I had another reason for going to New Zealand. In a way, my trip there was a silent protest. Let me explain.
Cicely and I had been aware of each other in a vague sort of way since childhood—our families knew each other and sometimes met—although we were certainly not childhood sweethearts. She was just a girl that I would see every so often at functions and get-togethers but did not take much notice of. After all, she was three years younger than me. Her father, Patrick Gaussen, had a large grazing property named Vasey Farm near Balmoral, west of the Grampians. The property had been owned by the Gaussen family since 1925. I formed my first romantic association with a Gaussen girl when I was a teenage agricultural student at Longerenong College, although it was not with Cicely but her older sister, Jill, who was about my age. To call it a ‘romantic association’ is really to overstate its importance, for the truth is it was just a teenage attachment of a harmless type that was common then.
That was 1953, when I was eighteen. My next contact with a Gaussen girl was in 1956, and this time it was Cicely. It happened this way. A good friend of mine from Hamilton, Graeme Gunn, who was an exceptionally talented footballer, had been recruited by the Melbourne Football Club and had moved to Melbourne to play there. I sometimes went to Melbourne to spend the weekend with him, camping in the half-house that Graeme and a few others rented in South Yarra. One evening I tagged along with Graeme and his girlfriend when they decided to go to a kind of nightclub in the city. We were walking along Bourke Street, just in front of the Myers store, when we came upon Cicely, who had probably just been shopping and was with a group of girlfriends. Graeme apparently felt sorry for me because I did not have a female companion, and on seeing Cicely he grabbed me and said in my ear, ‘Look—there’s that Gaussen girl, Cicely. Ask her to join us.’ I was reluctant, guessing she would probably turn me down, but Graeme insisted, so I went up to Cicely and asked her to come along. As I had feared, she declined.
She must have given me her phone number, though, because not long after this I asked her out again and this time she said yes. Soon, I was taking her out regularly, and before long I was smitten. This was 1957 and Cicely was now nineteen years old. Then came some worrying news. Cicely was an accomplished equestrian, and her parents had decided to send her to a riding school in Ireland called the Burton Hall Riding Centre, which was run by a memorably named ex-soldier, Colonel Dudgeon. The news was worrying for me, because I half-suspected that the real reason her parents wanted her to go to the riding school there was that they hoped she would meet and marry a gentleman-farmer. But there was nothing I could do to stop her going, for everything was arranged. Cicely had been booked into the school and was due to sail to England in October 1957.
It was clear to me that I needed to take pre-emptive action to ensure I did not lose her. An opportunity arose in September 1957, when we were in Melbourne together for the weekend. Cicely stayed there with her grandmother, Christine Thornley, and I again stayed with Graeme Gunn and his mates. Cicely and I had already talked about getting married in a roundabout sort of way, but this weekend I made sure the talk became action. I took her to Hardy Brothers, an old firm of jewellers in Melbourne, and bought her an engagement ring. I chose the Hardy Brothers shop because that is where my father had bought my mother’s engagement ring. In fact, my father may well have bought the ring from the same elderly jeweller who sold the ring to us. He remembered my father as ‘Mr Dave’.
Then came the awkward part: breaking the news to Cicely’s parents. It had already been arranged that Cicely and I would drive to their property that evening, and as we travelled up in my mother’s Volkswagen I felt myself becoming more jittery by the mile. We found Mrs Gaussen cooking a roast in the kitchen. ‘You’re very late,’ she said. I explained it had been a big day—and I blurted out that Cicely and I wanted to become engaged. Mrs Gaussen said, ‘But you haven’t asked Mr Gaussen,’ the implication being I should do so immediately. So I walked rather hesitantly down the hall to what was called the smoking room. He was in there, reading a newspaper and sitting in front of a fire blazing with red gum logs. I told him about our intention to become engaged. He did not seem unduly surprised, but he replied firmly that, no, he would not agree to it. So I returned to the kitchen where Cicely was waiting. Her mother said, ‘What did he say?’ I told her he had said no. ‘What bloody rot!’ she said to me. ‘I knew your father well, and he was a fine man.’ Then she strode up the hall to the smoking room. A few minutes later, she emerged and declared, ‘You will announce the engagement tomorrow.’
So we became engaged. A month later, Cicely left for England. I did not want her to go, of course, and I resented the fact she was going. After all, we were merely engaged, not married, and I was still afraid that she might meet somebody else there and call our engagement off. It was against this background that I decided to go to New Zealand. I suppose I was making a point: I was showing her that she was not the only one who could flit off overseas. So I set off for New Zealand in November 1957, just a few weeks after Cicely’s departure.
