In 1937 a property about 25 kilometres southwest of Hamilton, called Bassett Estate, came on the market. It was named for Christopher Bassett, who had taken up land in the district a century earlier but had been murdered there by Aborigines in 1843. In 1937 Bassett Estate was close to 10 000 acres (4000 hectares)—big but by no means the biggest in this part of Victoria. The property was closely associated with the adjacent village of Branxholme; each was dependent on the other. Most of the shearers and other people who worked there lived in the village, and Bassett cattle were always loaded at the Branxholme railway station yards.
I do not have a record of the auction, but it was almost certainly held in the old Victoria Hotel, then one of Hamilton’s landmarks—a three-storey, bluestone building of character, which had once been a Cobb and Co station. (Sadly, it was demolished about 40 years ago and replaced by a much inferior commercial building.) Bassett was an excellent property in every respect, with very productive river flats, so there was plenty of interest. My grandfather certainly had his eye on it. He did not want it for himself but for one of his daughters, Jean, who was married to Marcus Whiting, the son of a Melbourne businessman. The Whitings were well off. After their wedding, the couple were able to spend nine months honeymooning in Europe. (They are said to have gone to the theatre in London no fewer than 27 times.) They already owned quite a large dairy farm near Warrnambool, where they must have lived in some style, for they employed several domestic staff, including a housemaid. But it seems my Aunty Jean was keen to buy a property somewhere in the Hamilton district, which for her, of course, was home territory.
At the auction, a group of people, mainly local farmers, bid jointly for the property, the plan being that each would end up with a designated section of it. The Whitings were part of this group, and they emerged with a 4000-acre (1600-hectare), rectangular slab of Bassett Estate that included the homestead and retained the name Bassett. My father was part of the group, too, and he ended up with a 1715-acre triangle in the middle. My father was helped at the auction by his friend Eric Reid, a stock and station auctioneer. After the auction, he and my father retired to the bar of the Victoria Hotel to celebrate the purchase. While they were having a drink, Reid asked my father what he intended naming the property, and my father replied that he had no idea. Reid said, ‘Your family came from Scotland, didn’t they? You ought to give it a Scottish name.’
So they asked the publican if he had an atlas, which he did. The atlas was placed on the bar counter, and Reid and my father pored over a map of Scotland. They saw the name Hamilton and looked for a suitable place name nearby. Reid put his finger on Lanark, a small town southeast of Hamilton. ‘It’s about the same distance from that Hamilton as your property is from this Hamilton,’ he said. ‘So why not name it Lanark?’ My father thought this was a good idea, so Lanark became the property’s name.
Marcus Whiting died, aged 57, just two and a half years after buying Bassett. He had been supervising the loading of a mob of cattle at the Branxholme railway yards, and he suffered a fatal heart attack as he went to mount his horse for the ride back to Bassett. His overseer, Alf Turner, ran to the railway station to get help, but it was too late. My father stepped in to help Aunty Jean run Bassett. He was then responsible for several other family properties in the district, including one named Tahara South, which belonged to his father. This is not to say he was in any way a hands-on manager. We lived in town, and he employed men to run the various properties on a day-to-day basis. I have only one boyhood memory of going with him to visit Lanark—and he was there that day not to check on the sheep but to shoot ducks. I can picture him now: sitting with a mate on a couple of wool bales, waiting for wild ducks to fly in to the remnant of a swamp that existed there then.
My parents had been married at St John’s Church in Toorak, Melbourne, in 1931. My mother, Lesley Baker, was a town girl, daughter of a solicitor, and she grew up in Hamilton itself. She was a third-generation Australian. Her maternal grandfather, William Renfrey, was one of many Cornish immigrants who settled in South Australia’s so-called Copper Triangle, an important copper-mining area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His occupation was building chimneys for the smelters there, although he later moved his family to Hamilton. My mother had two sisters but only one brother—my Uncle Vern, of whom I will have more to say later. She was young, good-looking and popular, so at the time she married my father, who was then aged 33, she was considered quite a catch. My parents had two children, a small family in those days. I was born on 25 February 1935 and my sister, Robin, three years later. We were delivered by a midwife, Sister Marjorie Brook, who later served with distinction in World War II. She became a family friend, and I remember her with affection.
I was much too young to be aware of this myself, but it seems that by the 1940s my father had begun to suffer poor health. He was well enough to go off fighting the bushfires of 1944, which did so much damage in Victoria (32 people died and 700 homes were destroyed), but a few months later, in April 1944, he died, aged just 46. No fewer than 170 wreaths were sent to his graveside, reflecting his prominence in Hamilton. He had been a Hamilton town councillor and a president of the Hamilton Club.
