In the early 2000s we Fentons, as a family, had some big breaks with the past. In 2003 Cicely and I decided to leave Lanark and move into a house we owned in Hamilton. By then, David and his wife Catherine had been living at Lanark in a house of their own for close to ten years, and long before that David had taken over the running of Lanark’s farming operations. As I mentioned earlier, he took over the farm’s management as far back as 1992. So for a number of reasons it made sense for us to leave Lanark, our home for almost 50 years, and become town people.
All this while my sister, Robin, had continued to own a portion of Lanark. In 1998 I helped her organise the sale of her portion, part of which was bought by David. In 2000 Robin died, aged 61. More than twenty years earlier she had been given just three months to live. She used to say to me, ‘You don’t fight cancer: you just have to learn to roll with the punches.’ She was always willing to try any new treatment that her excellent doctors recommended. She was also very supportive, in a quiet, reassuring way, of other women in the community who wanted to yarn with someone about how to handle an illness. Each evening Robin went for a long walk along the rugged cliffs at Cape Nelson, near Portland, which I think was an important outlet for her. She made a habit of stopping at a particular place along the walk and sitting there for some minutes in silent thought. For Robin, it would have been a time of meditation. After she died, her family erected a superb stone seat at the spot as a memorial. It contains her ashes and is adorned with a plaque.
One reason Cicely and I left Lanark, I do not mind admitting, is that the eastern swamp rats had made life almost intolerable for us, destroying our vegetable garden, ring-barking many of our oaks, even killing fruit trees. The odd thing was that about six months after we left Lanark the rats left, too. It was as if they decided the battle had been won—they had driven us away—so there was no point in fighting on.
The main reason for leaving Lanark, though, was that Cicely and I decided that with me looking over his shoulder David could not run the property as successfully as it could be run. This is a problem that arises quite often, I suspect, when farms are passed from father to son. It seems fathers cannot resist poking their noses into what should now be their son’s business. The solution is for the father to move far enough away from the property that he cannot interfere on a daily basis. As I write this, it is six years since I left Lanark. I sometimes think that, for everyone’s sake, I should have left ten years ago.
Our departure followed a disagreement I had with David over the way the property was being run. We had an argument one day, standing halfway between the house and the shearing shed, which ended with him telling me that the half-dozen or so major decisions affecting the property that I had made recently had been bad ones. Some colourful language was used—language that David had obviously picked up from me. I returned to the house to complain to Cicely. With her customary good sense, she came up immediately with a solution to the problem: she and I would move out of Lanark and let David and Cath run it on their own.
Leaving Lanark was undoubtedly the right thing to do, but it proved to be very difficult for me emotionally. Too much of my life had been invested there for the parting to be easy. For a while, I was quite disconsolate. To be frank, I was sometimes reduced to tears. I became particularly upset each time I went back to Lanark, for we still had our old home there containing a lot of our personal items, including most of my natural history library. In fact, if I had not been a farmer, I might well have concluded that I was suffering from a form of depression. But farmers do not suffer from depression—or so farmers like to imagine. In reality, depression has been rife among Australian farmers in recent years. Drought and financial hardship have combined to ensure that.
A friend of mine said to me just the other day, ‘It must give you tremendous personal satisfaction to drive around Lanark and see what you have accomplished there. All those trees! And all that biodiversity!’ I did not tell my friend this, but the truth is that five years after leaving Lanark I still cannot bring myself to drive around the property, for I would find that too hard to handle emotionally. My visits have been confined to our old home and its immediate vicinity. This will not last forever, though. The emotional stress of it all has been easing gradually. By the time this book is published, there is every chance I will have revisited Lanark in its entirety.
It is a matter of considerable pride for me that Lanark has now been passed to a third generation of the Fenton family. David is not engaged in any major tree-planting program, but in other ways he has carried on the work I began. He greets the visitors to Lanark who come periodically to look at and learn about trees and water, for instance, and I have been told that when he talks to the groups, he says the same things as I used to say and even sounds a little like me. That does not surprise me. After all, David grew up listening to me giving the same kind of talk to the same kind of groups. What I can say about David is that, as a farmer, he has his feet planted more firmly on the ground than I did. I was always thinking too much about the trees I had planted or was about to plant to give the farm the attention it deserved.
