Playing the bagpipes is a tradition for Donald Blair’s family – there are 11 people in his family who play the pipes.

Donald still plays the pipes that his grandfather purchased in Edinburgh in the late 1800s and if those pipes could talk, they’d have quite a story to tell.

“Scotland was a very poor country but anything to do with kilts and bagpipes they seem to be able to find money for,” he said.

When Donald’s grandfather, who worked for British Railways, was sent to Canada and South Africa to work, he took the bagpipes with him.

“While he was in Halifax he wrote a tune called The Pride of Scotland which is quite well-known,” Donald said.

“He died shortly after he returned to Scotland from South Africa and they went under the bed for a period of time and then my dad took them up.”

Donald’s father joined the navy and after five years came to Australia, arriving in Fremantle in the 1920s with the pipes under his arm.

“The Depression was on and he wanted to get across to Victoria, so he walked,” he recounted.

“He said there were hundreds walking the roads. They did a thing called jumping the rattler and they’d go up to the railway lines where there was a bit of hill and when the goods trains were just outside the town and were still going very slowly they’d jump on the carriages and then jump off before the next town.”

Donald’s childhood is filled with memories of the bagpipes. His earliest memory is watching his dad coming in from a fishing trip on a Mount Gambier lake playing Danny Boy on the pipes.“I don’t know why he had the bagpipes there, but he did.”

As a five year-old he remembers his father playing with the Mount Gambier pipe band and leading a march of American troops through the streets in 1942. “It scared the living daylights out of me because all I heard was bagpipes in the distance and boots on the bitumen.”

The family moved to Garvoc, and at the age of eight Donald decided to take up the bagpipes. “I had a great love for music, and pipes were in the house and it was just the automatic thing to do,” he said.

“Music has been a passion all my life. I had a go at three or four instruments. My mum was very keen to have me play the piano. But they were financially poor and they couldn’t afford a piano. I had a few lessons and I had to go to the neighbours to practice and that didn’t last.”

He said despite later learning the piano for three or four years and doing five grades on the flute “pipes still come up trumps”.

As a child, he would win many of the talent quests that were commonly held across the district. “They’d throw money onto the stage,” he said. “Growing up for me there were pipe bands in every country town in Victoria. There was even a pipe band out at Purnim.”

Highland dancing was also popular. “Dad played for highland dancing everywhere. They bought a little house in Garvoc and the house was bought with all his piping money from highland dancing,” he said.

“He was getting three pound 15 shillings a week at his job at the Garvoc grocer’s store, and he could get five pound a week playing for highland dancing for a Saturday afternoon.”

His father’s job involved riding his bike around the region to collect orders, and then loading up the horse and cart to deliver the groceries. Donald not only inherited a love of bagpipes from his father, but also a love of riding long distance on his bike.

Most days he will ride 30 kilometres, on others he will ride 70km. “I just jump on and away I go. I could sit there for four or five hours,” he said. “My latest acquisition is an electric e-bike. It doesn’t go unless you pedal.

“I thought I’d update and get modern.

“As an eight-year-old kid my parents couldn’t buy me one. 

“I’d gather up enough money to enter a raffle, but I never ever won one. But my first wage I ever earned I went into the bike shop and bought a bike.”

Donald worked in the dairy industry, securing a job in the laboratory at Trufoods at Noorat before he was sent to Werribee for two years to study dairy factory management. 

He then worked at Associated Dairies in Dandenong but city life was not for him, and also because during his time there in the 1950s he couldn’t find a pipe band to play with.

Donald decided to make his lifelong yearning to become a farmer a reality and quit his job in Melbourne and bought a dairy farm at Panmure.

Soon after he joined the Warrnambool pipe band which had just advertised in Scotland for a pipe major.

Allan Ingram arrived in Warrnambool, along with many other Scottish pipers and drummers, and was pipe major until 1982 when Donald took on the role.

By then Donald’s reputation as a bagpipe tutor had started to grow. He had already taught his children how to play and people started to travel from across the state for lessons.

Families from Ararat, Portland, Melbourne and Horsham would travel to Warrnambool every week for lessons. 

​“There was a stage when there were more people outside Warrnambool in the pipe band than what there was from Warrnambool itself,” he said. 

Donald had first started tutoring other players when he was 18 and pipe major of the Terang pipe band, and with his 80th birthday just around the corner, he still has about 30 students whom he teaches each week for both the King’s College and the Warrnambool and District pipes and drums bands.

With band practices thrown in, that means he spends up to 30 hours a week blowing on his pipes or practice chanter (although just recently he started sometimes using a digital chanter).

“I’ve got this digital pipe and I can play it now without blowing, because I could be blowing from 4.30pm until 9.”

Today’s technology means he is able to tutor pipers from other towns via Skype. In the old days he used to tutor an Ararat family of five pipers over the phone. “My ear would get very sore,” he said.

“It’s given me enormous pleasure. I’d be a millionaire if I were paid, but the pipe major’s job is a voluntary job. From that perspective you don’t expect to be paid.”

For Donald, it is all about giving young bagpipe players experiences to remember. 

That’s why he is taking the band to New Zealand to compete in the Jenny Mair Highland Square Day on December 9.

“It’s so popular that all the bands flock there,” he said.

The talents of Donald’s students have not gone unnoticed with a Melbourne band recently asking some Warrnambool pipers to join their band.

“We’ve had players play with other high-level bands, we’ve had players play at the Edinburgh Tattoo on a number of occasions. We’ve had players play the World Pipe Band Championships,” Donald’s son-in-law Pete Moir said.

When the bagpipes were introduced to the Australian Music Examination Board, Donald started putting his students through the HSC/VCE as a year 12 subject.

His daughter Merran Moir was one of the first pipers to do that.

She went on to join the Melbourne pipe band and was then asked to play the bagpipes on John Farnham’s iconic Aussie anthem You’re the Voice. 

This year marks 30 years since she joined that first tour for the Whispering Jack album.

“I actually went down while they were doing the recording, so I was drinking beer with John Farnham while they were recording,” Merran’s husband Pete said. 

“He’s as nice as what he appears.”

Warrnambool has had a pipe band since 1906, with the exception of both world wars when it went into recess for a time and in the 1960s there was even a ladies pipe band.

Each year the band takes to the road for competitions, the first for the ‘17/18 season kicks off in Daylesford on December 2.

Over the years the band has won a number of competitions, been invited to Melbourne to play for a special Royal Children’s Hospital concert at the Melbourne Performing Arts Centre and regularly plays at festivals and Anzac Day marches across the district. “For me it’s been an incredible journey,” Donald said.  “I’ve led a very simple life. I’ve been a simple soul.”