I must say something about the character of the part of Victoria where Lanark is located. I do so not for the benefit of Victorian readers, all of whom would be well aware of the Western District and the kind of place that it is (or, perhaps, that they imagine it to be). People who live elsewhere in Australia, though, tend to have only a vague idea of where and what the Western District is. They may know that Malcolm Fraser’s former property, Nareen, is there, but that is quite possibly all they do know about it.
Allow me then to provide a personal view of this region, surely one of the most interesting in the whole of rural Australia. The Western District is most simply defined as the southwestern corner of Victoria, extending roughly from Ballarat in the east to the South Australian border in the west. It was once considered the heartland of Australia’s so-called squattocracy, and there was a good reason for that. The district occupies a geological feature known as the Basalt Plain, which is a more or less flat expanse of rich volcanic soil that extends from Melbourne to the far side of Hamilton. In fact, the Basalt Plain starts to peter out at Lanark; we have the tail end of it. Not far to our west the basalt soil is replaced by lighter soils with limestone outcrops.
Thanks to its excellent soil and suitable climate, the Western District is arguably the best sheep-grazing land in Australia, and it became the nation’s premier wool-growing region. Even today, the area is said to produce around 15 per cent of Australia’s wool clip. The sheep farmers who took up large tracts of land there in the 1800s became wealthy—and thus was born the legend of the district’s squattocracy, a legend that the media has kept alive to the present day. Just the other day a friend drew my attention to a description of the district’s sheep graziers that he had found on some website or other. We were called ‘those pampered, moleskin-wearing, Jaguar-driving, privately educated Western District squattocracy types’. The writer intended to be humorous, of course, yet the image he presents is still widely accepted as fact.
People can make jokes about the Western District and its squattocracy, but the truth is there is not much to laugh about. Those old-time graziers with big properties may have been wealthy, but their wealth enabled them to support and hold together entire rural communities. Take Branxholme near Hamilton, which I consider my ‘home village’. Until the 1930s, virtually everyone who lived in Branxholme had a job. Branxholme residents were either employed by the owners of Bassett, or they were paid to provide services in the district. There was virtually nobody in Branxholme of working age who was not gainfully employed in one way or another. Today, I would guess that half the people who live in Branxholme cannot find permanent work of any kind—and that is not through any fault of theirs.
Thus, far from being funny, the story is actually a very sad one. So what went wrong? Well, the district suffered two body blows in the first half of the last century. The first was the loss of so many of its finest young men in World War I. As far as I know, no historian has so far managed to assess the true impact on Australian society of the loss of such men, especially in country towns. In the Western District, as elsewhere, the war wiped out a significant portion of a whole generation of movers and shakers—men who otherwise would have gone on to lead the way in the rural industry. After all, the men who went to that war were all volunteers, and I think it is fair to assume that, by and large, they were the men with the most energy and initiative.
Take the case of Hamilton. In 1914, when the war began, the town’s population would have been no more than 5000. (In the last census before the war, in 1911, its population count was 4902.) Yet from those 5000 or so residents, 374 men and 32 women enlisted for military service, and 79 of these men were killed. I would guess that those 374 men represented a very high proportion of Hamilton males of eligible age, which meant males in their late teens and twenties. This, in turn, shows how devastating for a town of Hamilton’s size was that loss of 79 lives. Clarke Street in Hamilton has the questionable distinction of being, reputedly, Australia’s most fertile source of World War I volunteers. There were 33 houses in Clarke Street then, and 25 young men living in the street opted to go off to war.
The other body blow for the Western District—and the whole of rural Australia, for that matter—was the Depression in the 1930s, when many big grazing properties went to the wall. Even for the properties that survived, things were never the same again. Farming methods changed. Fewer and fewer farm workers were employed. Farming became more intensive and depended heavily on pasture improvement. This was, I believe, the end of the squattocracy as everyone knew it. Why? Because the men who might have had the drive and ingenuity to adapt successfully to the new circumstances that the Depression created in the bush were lying dead in war cemeteries in Europe.
In the event, the grazing industry was unable to adapt and, as a consequence, went into decline. The reality is that for many years now the district’s graziers, like most Australian farmers, have struggled to survive financially.
After the first Landline program about Lanark appeared in 1991 I suspected that some viewers, knowing that we were sheep graziers in Victoria’s Western District, may have assumed that the environmental work we did there was just a personal indulgence by members of the old squatter class. I hope I make it absolutely clear elsewhere in this book that nothing could be further from the truth. The environmental work we did at Lanark was certainly not an indulgence. It strained us to the limit financially.
However much the district may have changed, Hamilton remains a very livable, handsome, comfortable country town. For the past 30 years or so Hamilton has had a fairly static population of around 10 000, which is not to say the city is in any way stagnant. One effect of having a stable population like this is that the people who live in Hamilton tend to know everyone else, so it is a well-integrated community. Unfortunately, the population outside the town has not been so stable, and various changes in land usage, most notably the spread of blue gum plantations, have had a lot to do with that. In certain parts of the district, especially around Branxholme, the plantations have replaced farms, and the farmers, their families and employees have gone—a tragic development in my opinion, which I will discuss later in this book.
For all that, Hamilton and the district around it remains a marvellous place to spend one’s life; I know of no place better. Over the past 50 years I have been to Melbourne hundreds of times, yet each time I return I still get a lift when the Grampians come into view and I know I am nearing home.
Hamilton has been called the wool capital of the world, although wool is not its only claim to historical fame. Hamilton also has a place in Australia’s aviation history. In 1936, young Reg Ansett (he had just turned 27) started out in the airline business by running a service between Hamilton and Melbourne with a six-seater Fokker plane. Five years earlier he had begun using a second-hand Studebaker car to ferry people from Maryborough to Ballarat and from Hamilton to Ballarat. A few Hamilton people invested in Ansett’s airline venture, including Billy Beggs, a brother-in-law of my father.
Beggs was an interesting character. Born in 1879, he had varied business and rural interests, he bred racehorses with fair success, he was elected a Hamilton councillor, and he was president of both the Hamilton Club and Hamilton Golf Club. Beggs was reputedly one of three Hamilton people who put up money to get Ansett’s first plane in the air. All three later became directors of Ansett’s company. Beggs remained a director until 1956, and he was the company’s chairman for several years. Reg Ansett once declared that, but for Beggs, Ansett Airways might not have existed. He was referring to his role in dealing with a crisis that arose in 1937 over the delivery of aircraft. The odd thing is that, by all accounts, Beggs never once flew in a plane.