In early 1966 Cicely and I began by far the biggest project that we had undertaken so far at Lanark: the construction of a large dam to provide a permanent water supply. In effect, we were setting out to install a wetland to augment the already reinstated Racecourse Swamp. In the process, we would also create a habitat for birds, especially water birds, and we wanted that habitat to be as varied as possible in terms of both plant types and water levels. The more varied the habitat, the more sustainable the habitat would be. The project was to provide practical benefits, too—most notably a permanent water supply for the house and garden as well as for the stock. If the need arose, we would have water to protect ourselves against fire. Lanark’s number-one problem when Cicely and I came to live there was a shortage of water, both at the house, where we had only a 1000-gallon tank, and in the paddocks. This problem, we hoped, would be fixed once and for all.
At the time we were preparing plans for Lake Cicely, we were fortunate to have the services of Michael Cook, our farm consultant, known to us as Mick. He was in favour of the various environmental projects we were undertaking, which was pretty unusual for a farm consultant at that time. Mick suggested we go one step further and use the water in Lake Cicely for irrigation, which required some modification of our original design for the lake. Incorporating irrigation in the project did provide a bonus: it convinced my bank manager to lend us the money we needed to see the whole project through.
What the dam ended up doing, in fact, was to create an expanse of permanent water that we later named Lake Cicely. The lake forms a kind of horseshoe around the house and, when full, measures about seventeen acres (seven hectares) in area and holds about 60 acre-feet (74 000 cubic metres) of water. The site for the lake was just below the old swamp— that is, further down the catchment. The construction work went ahead so steadily that the entire project was finished by the following summer—that is, the summer of 1966–67. For that, we can thank the skill and efficiency of the contractor, the late Kevin Shepherd, who had as many as five Fordson tractors working on the job at one time. Kevin also had two vans stationed on the site. One served as a workshop and the other as a mess hut. In all respects it was a big operation.
With the dam wall now in place, we all looked forward to seeing water banking up behind it in the winter of 1967. That proved to be a false hope, for 1967 turned out to be a terrible drought year. Indeed, the 1967–68 drought was one of the worst in Victoria’s history. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the first six months of the year were the driest January-to-June period on record in the twentieth century across large areas of Victoria, and as far as I know that included our own district. Until the record was beaten in 2007, Melbourne had its driest 365-day period in 1967–68. The rainfall in that period totalled 318.0 mm—or only twelve and a half inches. In 2006–07, the record-lowering total was 316.4 mm.
As a consequence, hardly any water appeared behind our big new dam in the whole of 1967. True, the dam wall did develop some small leaks, as dry dams tend to do, and these later needed fixing. But it was the drought that kept the swamp dry initially. Water did not start to flow into it until eighteen months after the dam’s completion—after the drought broke in 1968. Before long, Lake Cicely began to appear, as if from nowhere, and the lake has never been totally dry since.
Because the lake was intended to be a habitat for water birds and other water-loving flora and fauna including frogs, swamp rats and white-tailed water rats, we fenced off the whole area from stock. We knew this would also allow a full suite of indigenous riparian plant species to establish themselves there. Maybe it was appropriate that the fenced-off wetland at Lanark should have been installed by someone named Fenton. I have read that the family name is derived from the ancient English word ‘fen’, which means ‘marsh’, and from the equally ancient English word ‘tun’, which means a fenced-off enclosure. Together, they describe perfectly the project we undertook to reinstate Lanark’s swamp. The fenced-off reserve around Lake Cicely continued to expand in the decades that followed. By the time my son David finished fencing off the latest, and probably last, addition to it three years ago, the reserve had grown to 65 acres (27 hectares).
The old swamp above Lake Cicely had been drained many years before by previous owners of the property. There would have seemed nothing wrong with that at the time: it was what farmers all over Australia did if they had swamps or wetlands on their land. Why did they drain them? One reason was to acquire more grazing land. The main reason, though, was to reduce or, better still, eliminate the risk of certain diseases that are prevalent in wet areas. Liver fluke, a common disease in cattle and sheep, is one of these. Snails are an intermediate host of the parasite that causes the disease, and snails flourish in and around swamps.
