The 77 year-old’s home has been passed down through five generations of his family on his mother’s side and Duncan says proudly, “It’s the oldest cottage in Victoria still lived in by the same family.”

His lifestyle is almost as modest as that of his ancestors, with mod cons amounting to a septic tank and flushing toilet in the outhouse, a tap outside for cold running water, phone and small gas refrigerator inside the cottage, battery-operated torches and wireless radio.

The cottage has never been powered, so there is no television and he relies on kerosene lamps, wood-fired stove in the kitchen and open fireplace in the lounge.

Duncan ran dairy cows with his parents Ben and Jane after leaving Daylesford Technical School at the age of fourteen-and-a half; giving it away in the early 1970s when the butter factories closed up and nobody could sell cream.

His family had four big chook sheds at one stage, running 600-700 chooks and they always cut hay for the stock for poor seasons.

He ran sheep on the farm too, until about 1990, and now he helps with the sheep a neighbour puts on his land.

He keeps busy doing routine work: mending fences, gathering firewood, keeping the yard clean and tidy, picking fruit and walking his dogs.

Even if the weather is sweltering, between 4.30 and 5.00am every day, Duncan lights the stove in his tiny kitchen, to cook a big bowl of porridge for breakfast and for hot water for his cuppa or a sponge bath.

In winter, the stove supplements heating from the open fire in the lounge.

He lives alone except for his cat, which has a special chair next to Duncan’s in the lounge, two dogs, kangaroos, other wildlife and his neighbour’s sheep.

Duncan never married, he was an only child and his dad and mum died in 1963 and 1985 respectively.

He still misses them a bit.

It is a simple existence – some would call it hard – but Duncan is content and only family weddings and funerals have kept him away from Nuggetty for five nights in his lifetime.

“You sort of get homesick when you’re away and then you wanna come back," he said.

“Yandoit’s a good place; I like grubbing around the hills, being amongst the bush and talking to people.”

Duncan and his local friends regularly call on each other and his cousin Russell drops in a few times a week, but the “talking sessions” with neighbours each Wednesday morning are especially a highlight, with his old mates doing most of the talking, while Duncan does a lot of listening and makes the cuppas.

Because of his gifts for listening, talking to and looking after people, Duncan is known as the unofficial Mayor of Yandoit, particularly within his circle of friends and neighbours, and he, along with his old mate Morrie, are guardians of most of Yandoit’s oral history.

Some of this will disappear with Duncan’s generation, but he is pleased that newcomers to Yandoit have already done small recordings of its history and are restoring many of the properties.

Going back to the origins of Old Nuggetty, in 1840, a big Irish bullock driver named Jim Moylan built what is now Duncan’s lounge room; a hut constructed from red box slabs that are still standing, with a bark roof later replaced by iron.

Jim was a bachelor, so his sister Joanna and her Austrian husband and gold miner Mark Billanitsch took over.

The hut served as kitchen, living and sleeping quarters, before more and more children arrived, and a separate kitchen and sitting room were added.

The next custodians of Nuggetty were Mark and Joanna’s daughter Bridget and her husband Charles Killingbeck.

Charles was a gold miner too, along with blacksmith, farrier, dairy and chook farmer.

These families were virtually self-sufficient on the property, a tradition continuing to Duncan’s day.

In about 1860, a two-roomed miner’s cottage that Duncan calls “the front rooms” was built with the best available “bush timber” weatherboard and shingles, but it wasn’t until Charles and Bridget’s daughter Jane married Ben McKinnon, that the separate cottages were joined in 1935-36, using red stringybark and sandstone off their land for the huge chimney.

Ben had been wounded in the First World War.

He was rheumatic and in pain, but ran the farm and worked as a salesman.

“Me dad had the gift of the gab and could sell sand to a Chinaman.”

Duncan admits they were quite alike, saying, “He had a good sense of humour and me mum was pretty good.”

Both are clearly meant as high praise.

The historical cottage was nearly lost in the big fires of ’69, which Duncan likens to the Black Saturday wildfires in 2009.

Conditions had been building up, with excessive growth and extreme heat.

Then on January 8, fires started near Mt Cameron, running hot and fast, and continuing for about three weeks

Spot fires erupted at Nuggetty, ember attack from across the road.

Duncan recalls, “It was only meself and me mother here, and if we had’ve cut and run, the place would’ve been burned.”

It was precarious for two to three days but they stayed and saved everything, thankfully preserving a significant part of Yandoit’s history.

Sandi Wallace is an award-winning crime writer and the author of Tell Me Why a contemporary crime novel set in Daylesford and surrounds, which is available at Paradise Bookshop. The next book in her Rural Crime Files series Black Saturday continues links to this region and is due for release in spring 2015.