I was barely 22 years old when I took control of Lanark, and only 23 when I took up full-time residence there with my new bride. This was probably just as well. If I had been much older, I may well have been disillusioned by the sorry state the place was in and lost heart. As it was, I was young enough to relish the challenge of turning Lanark into a first-class property. This proved to be an enormous job, although I did not realise it at the time. That was probably just as well, too.
The country around Lanark looked very different, of course, when white farmers first came there with their sheep and cattle. It was then an open woodland with a dense growth of trees and associated under-storey plants along the natural drainage lines. These trees would have included drooping she-oaks, manna gums (Eucalyptus viminalis), blackwoods (Acacia melanoxylon), swamp gums (Eucalyptus ovata), woolly tea-tree (Leptospermum lanigerum), silver banksias (Banksia marginata), which were called ‘honeysuckles’ by the early settlers, and black wattles (Acacia mearnsii), which are the pioneer wattles of the district. The farmers got rid of most of the trees. Black wattles were targeted in particular because their bark is rich in tannin, which made them useful in the tanning process.
Most of the land clearing in our area took place in the second half of the 1800s, especially the 1870s. We have a firsthand description in 1886 of how rapidly the old Bassett sheep station, of which Lanark was part, had been stripped of trees and other vegetation in the previous fifteen years. It appeared in an article in the Hamilton Spectator, the local newspaper (which celebrated 150 years of publication in 2009). The writer had this to say:
I was not prepared for the transformation the place has undergone. The forests have almost disappeared and with the exception of the bleached weather boats in trunks of the larger gum trees, there is nothing to indicate they ever existed; the main branches have all fallen and cleared away, whilst the thick honeysuckles [banksias] have vanished, root and branch. Vast lengths of drains have been completed to link up with the creek and the land is all now healthy.
Let me describe what Lanark was like when I took it over in 1956. To begin with, it was almost tree-less. Apart from some pine trees and two stands of sugar gums that had been planted in the 1930s as shade for the stock, Lanark was a bare expanse—a moonscape almost. The pastures were neglected and degraded. There was a patchy covering of native grasses but little else. The stock were in poor condition, too. The sheep had foot rot when I arrived there, and the cattle were old and looked like bags of bones.
Years ago an RMIT publication quoted me saying this about Lanark when I took it over:
Looking back, I often wonder why the hell I didn’t sell the property. All the water had been drained. It was absolutely bare, apart from the thirty-five pine trees planted along the railway line during the Depression, 300 pines that my father planted in 1939 and two very small sugar gum plantations on the property. Every other tree I have the opportunity or privilege to walk under I have planted myself or an extremely close person to the family has planted.
Clearly, the absence of trees at Lanark was a problem I could not fix quickly. Trees take a long time to grow—frustrating when you want them to grow quickly. But I was confident it would not take me long to fix most of Lanark’s other problems. I believed I could turn things around fairly quickly. In fact, my first management decision was not a good one. With hindsight, the most sensible method of dealing with the foot rot would have been to sell all the sheep and start again. At the time, though, I was convinced I could beat it—which I did manage to do eventually, although it took an immense amount of time and effort. I had to separate the sheep with foot rot from the rest of the mob, and pare their feet (by no means a pleasant job, given that the feet were often fly-blown), which I then soaked in a bath of formalin. Moreover, this all had to be repeated periodically.
In 1956, Lanark had no remnant vegetation. By this I mean that none of the original vegetation, including trees, that grew there before farmers started clearing the land had survived— apart from a few degraded areas of native grassland that had been grazed continually for 100 years or more. The only remnant vegetation visible on the place was over the fence— along the railway line that forms Lanark’s southern boundary. There were some silver banksias, manna gums and black wattles growing beside the line, plus some patches of native grass. Not long afterwards, however, the railway authorities decided to poison the lot because they felt the railway line would then need less maintenance and be a better fire break. (In my opinion, they were wrong on both counts.) It took them several years of spraying to get rid of this indigenous vegetation, but eventually all of it was gone. Today, exotic plant species grow along the line, including phalaris grass, self-sown pines and numerous weeds. These have to be sprayed annually to maintain access and ensure an effective fire break.
On our side of the fence, meanwhile, I was busy establishing a row of pine trees about 150 metres from the boundary. The pines were meant to provide shelter for my sheep—but they were also meant to mask the sight and sound of the steam trains that used to run fairly regularly along the line. Today, if steam trains still ran along that line, I could probably charge people to come and watch them.
These pines were my first major planting. I am happy to say they are still there today.