Ray Moreland isn’t necessarily your typical country cop.
He readily admits, when he’s out of uniform, his heavily tattooed arms and solid appearance is just as likely to make little old ladies cross to the other side of the street.
However, his smile and easy-going manner would allay any fears (if they haven’t already fled!).
Since 2002, Leading Senior Constable Moreland has been stationed at Buchan as the sole policeman.
Sixteen years have flown by and he’s in no hurry to leave.
“It’s a great little town, it really is,” he said emphatically.
Snr Const Moreland has witnessed the Buchan community endure fires and flooded plains, but through it all the resilience of the close-knit community shines through.
“They come together in times of crisis,” he said.
Snr Const Moreland’s journey to Buchan begins at the other end of the world.
It’s Belfast, in Northern Ireland, in the mid 1960s when his parents, Jim and Florence, welcomed his arrival.
In 1969, Northern Ireland was beset with intense sectarian and political rioting and the Morelands decided it was time to leave.
Australia was a welcoming country in those days and the Morelands arrived in Melbourne when Ray was three.
Growing up in Cheltenham, Ray attended the local high school and embraced cricket and soccer before making his football debut with Caulfield and later Rowville Football Club.
He wanted to be a pilot, but two of his childhood friends joined the police force and he was persuaded to follow suit.
Graduating from the Police Academy in 1985, Snr Const Moreland was shuffled around a number of inner city police stations, namely Elsternwick and Port Melbourne, before doing a six-month stint in Russell Street.
He was stationed there when the Russell Street bombings occurred in March 1986, but it was his day off when the bomb exploded in a vehicle outside the station.
For about the next five years Snr Const Moreland was stationed at Oakleigh before being posted to Narre Warren Police Station in 1992.
He regularly shared night shift duties with his colleagues.
In 1994, two police officers from Narre Warren patrolling an industrial estate in Hallam had three shots fired at their divisional van.
They narrowly escaped death by speeding from the scene.
Ray Moreland wasn’t in the police vehicle being fired upon.
He had been rostered on the following night.
Four years later two policemen Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller were shot dead after pulling over a vehicle in Moorabbin for a routine intercept. Ray was still at Narre Warren and says today that the man jailed over the deaths of the two police officers in Moorabbin remains a suspect in the unsolved divisional van shooting. The suspect was known to live in Narre Warren at the time. Whether it was this sliding doors moment that could have placed Ray in the divisional van shooting or he felt he’d had enough of policing in Melbourne is cause for reflection.
But Ray decided after seeing a job advertised in the police gazette for a sole policeman in Buchan, a quieter life was beckoning.
He applied and was appointed Buchan’s new officer in charge, filling a vacancy that had been empty for six months.
Snr Const Moreland recalls arriving in Lakes Entrance to pick up his police four-wheel drive and the keys to the Buchan station.
Upon arriving in Buchan he was shocked to see the police station positioned next door to the pub.
“I mean that’s just stupid,” he said.
After unpacking his belongings, Snr Const Moreland ate dinner in the pub.
“I introduced myself and the fella who owned the pub at the time, Kevin Cook, was an ex-policeman, so we had a chat and he gave me some info on the locals, like who to look out for, the bad eggs and the good people in town.”
Snr Const Moreland spent the next few days introducing himself around town, exploring the bush and taking in the vast area he had control over.
He concedes it’s a large area from Buchan to the border with large swathes of bushland.
In Narre Warren, he would be attending 15 to 20 jobs a day, namely burglaries, assaults and family violence.
“I thought wow this is fantastic after working so hard in Narre Warren, you’ve got time to do paperwork and time to investigate a crime here.”
One of the downfalls of the jobs, he conceded, is knowing that “every job you go to you’re going to know that person or have a connection to them”.
Snr Cont Moreland says losing his neighbor, who had a medical episode at a party, was “really hard”.
He is proud of his time as the police Aboriginal liaison officer, which involved taking children to the Dreamtime game at the MCG, a position he held for 10 years.
In 2011, he won the highest award for police involvement with Aboriginal youth, being bestowed with the ‘Police Community Spirit Award’ by the Victorian Indigenous Youth Advisory Committee.
Snr Const Moreland stopped looking in the police gazette for postings elsewhere long ago. Come April, he will have been in Buchan for 17 years and plans to see out his policing career in the place he fondly calls home.
IMAGE: Officer in charge at Buchan, Leading Senior Constable Ray Moreland swapped city policing for the lifestyle of a country cop and hasn’t looked back.
