Why is Spring @Value not working to read my parameter and default value?

In my small Spring project, i have a value that i may need to change of on of my parameters.  The simple solution would be

@Value("${myParam:defaultVal")

private String myParam;

Yet it was not working and the value was coming out as "$myparam:defaultVal".

What's the issue?
Eventually i stumbled upon the issue via this spring issue. I also saw it addressed here although there is a mistake as it is not sufficient to use util:properties as explained here. So, to make this work if you are using XML just add this in:

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:/myfile.properties"/>

Now hopefully this wont happen again to me...