I was nine years old when my father died, and my mother was in her early thirties. A widow as young and attractive as my mother might well have married again, but my mother never did, although she was to live until 1981. One reason, I suspect, was that my father’s sisters, out of sympathy, took ‘poor Lesley’, as I later heard them refer to her, firmly under their wing. They were kind people and they meant well, but I am sure they restricted my mother’s social life.
It must have been terribly difficult for her, but my mother kept our family life going as best she could. We still went to Portland—a coastal town about 90 kilometres south of Hamilton—for our annual holiday, for instance. My father had always rented a house for us there. It was common then for Portland people to let their homes during the holiday season and move into a shed at the back of the garden. My mother kept the tradition going. Each year we headed off to ‘Porty’ for a holiday and the first one to see the sea was rewarded with a penny ice cream.
Over the years I have met numerous people who, like me, had the misfortune to lose a parent while they were young children. Some I have spoken with have very clear memories of the parent, even though they were perhaps only four or five years old when the parent died. Not me. My memories of my father are few and fragmented. Here is one of them. When I was eight and Robin about four, our father planted trees for both of us in the garden of our home at 20 Chaucer Street, Hamilton. We helped him plant them. My tree was a claret ash and Robin’s a silver birch. The claret ash grew just outside the closed-in verandah where I used to sleep, so I was able to keep track of its progress.
Then, a few years after my father died, my mother had the claret ash chopped down. It had grown into a sizeable tree by then, and my guess is that its roots were judged to be a threat to the foundations of our double-brick home. Whatever my mother’s reason was for getting rid of the tree, my reaction was extraordinary. By all accounts I ranted and howled for two or three days afterwards. Nothing could console or placate me. Even now, I can recall the sense of outrage I felt. Something precious had been taken from me and I would never get it back.
My reaction to that tree’s removal was certainly out of character. I cannot remember another occasion, before or afterwards, when I put on a turn like that. Without wishing to sound overly introspective so long after the event, I am sure now that I must have somehow associated the tree with my father. Subconsciously, I may have considered it my last personal link with him.
That strange episode may also show that, even then, I was already starting to develop a fondness for trees. Something else I remember from that period may have been a sign of things to come. A few of the boys I knocked about with in Hamilton had armed themselves with home-made shanghais—or gings, as we preferred to call them—which they liked to fire at birds. We would ride out on our bicycles to the town’s Lutheran Cemetery, where there was some natural bushland, and the others would fire their gings at the blue wrens, silvereyes and other native birds they found there. I went along with them, but I disliked the idea of shooting at birds and never did it myself. Did this suggest I was already developing an environmental conscience? Perhaps, although it might also mean I simply had no stomach for blood sports.
By now I had certainly started to take an interest in gardening. One of our near neighbours was an elderly gardener named Russell Pittman, of whom I have fond memories. He belonged to a class of Australian pioneers who have never received the recognition they deserve. When we think of early pioneers we tend to think of the people who first settled the land, cleared it and farmed it. But there were pioneers in country towns, too—those solid working-class people whose skills and labour kept the entire rural community operating.
Russell Pittman was one of these. He lived in a small cottage two streets away from us, and he used to come to our house and show me how to plant vegetables and other garden plants. I have a clear memory of him sitting on our side verandah, having a cup of tea with my mother and eating the scones that she made specially for him. That was characteristic of people then: they were not constantly on the go, as people tend to be today, and perhaps for that reason they did not earn as much. But they did have time to spend with other people. Not many workmen have time to sit and yarn over a cup of tea today.
Under Russell Pittman’s direction, I worked up a garden just outside my sleep-out. My Aunt Nell used to give me nasturtiums to plant there. It was a wise choice on her part, because nasturtiums grow easily, which makes them an ideal plant for the child gardener. I was eight or nine years old then. Was my interest in gardening as a child a precursor to my passion for planting trees later in life? Probably, but I do not know for sure.
After my father’s death, my mother came to depend financially more and more on the wool-growing operation at Lanark. Under the terms of my father’s will, the property was controlled by the Ballarat Trustee Company. Indeed, a sizeable proportion of the properties in the Western District that had been left in a will seemed to be controlled by the Ballarat Trustee Company, which later became the Union Fidelity Trustees Company. Engaging a trustee company in this way was part of a simple device to avoid death duties. Instead of leaving your property to your spouse, who would have to pay death duties again when he or she died, you would leave it to your children or, as often happened, to your grandchildren. This was called skipping a generation.
