19
‘YOU’RE OFF YOUR BLOODY ROCKER’

Trees are slow to grow, but once they do grow they are big enough to make a difference. At Lanark, it took about 25 years for the trees I had begun planting in the late 1950s to transform the place’s appearance. By the early 1980s, this once barren and desolate property was starting to look lush with vegetation. Many of the wattles had already matured and died, and the rotting wood was helping to create the balanced ecosystem that I had always hoped to achieve. Yet many farmers in the district still regarded me as eccentric or worse, and in a way that was understandable. For years, various government authorities had been encouraging and financing farmers to clear their land of trees and to drain swamps. Yet here I was doing exactly the opposite—planting tens of thousands of trees and restoring wetlands—and I was doing it all at my own expense. Who could blame other farmers for thinking I was mad?

Even the trustee company which ran my father’s estate had misgivings about what I was up to. Recently, I came upon a record that I made of a conversation I had with one of the company’s senior people in 1959. ‘We want you to drain that 40-acre [sixteen-hectare] remnant swamp,’ he said, to which I replied, ‘I have just made it bigger—I have returned it to its original dimensions.’ He said, ‘You what? I didn’t see any account for that.’ I told him there was no account because I had done the work myself. He then repeated, ‘I want you to drain it.’ I asked, ‘What for?’ He then made it clear what he was really on about. ‘Because we can get a government subsidy to do the work,’ he said. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘that’s no bloody reason to drain it.’ As far as I can tell from my notes, that ended the conversation. The swamp did not get drained.

Cicely and I had completed the reinstatement of the wetlands at Lanark by 1970. By then, a wide variety of riparian plants was growing there, thanks in large part to the visiting water birds that had brought in seed. Not long after this, the Department of Agriculture in Victoria began establishing farm management groups in various areas of the state, the aim being to get young farmers to share ideas about what they ought to be doing with their land. The group in my area used to meet in a hotel at Digby, near Branxholme. At that time I was still feeling my way environmentally. I was still running as many sheep to the acre as anyone in the district, for instance. Yet I had already come to believe strongly that Australian farmers could not continue to regard the health of the environment as something that had little if anything to do with them. So I phoned one of the people connected with the local farm management group and told him I thought the group ought to be devoting some attention to the environment. He responded by inviting me to come along one afternoon and speak to the group about it, which I agreed to do.

I brought along some slides that we had taken of water birds on the Racecourse Swamp and I showed them during my talk. I explained that since we had reinstated the wetland some locally rare species of water birds had reappeared there. I explained how the water birds brought plant seeds with them, both in their gut and on their legs, and how, thanks to this, the wetland now had a good cover of indigenous wetland plants. Indeed, the restoration of the wetland had gone so well, I said, that ibis were now nesting there, and I showed some slides of the ibis on the screen to prove it. Whereupon a farmer at the back of the audience called out, ‘So what?’ Everyone laughed uproariously. I realised then that I had been wasting my time.

Now, this happened a long time ago, in the early 1970s, when people were not nearly as environmentally conscious as they are today. In fact, the nesting ibis were living proof of the fact that this big environmental project of ours, the rehabilitation and protection of a wetland, had been a success— that a bird habitat had been brought back to life.

Farmers used to believe that if they did anything out of the ordinary in the interests of the environment—if they deviated even slightly from traditional farming practices—their farms’ productivity would suffer and they would be out of pocket. I have no doubt this is the main reason other farmers reacted so negatively to the environmental work we did at Lanark. They assumed that it would result, at least in the short term, in a net loss financially, which, in fact, it did.

I was interested to see that Dr Rod Bird, until recently a Hamilton-based scientist of the Victorian Department for Primary Industries, picked up on this fear of lost production in an interview with Dr Martin Mulligan of RMIT University’s Globalism Research Centre. (I quote from the same interview in another chapter in this book.) Referring to our tree-planting work at Lanark, Dr Bird said:

John and Cicely [Fenton] started at a time when it definitely wasn’t fashionable, and they were regarded as rather eccentric. Some of the population would still describe this kind of work as eccentric, but much of the population has now caught up with what the Fentons were trying to do . . . But, in the end, it is not getting any easier to make a living from farming. The way out for many farmers seems to be to expand, and there is a reluctance to allocate much land to what might be regarded as nonproductive use, even if there are clear long-term benefits in terms of productivity.

In an earlier chapter I quoted from an article about Lanark that Prue Powell wrote for Bushland on Farms: Do You Have a Choice? She touched upon the reputation I had acquired in the district for being a little crazy:

While John [Fenton] spent all his spare time and money planting and learning about trees, his neighbours looked on at ‘the town boy’ with great scepticism. However, when he began putting the water back into the swamps in a horseshoe around the house, they knew he was mad. Fifty-six hectares [about 138 acres] of grazing land went into wetlands. This might have been the time John’s defence line began to harden. It was characterised by the phrase, ‘Go to buggery.’