I returned to Australia in June 1958. Two months later Cicely came back, too. We married a little over four months later—on 8 January 1959—and moved at once into our home, the house at Lanark that had been built in the mid-1940s to accommodate the property’s manager. By now, I had been living at Lanark off and on for several years in a dwelling known as The Hut. I was certainly there in late 1956 when the Olympic Games were held in Melbourne, because I remember listening at Lanark to Olympic events on the radio. Built half of weatherboard and half of fibro, The Hut had one bedroom, a small kitchen with an old wood-burning stove, and a long-drop dunny outside. The Gunn brothers, Noel and Murray, had built it for me behind the manager’s house in 1956 when I began living at Lanark intermittently. The Hut has been put to various uses since then, and for the past twenty years or more it has served as an office.
During the years I had been staying, off and on, at Lanark, I had managed to plant a few trees around the house and a few individual trees around the property. The manager of the property, Keith Fort, helped me plant them. The trees were planted simply to provide shelter for the house. They were mainly Monterey cypresses (Cupressus macrocarpa), plus a few natives. The latter were mainly tuarts (Eucalyptus gomphocephala)—a coastal eucalypt native to the southwest of Western Australia. We grew the tuarts by direct seeding, which at the time was an unorthodox way to grow them but has since become fairly common practice. The method I used was quite straightforward. I shallow-ploughed the strip of ground where I wanted the trees to grow, spread the tuart seed and raked it in. It was necessarily a simple process for it replicated, more or less, the process by which trees are seeded in nature. Many graziers in the Western District used this same method in the 1930s to plant long rows of sugar gums (Eucalyptus cladocalyx).
In retrospect, I can see that even then I was becoming keen on the idea of planting and nurturing trees. An incident that occurred not long after I planted the tuart seed illustrates this. Keith Fort had bought a number of turkeys, which he intended to fatten and eat. I called in one day when he was away and saw that one of his turkey gobblers and a number of turkey hens had got into a fenced-off area where I had sown the tuart seed. The gobbler was scratching at the seed as hard as he could and spreading it everywhere, which made me see red. I grabbed a stick and threw it at him with the intention of driving him out of the tuart row. Unfortunately for the gobbler, the stick spun like a boomerang and struck him in the neck. He ran for a short distance then fell down dead. I buried the turkey and said nothing to Keith Fort. I reasoned that an admission of guilt would not bring the turkey back and was sure to strain my relations with Lanark’s live-in manager. Perhaps Keith concluded the turkey had been taken by one of the wedge-tailed eagles that nested in drooping she-oaks (Allocasuarina verticillata) nearby.
Right from the outset, I kept a daily journal of things that happened on the farm. Here is an entry from around that period: ‘I’ve had my eye on a new site for a house since about Christmas time. Mum had a look at it the other day and also G C Gunn. Both thought it was okay. Makes use of a view of the swamp and the Lanark Lake. Cicely thinks it’s great too.’ What I find interesting about this journal entry is that I used the word ‘lake’. This was 30 years before Lake Cicely really came into being, and I was already dreaming of creating a large body of permanent water in the vicinity of the house. Another entry records the fact that as far back as April 1957 I bought a rotary hoe for use in planting trees and shrubs—another indication that I was already taking the idea of planting trees seriously.
In May 1958 Keith Fort left Lanark to take up a stockman’s job at Yarram Park, a well-known property near Dunkeld, which made it possible for Cicely and me to move into the manager’s house at Lanark after we were married eight months later. The house was made of weatherboards and had an iron roof. It had two small bedrooms, a sitting room and a tiny bathroom that was heated by a chip heater with an iron chimney. The toilet was a long-drop dunny outside. Our water supply consisted of two 1000-gallon galvanised-iron tanks that were fed from the roof. We did have running water in the house, but there was not enough water pressure to run a shower. The house had no electricity as such, either. The only power we had was supplied by a 32-volt battery unit that I charged periodically using an old engine in the shearing shed. It was one of the excellent Ronaldson Tippett engines that used to be manufactured in Ballarat.
There was still one employee at Lanark—a local man named Jack Childs. He had started working there while Fort was still manager, and he stayed on when I took over. Jack lived in Branxholme but used to camp in The Hut during the week.
By the time Cicely and I took up residence in the former manager’s residence at Lanark, the house was surrounded by young trees that were growing vigorously. Tree-wise, it was not much of a start—but it was a start.