It took a long time to achieve, but when I left Lanark in 2003 it was functioning, in my opinion, as an environmentally sustainable property. Everything was in balance, by which I mean that the various elements of the environment—pastures, trees, sheep, wetland, wildlife, native scrub—were in equilibrium with each other.
One reason things were in balance was that we did not force the property to carry too many sheep. Today, David is running more stock than we did—not because he wants to but because he believes he has to if the property is to remain viable. On the whole, though, David is continuing to run Lanark along the same environmental lines as we did. Recently, I heard him argue the point with another farmer about weeds. The other farmer spent a lot of time spraying and slashing weeds, which meant his sheep ate little of anything but lush pasture grass. I heard David say to him, ‘You wouldn’t feed your children nothing but chocolate, but that’s what you’re doing with your sheep. You’re feeding them rich food, without weeds to balance the diet.’ I might have said that myself.
David believes that a combination of native pasture, improved pasture and weeds provides a balanced diet for his sheep, which consequently are generally healthier. He fertilizes only when soil tests show there is a specific need, and he always does it with trace elements and soil nutrient balance in mind. The basic aim is to maximise production while ensuring the health of the environment. David runs 3500 ewes, including self-replacing merinos, that are joined to Border Leicester rams and produce 500 first-cross ewes. The net result is the sale of 3200 prime lambs in late spring and early summer. Unlike me, David is an excellent shot with a rifle, and I remarked that he must have managed to shoot a lot of foxes, which are a principal cause of losses of young lambs. He said, ‘Well, that’s part of it. The main thing, though, is the shelter. We can lamb anywhere now without losing lambs.’
I came upon a similar quote by David in a book published in 1999, Listen to the People, Listen to the Land. He said, ‘The trees have been a major part of Dad’s life, so therefore it’s had to influence us kids—and it has influenced us—I mean, you can see that. I don’t think there will ever be salinity problems at Lanark because Dad faced up to the problem so many years ago. It’s all about caring for the land, isn’t it? That’s why the trees are so important.’
When I look back now on all the work we did over half a century at Lanark to try to rehabilitate the landscape, I can see more clearly than ever before that it was Cicely who made it all possible. All the way through she was the anchor. She was the one who held things together. True, I did the bulk of the tree planting and other environmental work, but to a large extent I was merely indulging a personal passion. It was Cicely who had to bear the real burden of it all. She had to cope with the strain, both emotional and financial, that my passion for restoring the environment imposed on the whole family. I had the fun part. She had the drudgery and, worse, the worry. She also bore the burden of the bookwork. I always had an aversion to anything to do with accounts, budgets, bank statements. Cicely probably did not enjoy dealing with them, either, but she took them on for my sake. She was always the bookkeeper.
In fact, our achievements at Lanark were a genuine family effort in the sense that the burden was shared by our children, too. When we were awarded the 2002 Serventy Conservation Medal, named in honour of the great naturalist and scientist Vincent Serventy, I was pleased that the citation read ‘John and Cicely Fenton and family’.
Neville Bonney wrote a paper about Lanark and its trees for inclusion in a book which, in the end, was not published. Neville was kind enough to give me a copy of the paper, however, and I would like to quote from the last page, where he describes a conversation we had a few years ago. While I was rabbiting on about the need to treat the land with a kind of spiritual reverence, as the Aborigines do, Neville broke in and said:
John, look at the legacy you and Cicely have left, the many accolades you both have shared, the honours you have received during the past fifteen years. Lanark, the showcase for on-farm tree planting in the 1990s, has inspired many Australians to do the same. Lanark was the model farm. Now there are many Lanarks evolving throughout the landscape. Feel proud that Lanark was their inspiration . . . Lanark is now in its second innings, and it’s still in the family, with more tree stories to come.
I hope he is right. Australia needs as many tree stories as can be told.