In the mid-1960s, Cicely and I decided to establish a wildlife reserve at Lanark consisting entirely of native trees and under-storey vegetation. We recognised at the outset that any reserve we created needed to be big enough to support sustainable populations of the wildlife we hoped to attract. In the end, we decided to set aside 65 (26 hectares) acres. By comparison—I say this for the benefit of readers who have trouble picturing just how big a 65-acre block is—Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne are 62 acres (25 hectares) in area and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney 72 acres (29 hectares).
The site we chose was all but bare. The lack of any remnant vegetation initially put us a a huge disadvantage. We decided to create the habitat in stages, starting with a nucleus of 30 acres (twelve hectares), which we named the Other Side. After fencing the area off, we planted it out with a variety of indigenous trees and shrubs, including black wattles, drooping she-oaks, blackwoods and manna gums, plus a suite of shrubs and ground cover.
Within the 30 acres was the old swimming hole that I had dug out for our children, known as the Other Side. Its attraction for Cicely and me was its distance from the house—about 400 metres. We would never have dug a swimming hole close to the house, of course, lest one of our small children wandered into it one day and got into trouble. As described previously, whenever a swim was called for, we would pack the children into the car and drive to the Other Side. In that way we conditioned the children to think of swimming as a special outing. In recent years the swimming hole has been generally dry, but as I write this the hole is again full of water, and David and his family are swimming there again.
That original 30-acre reserve has evolved over the years, and today it is an established bushland that is home to a range of native animals, birds, reptiles, frogs, mussels and fish. The animals include eastern swamp rats, eastern barred bandicoots and swamp wallabies. Bits were added periodically to the original reserve, and the area of fenced-off habitat is now around 65 acres. In fact, our son David fenced off the last addition only four years ago.
Today, the Other Side Reserve occupies about 4 per cent of Lanark’s land, a significant proportion. Some farmers might consider it wasted land, but this is not the way we see it. Over the years, the Other Side provided a substitute for the holidays we could not afford. We not only swam there but had picnics and so-called treasure hunts. These were hunts for particular kinds of wildlife, maybe a pioneer skink or a blue wren, or even for some kind of rare fungi. The first to find the skink, wren or other designated ‘treasure’ would win the prize. It is a game our grandchildren now play there. Lately, blue-tongue lizards have been added to the list of ‘treasures’. About seven years ago a volunteer wildlife carer named Pam Turner released five of the lizards in the Other Side Reserve. They were injured lizards that she had nursed back to health. The lizard colony appears to be surviving well.
Although the reserve is fenced off from stock, David does let sheep graze there at certain times of the year. The idea was suggested to us by Tim Barlow, an ecologist who visited Lanark some years ago and gave us excellent advice on managing the habitat. He made the point that for the habitat to function as naturally as possible we needed to replicate the grazing of the native grasses and herbs that would ordinarily be done by kangaroos and wallabies. So, depending on the conditions, David periodically allows weaned, drenched lambs to graze there for a short time in late summer.
Bushland reserves can also provide excellent shelter for stock if an emergency arises—as it did at Lanark in 1987. In late November that year we were hit suddenly by extremely cold winds from the east. This was remarkable in two respects. One, cold weather at the end of November is a rarity in our part of Victoria, which is why we always considered it safe to shear at that time. Two, killing winds in our district—strong winds that are cold enough to kill stock—invariably come from the southwest. Accordingly, we aligned our shelter belts to protect the stock from winds blowing from that direction. So when those freakish winds hit us in 1987 our sheep were largely unprotected. Moreover, a sheep’s fleece naturally loses much of its insulating properties as summer approaches, so our sheep were all the more vulnerable.
I was still shearing that day when a stock agent called in and asked what I intended doing about the sheep in the front paddock. I replied there was no need to worry—the sheep there had plenty of shelter. ‘You’re wrong,’ the agent said. ‘I saw ten dead.’ In fact, when we went to check we found the death toll had risen to about 30. Clearly, we had an emergency on our hands. My youngest son, Johnnie, happened to be home, and he asked, ‘Father, what the hell are you going to do?’ When I replied that I was unsure what to do, Johnnie said, ‘Well, I know what I’m going to do.’ With that, he took our sheepdogs plus a couple of RMIT students who happened to be visiting Lanark and rounded up the sheep. Then he cut a hole in the fence around the bushland reserve and, with some trouble, drove the sheep in. Once inside the densely vegetated reserve, the sheep survived. In fact, I think we lost only three more sheep that day.
