By the late 1960s, certainly by the early 1970s, it was fairly well known in the Hamilton district that I had embarked upon a big tree-planting program at Lanark. Not long after this, to my surprise, I found that people far beyond Hamilton had become aware of it, too. Lanark’s reputation was spreading by word of mouth, presumably that of friends and supporters. I first realised this when strangers began phoning to ask if they could come and have a look at the work we had done. As the years went on, the number of visitors of this kind increased steadily, as did the number of areas from which they came. Soon we had people arriving from South Australia. Next, they started coming from New South Wales. Before long, we were being visited by people from all over Australia.
We were always happy for people to come to Lanark and look over the place unless for some reason it was a problem to have them there on a particular day. Of course, visitors were an inconvenience in one respect. I had to show them around, which meant that whenever visitors arrived I had to stop work for as long as they were there, and Cicely often found herself obliged to offer a cup of tea. But on the whole, I quite enjoyed people coming to Lanark. Most were impressed by what they saw and told us so, which always gave my spirits a lift. It was a nice change from the generally negative reaction we received from local people.
I have a special memory of a visit by a group of agricultural scientists and farmers from Chile about ten years ago. One huge man stood back from the others as they boarded the bus to leave. He had said very little all afternoon but had obviously detected my frustration at the lack of official support for our environmental work. He put his arm on my shoulder and said with apparent emotion, ‘Do not be concerned, John Fenton. Very soon the world will be aware of the value of natural capital.’
I estimate Lanark has now had about 5000 visitors since we began admitting them in 1966, which I think is a pretty impressive number for a privately owned farm. Until 1982, we used to let people visit free of charge, but financial necessity has since compelled us to charge an admission fee. I could no longer afford to stop work for an hour or two whenever a visitor turned up. There were our helpers to consider, too—experts like Rod Bird and Murray Gunn, who were not only prepared to come to Lanark to speak to visitors but were willing to do it for nothing. We needed to lighten their burden, too.
At first the visitors were individuals with a personal interest in one or other aspect of the work we were doing, whether conservation, farm forestry or habitat creation. Some of them were farmers who had heard on the grapevine what we were up to. Then, starting in the late 1970s, Lanark began to attract the attention of university people. The first to visit us, in February 1979, were groups of students from Melbourne University. Later, we had student groups visiting us regularly from the landscape architecture department at RMIT in Melbourne. Then, academics began arriving from other states and overseas. At various times we had visitors from American and Canadian universities, as well as people from other overseas organisations, such as farm forestry associations.
Most remarkably of all, I was invited to go to what was then the Soviet Union to speak to an audience of environmentalists and farmers in the Tver region of Russia, about 200 kilometres northwest of Moscow. This was in 1992, the time of Glasnost. In the previous year an elderly Russian professor with an interest in the environment, Elvin Kalinan, had stayed with us at Lanark. Before leaving he praised our environmental work by writing in our visitors’ book: ‘It is a wonderful result. Heroic labour made by very nice family.’ Then, as he was saying goodbye on the verandah, he hugged me and, with tears in his eyes, said through his interpreter, ‘John, you must come to our country and speak to us on environmental matters.’ It was an invitation I was happy to accept.
I had not been to the Soviet Union before, of course, and I quickly grew very fond of the country and its people, who, it seemed to me, had a surprisingly Australian-like sense of humour. I came to realise this when I spent ten days on an old collective farm at a village named Cressna, about four hours’ driving time west of Moscow. I had hardly ever drunk vodka before, but I soon acquired a taste for it. Vodka is a trap for the innocent. During my visit to the Soviet Union, I did my best to keep a diary, recording in detail what I did each day. I soon fell behind with the diary, though, and one of the Russian organisers of my visit happened to be near me one day when I was trying to catch up. I was talking aloud, wondering what I had done on the Wednesday of the previous week, when he spoke up. ‘John,’ he said, ‘you did not have that Wednesday.’ It was true: a whole day had gone missing. I had drunk so much vodka with my Russian hosts on the Tuesday evening that I was off the air for the whole of Wednesday. It was a lesson, painfully learned.
Five years after the Russian trip, our environmental work was brought to national attention in Australia by the ABC’s Landline TV program. It was by no means the first media exposure we had received, however. A journalist working for Melbourne’s Age newspaper, Rod Usher, wrote an article about us in the late 1980s that appeared to create a lot of interest. This was really the first occasion Lanark had made the metropolitan news. Then, in the mid-1990s, another journalist, Richard Cornish, wrote at length about Lanark, Cicely and me in the Sunday Age. Under the heading ‘The arbour of love’ was a photo of Cicely and me walking hand in hand beside Lake Cicely. Cornish’s article must have been widely read, because we had plenty of feedback from it later. This article probably got the Landline people interested, because they approached us not long after it appeared.