I have no doubt whatsoever that my reputation for being a nonconformist stood against me in a number of ways. For instance, I was never appointed to any government committees or boards. A farmer I know with a conservative outlook believed he knew why I had been overlooked. I had just been complaining to him about how I had again failed to be appointed to two bodies in which I had a keen interest—the Catchment Management Board and Greening Australia. He said, ‘Wake up to yourself, John: you’ll never get on any of those committees.’ I asked him why. ‘Because you’re a greenie and a bloody stirrer,’ he said. I protested, saying that, one, I was not a greenie, and two, while I did have different views from many other farmers on how farming land should be managed I did not ever seek to provoke others with those views. He persisted. ‘Of course you’re a stirrer, you old bastard,’ he said. ‘They all talk about you. You’ll never get anywhere with them.’

It is an unfortunate fact in Australia that people who come up with alternative views on how to farm and manage the land invariably get derided as cranks by the old guard. This merely reflects the rather obvious fact that, taken as a whole, country people are an extremely conservative class of people. True, some farmers in Australia have tried to do things better by doing them differently, but they are a very small minority. I used to say that if you travelled around Australia you could count on finding a farmer with innovative ideas on managing the land and protecting the environment every 30 miles or so. That is quite a distance—around 50 kilometres. This is what makes it extremely hard for farmers advocating a different approach to get any support, for at every farmers’ conference they attend they are likely to find 95 per cent of the others lined up against them.

In my opinion, peer group pressure had a lot to do with the generally negative response from other farmers to the environmental work we did at Lanark. The truth is that farmers are under enormous pressure to conform to what is considered normal and traditional. They are made to feel extremely uncomfortable if they try to do things differently. This is not just a case of farmers being pressured by other farmers. Farmers are pressured to conform by government bureaucrats, too— departmental agronomists and the like—and even by their bank managers. If you step out of line—if, say, you give up using superphosphate or spraying your paddocks with chemicals— you will be made to feel isolated.

Even my own children wondered if their father had gone a little dotty. My three sons used to go to school by riding their bikes to the property’s front gate, where the school bus would pick them up. One afternoon I happened to be in the house when they returned from school and pulled up on their bikes outside. The twins were then probably eight years old and their brother, John, seven. I was near a window and heard their conversation. One said, ‘Did you see what he’s done now?’ Another said, ‘Yeah, he’s built another dam in the front paddock.’ The third, Johnnie, said, ‘That makes four dams in the paddock—the silly old bugger.’

It was true there were four dams in the front paddock. The last of them was a purpose-built wildlife dam that I built in 1969 and fenced off. The fact that I had built a dam for wildlife rather than sheep was probably what caused my sons to wonder if I had lost my senses. Actually, that wildlife dam was to prove the very last dam I built at Lanark. Nearby, I intended erecting a flagpole, and I approached the well-known Melbourne firm Evan and Evans, founded in 1877 and thus the oldest flagmaker in Australia, to design a flag for the Fenton family. It included the family motto, ‘Out of difficulty I arise’, which might well be Lanark’s motto, too. In the end, though, neither the flag (which showed a palm tree growing from a rock) nor the flagpole went up. It was the first time I can remember Cicely really putting her foot down. ‘If that flag goes up,’ she said, ‘I’m off.’ The flag remained folded up in a cupboard.

A few farmers who at first regarded what I was doing with suspicion did come to see the wisdom of it later. One of them was a good friend of ours named Teddy Youngman, a grazier who lived not far from us. Teddy owned and flew a light plane, and one day he happened to fly over Lanark while we were building the Stockyard Dam, the one that formed Lake Cicely. He said to me the next time we met, ‘What the hell are you doing down there, John? What sort of a dam is that? You’ll have the whole place full of water. You’re off your bloody rocker.’

Teddy later had a change of mind. He often flew over Lanark, which was on his regular route to Melbourne, and as time went on and Lake Cicely started to fill with water he apparently came to like the look of the dam. A few years later he phoned me and asked would I go over to his property, Ardgarten, because he wanted to talk to me about a dam he was thinking of building there. The upshot was that he built a dam five times as big as Lake Cicely. It was not an exercise in oneupmanship, though: that was not Teddy’s style. He had simply come to believe that a large body of water would be a valuable addition to his property.

More recently, I have sensed that among Australian farmers attitudes are finally starting to change. Reality has forced them to recognise that they cannot keep doing things as they have always done—that, for their own sake if not for the environment’s, their approach has to change. It is not only the younger farmers who are starting to see the light, either. Some older farmers are seeing it, too—farmers who have been around long enough to know how much healthier our land used to be.

A relative, Liz Fenton, who has a property near Hamilton, has noticed the same thing. Liz has done a lot in the district to promote the idea of planting native trees, preferably those indigenous to the area, and she grows them for sale at her indigenous farm nursery. Liz was featured in a chapter of the 1999 book Listen to the People, Listen to the Land, in which she made this interesting observation:

The people who are most supportive of my work are often the older farmers. They’re the ones who have generally retired and reflect on what’s going on, and they look back at what the land was like when they were young and just starting out. They know they put a hell of a lot of effort into clearing, and any criticism they make is about themselves. Whereas the next generation are sometimes a bit protective of their ancestors and are afraid to see them criticised, it’s the older people who have seen the land change, and it’s happened over such a short time.