In 1994 we were approached by the Melbourne Zoo and asked if we would be happy for the zoo to release a number of bandicoots in our reserve. These were no ordinary bandicoots. They were a species in serious danger of extinction—eastern barred bandicoots, so named because their hindquarters are ‘barred’ with light stripes. They were once common throughout the Western District. An old-time Branxholme resident, Arthur Price, once told me he used to see ‘hundreds of the little devils’, as he called them, when he coursed his greyhounds on a paddock at Bassett. But loss of habitat and local extermination by predators, mainly foxes and feral cats, had reduced their population throughout Victoria to mere hundreds, and it happened that most of the survivors were in the Hamilton district. The widespread use of potent chemical sprays in the 1960s also took a heavy toll.
I derived considerable satisfaction from the fact that our wildlife reserve, created virtually out of nothing, was one of only four sites in the whole of the state where zoo-bred eastern barred bandicoots were released into the wild. The others were wildlife reserves near Hexham and Colac, and a National Trust property near Skipton. By all accounts, Lanark was judged to be the best bandicoot habitat on privately owned land in Victoria. If nothing else, this demonstrated again that an individual farmer could make a big difference.
Did we make a difference as far as the eastern barred bandicoots were concerned? Well, the bandicoot population did grow for about eight years. Cicely and David could take much of the credit for that. They worked tirelessly with departmental officers to try to make the project a success. After that, though, the onset of drought caused the bandicoots’ breeding rate to slow, since feed was scarce. Since then, sadly, they have disappeared altogether. Foxes seem to have been the main problem. The surrounding blue gum plantations harbour foxes and, in my opinion, have allowed them to proliferate, which has been bad news for small native animals like these. Today, the only surviving eastern barred bandicoots in Victoria are housed in fenced, fox-proof reserves.
Our experience with the bandicoots confirmed my belief that if a species is known to be endangered the number-one priority is to protect the existing habitat. I suspect that some academic researchers, as distinct from those in the field, do not understand this.
As I write, it is 50 years since we began planting trees and shrubs in our wildlife reserve—more than enough time, you might think, for the area to return to a state of ecological balance. In fact, we may have to wait another 80 or 90 years for this to happen. Earlier, I quoted my ecologist friend Neville Bonney as saying during a visit to Lanark in 1998 that the first trees I planted there might not start to senesce until they were 140 years old. It would take as long as that, he said, for the gum trees to develop the hollows in which so many birds and other wildlife like to nest. About one-fifth of Australia’s native birds nest in tree hollows, a remarkable statistic, which puts the onus on farmers to retain fallen logs and old trees and stags. Nesting boxes are a poor substitute. It is the same with bats. I am sure most farmers would be astonished at the number and variety of bats that roost in hollow trees on their properties. Research suggests that a decline in bat numbers may be behind the growing problem of insect pests on farms.
Bonney, a strong advocate of planting native vegetation on farms, made one other important observation that day: he told me I had not planted enough scrub-type eucalypts such as swamp gum—trees that are generally regarded as inferior types of eucalypt but which have the advantage, as far as the environment is concerned, of becoming hollowed out relatively quickly, thus providing nesting places for wildlife in much less time than other trees.
About ten years ago I took a group of Aborigines from South Australia on a tour of Lanark. After walking around a few of the paddocks, we came to the Other Side Reserve. We entered the reserve by climbing through a fence, and as we did so one of the Aborigines, a young man, said to me, ‘The land here is much softer underfoot.’ Then he asked, ‘Do you think this is how the land used to be when the old people were here?’ He was referring, of course, to the original Aboriginal inhabitants. He was right—the ground in the reserve was definitely softer—although I had not noticed it before. It was nearly 40 years, after all, since hard-footed stock, sheep or cattle, had trodden on it regularly. During that time, fungi had re-established themselves in the soil, breaking down the tree litter and softening the earth. Even the eastern swamp rats had done their bit by burrowing a network of tunnels through the soil like giant earthworms. All this was, for me, further proof that the land was at last returning more or less to its natural state.