The soldier-settlement schemes that operated after both world wars led to much more intensive farming, which, in turn, encouraged people to drain more and more swamps. In Victoria, and probably in other states too, local drainage boards were set up to promote and oversee the drainage of wet areas. There was a real sense of compulsion about it. Draining wet country became as imperative as spraying weeds. Everywhere you looked in the early 1950s you saw machinery hard at work, digging drains.
I believe the damage done to the environment by this mania for draining natural wetlands and swamps was catastrophic. It was not just the swamps and wetlands that were destroyed, either. One farmer in the Branxholme area drained sections of his property and in the process destroyed the only pristine creek in the district. He diverted the creek through a channel, which effectively got rid of all the plant species that had lived along the creek. The creek had been a habitat for platypus, a whole suite of bird species and at least one endangered species of fish, the pygmy perch. There were tiger snakes there too. By the time he finished his draining operation they were all gone—including the tiger snakes, which promptly migrated to my place and set up permanent home in the wetland I was then re-establishing. Previously, when the property was bare and dry, tiger snakes were never seen at Lanark. About the only snakes we used to see were the less aggressive copperheads.
As far as I can tell from the records, the wetlands at Lanark were first drained in the 1880s, when Lanark was part of Bassett Estate. Farmers throughout Victoria—and across much of Australia, for that matter—were draining swamps as long ago as that. Over time, these drains gradually became blocked and the swamps reappeared, which is no doubt why the drainage boards were set up after World War II. Even today, you can see the outline of the drains quite clearly in aerial photos.
In 1956 I decided to reinstate the old Racecourse Swamp. At that time, drains were still channelling water out of the swamp, so these had to be filled in. We wanted to restore the old swamp to its natural state, the condition it was in before white settlement—with the same supply levels. Now, swamps in Australia tend to dry out periodically; some swamps dry out every year. The Racecourse Swamp dried out every few years. This is a perfectly natural occurrence. Australian wetlands have a naturally alternating sequence of wetting and drying, and it is wrong environmentally to try to prevent a swamp drying out by increasing its capacity. A far better option is to construct a new permanent body of water on a suitable site.
This is what we set out to do when we built Lake Cicely below the Racecourse Swamp. Our objective was to create a sizeable body of permanent water—a small lake, really—that water birds could use as a habitat at any time of year and around which riparian plants could become permanently established. The site was ideally suited to such a construction. It consisted of a large, fairly flat basin with a gentle gully falling away to the northwest. All we needed to do was build a wall to dam the water. We removed the topsoil along the line of the wall we intended to build, exposing the hard clay underneath. We then raised the wall by piling more and more clay on top of the exposed clay, compacting it all as we went along. When we finally had a wall of clay of the required height—about four metres—we covered it all with the topsoil that we had removed at the outset.
The wall, when complete, extended in a slight arc for a distance of about 100 metres. We finished building the dam in about six months. Initially, to keep our bank manager happy, we called it the Stockyard Irrigation Dam. Only later did we rename it.
Cicely and I bore the entire cost of the project. What I found incomprehensible at the time—and I still find incomprehensible today—is that other farmers in the district who drained their properties received government money to do it. They were paid subsidies to install the drains and, in my opinion, damage the area’s environment. Yet I could never get a cent from any government authority to support the work I was doing to improve the environment at Lanark by planting trees and reinstating a habitat for water birds. All the early tree planting we did at Lanark was in our own time and at our own expense.
Initially, our dam project was viewed with suspicion by certain authorities. The concern was that we might be blocking a natural water course. Some people from the old Victorian Soil Conservation Authority (a fine organisation, incidentally) came to see for themselves. They agreed it was not a natural watercourse, so we were allowed to proceed with the dam’s construction.
As it happens, we do have a permanent creek running through the property, but it is a long way from Lake Cicely. My guess is that until the mid-1800s—that is, before the country at Lanark was first cleared for farming—there were numerous springs in the vicinity. The springs may well have been there for thousands of years, but they would not have survived for long after the arrival of cattle and sheep. I do not understand the mechanics of the process, but I know from observation that springs that get trampled on repeatedly by sheep or cattle tend to dry up.
