katrina. And he ran – ran to school, ran to catch rabbits for dinner, ran for fun in cricket and rugby league. He ran so well that he played first grade league professionally in the Group 6 competition, and decades later was named as a winger in Bowral's team of the century.
On leaving school Ragg started working towards becoming a surveyor. At much the same time he met Bette Nelson, who grew up on a farm the other side of Mittagong. On finishing his studies he moved to Redfern for work but kept catching the train back to Bowral for Bette, balls and rugby league. In 1952 they married and settled in Sydney.
Shortly afterwards Ragg formed a partnership with Arthur Baxter at Western Earthmoving. Over the next four decades Baxter and Ragg, then Ragg and son Graham, built Western Earthmoving to become the biggest builder of suburban roads and subdivisions in the city, with a reputation for quality and integrity. The roads of suburbs like Menai, Kings Langley, Cherrybrook and much of Campbelltown are largely their work.
Wal and Bette planned their retirement early. They bought a home in Bowral and started returning there on weekends which soon stretched to three days and sometimes four. They gardened all day, then sat by the fire with a drink. A good life, shattered by Bette's development of breast cancer and early death.
Wal did it tough without the love of his life. For a man who disliked crowds and fuss, the lights and sights of Sydney had always seemed just a pitstop. But he found it hard to go to Bowral, where he'd always longed to be. He re-partnered with Audrey Hamilton; sadly she was also to die of breast cancer.
Wal's later years were difficult for him. He had the care of his family, especially his daughter Debbie, but missed company. He rekindled old friendships, keeping in touch with people he'd met in primary school days 75 years earlier, kept his garden fresh and became passionate about Andre Rieu. But he felt the world had taken a wrong turn.
Wal gradually declined, dying in Westmead Hospital at the age of 87.
He is survived by his sister Pat, his children Peter, Graham, Mark and Debbie, 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.