This is what my father did. When my sister, Robin, and I were still small, my father left Lanark to our future children with the proviso that my mother would have the income from the property during her lifetime. Until our children were old enough to take over the property, it would be controlled by the trustee company. This was a fairly common arrangement. The aim was commendable—avoiding two generations of death duties—but it was not such a good idea in practice. The trustee company was the problem. For one thing, it charged substantial fees. The fact that the trustee company controlled the property was a terrible bind, too. We could not do what we wanted to do with our own land. This would have been more tolerable if the trustee company had run the place efficiently. In fact, many of the decisions the company made about what should and should not be done at Lanark were, in my opinion, hopelessly wrong.
As it happened, my mother had no affinity with Lanark and certainly had no idea whatsoever of how to run a sheep property. We lived in Hamilton itself—and Lanark had been managed for some years by an old bachelor named Donny Macdonald, who lived there in a hut. That hut, a weatherboard lean-to, was the only structure on the property, for at that time Lanark did not even have sheep yards. The hut is still there today and, for me, it always brings back memories of Donny. He was a small man, tiny really, with a subservient manner. His hut consisted of three rooms. One was a workshop about one metre by three; another was a feed room about the same size, which was used for storing chaff for Donny’s horses; and the third was Donny’s living quarters—a room about three metres by three, which contained a stretcher bed, a few cupboards and an old wood stove with an iron chimney. The most modern thing in the room was a telephone, which had a single direct line to the Bassett homestead next door.
Donny Macdonald got around the property not on horseback but in a horse-drawn cart. In those days Lanark generally carried only 1000 or so wethers at any one time, so for most of the year Donny would not have had a lot of work to do. I imagine he mustered the sheep no more than twice a year, once at shearing time. There was no shearing shed on Lanark, so Donny would have taken the sheep to the shed at Bassett, about a kilometre away. For the rest of the year, he would have mended fences as required, made sure the stock had water, and generally kept an eye on things. He would certainly not have done any spraying or fertilising. Donny owned a bicycle, which he rode into Branxholme each Friday, a three-kilometre journey, to get his supplies. From week to week, it was probably the only human contact he had.
I am sure Donny had spent his whole life living and working on sheep stations. He may even have begun his working life as a shepherd, for he was probably just old enough to have done that. Until the late 1800s, when there were vast, unfenced sheep runs, graziers employed men to travel about with the sheep for weeks on end. Their job was to keep the sheep together in a mob, make sure they had feed and water, and protect them from dingoes. They were called ‘shepherds’, although they had little in common with shepherds as they were known in Europe. They led a very solitary life, as Donny did until he died. One day in the mid-1940s, my Aunty Jean at Bassett took a call from Donny on the direct phone line. He said to her, ‘Mrs Whiting, I’m very sick.’ She asked him how sick. He said, ‘I think I might die.’ This sounded serious, so Aunty Jean immediately drove in her car to Lanark. Donny had not been exaggerating: he was lying in his stretcher bed, dead.
As I said before, Donny’s hut is still standing. About six years ago I happened to walk past the hut with my grandson Will, who was then about seven years old. He remarked on the fact that the hut looked a wreck, to which I replied that I hoped he would help me restore it. Will then said, ‘Well, we’d better do it quick. My dad says he’s going to knock it over with his tractor and burn it.’ Will’s dad is my son David. I gave Will a brief lecture on the need to preserve the heritage of the countryside, and I later prevailed upon David to spare the hut, which he has.
After Donny died, the man my Aunty Jean employed as a manager at Bassett, Alf Turner (always ‘Mr Turner’ to me), also took over the day-to-day running of Lanark. I know a little about Turner, because he talked about himself while we were working together in the 1950s and I recorded some of the details in my farm journal. He had started work at Bassett in 1922. He arrived there by train in the company of 11 000 wethers that had been brought down from Swan Hill.
In the 1940s, not long after the war ended, the trustee company approved the construction at Lanark of a shearing shed and a proper house to accommodate a manager. The house was built for £1400 by Athol ‘Attie’ Gunn, the father of my friends Murray, Graeme and Noel. It was occupied first by a returned soldier, Don Macgugan, who was not there long because he was soon allocated a soldier-settlement block of his own. The next manager to move in was an ex-shearer named Keith Fort, who knew all there was to know about farming. Fort was still Lanark’s manager when I took over the place in the late 1950s. After Cicely and I were married, by which time Fort had left, the manager’s house became our home.