Initially, after creating Lake Cicely, I did use some of its water for irrigation. The irrigation system we set up was the so-called Keyline system developed by an Australian engineer, Percy Yeomans (better known by his initials P.A.), a great innovator in farmland management. Under this system, water is channelled through a drain that has been dug along an elevated contour. When the drain is blocked—usually with canvas sheets that are known in the business as irrigation flags—water overflows across the land below it. I irrigated in this way for about three years but then stopped. The reality was that the catchment feeding the lake was relatively small, so the lake did not fill up with water every year. Effectively, this meant we would not be able to irrigate in dry years, which was precisely when we needed to irrigate, so the whole exercise ceased to be workable.
Jim Murphy, an irrigation specialist, referred to this in a paper he wrote about irrigation by Western District sheep graziers in the 1960s. Murphy was employed by the Victorian Department of Agriculture to advise farmers in the district on irrigation, a position he held from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. This is what he had to say about Lanark:
The Fentons toyed with the idea of irrigation even to the extent of constructing Lake Cicely, but did not proceed further. Was it an opportunity lost? Arguably yes, but there were sound enough reasons for their decision. It was a first-class irrigation site and 40 acres [sixteen hectares] could have been irrigated from the 60-acre-feet [74 000 cubic metres] storage.
However, John and Cicely were committed to raising a young family and to wresting a living, without hired help, from their 2000-acre [800-hectare] property. Irrigation would have required more intensive stocking, additional management commitments and a greater labour input.
If Lake Cicely is not fed by a creek or springs, where does it get its water from? The answer is simply from run-off after rain in the local catchment above it. Today, the run-off is markedly smaller than it used to be, one reason being there are now many more trees growing higher up in the catchment than there used to be—and trees reduce run-off. Not only are there several shelter belts of trees that we have planted on our own land, including a substantial agroforestry windbreak of conifers and eucalypts three kilometres long, but, beyond that, there is now a large blue gum plantation on a neighbouring property. Whatever else may be said about them, the fact is that blue gums do trap and consume a lot of water.
Years ago we found an interesting clue to the likely presence of springs at Lanark in the distant past. On a dry hillside we discovered a number of Aboriginal axe heads. Clearly, groups of Aborigines had spent a lot of time at this spot over the years. The question was why. Only 200 metres away, at the bottom of the hillside, there was a creek that ran for most of the year. Why did the Aborigines not camp on the bank of the creek where water was available? The conclusion I came to was that there had once been a spring where the axe heads were found, which supplied the visiting Aborigines with all the water they needed. The reason they gathered at the spring, rather than on the bank of the creek below, was that the spring was a vantage point. From there, they could see if there was any game in the area. Perhaps they could also see approaching enemies. The spring presumably disappeared when farmers first cleared the land and introduced hard-footed stock.
As I write this, Lake Cicely has been attracting and fostering bird life for well over 40 years, which to me seems quite a long time. How remarkable then to think that local Aborigines used the very same water resources, on the same site, for almost a thousand times as long as that. The evidence suggests that Aborigines have inhabited the southwest corner of Victoria for 35 000 years at least, and maybe for 40 000 years. These local Aborigines, various clans of the Gunditjmara nation, tended to base themselves in one place, travelling only when it suited them. In summer they walked on age-old tracks down to the Portland coast to eat mussels and crabs on the beach. For most of the time, though, they lived on and around Lake Condah, a wetland teeming with wildlife.
They built stone houses there, the foundations of which still exist. They also built and managed extensive networks of ponds at different levels, in which they farmed eels. The eels were caught in an intricate system of traps and smoked in ovens fashioned from burnt-out trees, after which surplus eels were traded with other tribes over a vast area that possibly extended beyond the Murray River. All this happened tens of thousands of years ago. Against a time span of that magnitude, everything we have done at Lanark seems very recent indeed.
There is a sad contrast between the way Aborigines managed the land sustainably over a period of 40 000 years or more and the way it has been managed by the European settlers who displaced them. In barely 200 years (170 years in the case of my own district), Europeans have succeeded in turning a healthy landscape into one that is clearly ailing. I recognised this as a young farmer, and ever since I have sought to learn about and understand the land management techniques that the Aborigines employed. As one of my senior Aboriginal friends, John Lovett, says, ‘We don’t need your sympathy, but we do want your understanding.’