A Landline film crew spent three days with us at Lanark, filming the place and interviewing the family, which, for the ABC, amounted to quite a large investment of time and effort. They even brought a helicopter with them. The presenter of the program was Pip Courtney, a Tasmanian-bred journalist whom we came to like personally and admire professionally. In fact, I was extremely impressed by the professionalism of the entire crew. The program went to air in 1997 and drew a big response from viewers. Clearly, the kind of environmental work we were doing at Lanark struck a chord with the public. The show proved so popular that Pip returned with a Landline team in 2006 to do another program. By then, of course, my son David was Lanark’s resident owner, and the program focused in part on the family’s attempts to make the farm more productive while still caring for the environment.
I found the response to the Landline programs, especially the first one, very satisfying. The mere fact that so many people were interested in what we had done was further confirmation for me that it had all been worthwhile. I was also pleased that the help and encouragement certain local people had given us over the years—people like Rod Bird and Murray Gunn—was publicly acknowledged. The plain fact is that, without the scientific expertise and moral support of people like these, Lanark as we know it today would never have materialised.
What I did find significant about the initial reaction to the Landline program was that the people who took most interest in the show, as measured by the numbers of letters and phone calls we received, were not traditional farmers but people new to farming, including city people who had bought rural properties. This was not really so surprising. After all, it is always harder to accept new concepts if you have been adhering to old practices all your working life. I also think that people new to farming see things with fresh eyes, which means they are better able to recognise that our landscape has serious problems. Moreover, if they have an off-farm income they can better afford to do something about it.
Since that first Landline program, though, I have noticed a growing interest among farmers generally in the environmental work we have done at Lanark. I find that farmers who were entirely indifferent to it ten years ago often come up to me now to speak about it. Perhaps the message is finally getting through.
One consequence of the publicity was that I was asked more often to speak at seminars and conferences, some of which were attended by eminent scientists. Now, public speaking did not come easily to me. In fact, I was once told bluntly that I was no good at it. In 1981 I had applied for a Churchill Fellowship, saying I wanted to further my study of ‘the integration of farm management plans that will embrace the conservation of soil and water [and] revegetation of tree and shrub cover in such a way as to optimise the indigenous wildlife on the farm’. I submitted that this would result in a sustainable farming system offering farmers a future of stable financial returns. The system, I added, would incorporate a small but high-quality forestry enterprise.
I had to make my case in person at the final interview, where I faced a panel of three bureaucrats, chaired by a senior executive in the Victorian Forests Commission. After leaving the room to consider my application, they returned to say it had been refused. The chairman of the panel added for good measure that I had made a ‘poor personal presentation’ and that I did not speak well or clearly. He may well have been right about my presentation and my speech, but I suspect that he and the other panellists, like most people in the forestry and agricultural sectors 30 years ago, had little or no understanding of the kind of farming system I was proposing. Anyone advocating this type of approach was liable to be brushed aside as a greenie or as someone wanting to indulge in an alternative lifestyle.
Still, I persisted as a public speaker and gradually learned to give a reasonable performance. In March 2000 Cicely and I found ourselves sharing a stage in Melbourne with the environmentalist David Suzuki and speaking to 1200 people. The occasion was an International Landcare conference titled Changing Landscapes: Shaping Futures. (One of the other speakers was Pat Dodson, the Aboriginal leader, who as a boy was sent from his home in Broome, Western Australia, to board at a Catholic school in Hamilton, Monivae College. He ended up becoming the school’s head prefect.) Speaking at the conference was, for Cicely and me, an unnerving experience. I have always felt stressed when speaking to large audiences. I used to hope that, with practice, I would get used to it, but this has not happened. I did not get to meet Dr Suzuki, unfortunately. I think he slipped away as soon as he had finished speaking.
On the day of the conference, Cicely and I were both on the stage. I had been invited to speak at the plenary session, and I began by saying that Cicely and I had never addressed an audience together before. I then added, ‘This could well be a Punch and Judy show.’ It was not much of a joke, but it seemed to put the audience in a good humour, after which the presentation went down well. The audience did not even seem to mind that, unlike all the other speakers, I illustrated my talk not with a PowerPoint program but with around twenty old-fashioned slides, the first of which had been taken back in 1955.
I did work out early on that I should simply be myself when I spoke to an audience, regardless of how erudite the audience happened to be. In other words, I should never pretend to be anything other than a farmer with a passion for restoring and protecting the environment. I remember speaking at one fairly high-powered environmental conference in Adelaide in 2002. After a few other speakers and I had said our bit, questions were invited from the audience, whereupon someone got up and said, ‘I’d be interested to know what John Fenton thinks of EBMPs.’ After a long pause I replied, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of EBMPs. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
A few people, probably farmers, started to clap, but most of the audience greeted what I said with a scornful silence, which made me bristle. I went on:
That’s one of the problems with you people—setting agendas for farmers to follow. You think that you’re talking to farmers, but you’re talking to them in a foreign voice. We farmers know how to plant trees and we know all about soil. We know about the environment and we know it from first hand. If you want to converse with us about the environment, you need to do it in a language both of us can understand.
I did learn later, incidentally, that EBMP stood for environmental best management practices, although I am still not completely sure what that means.