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JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN GARDEN HISTORY SOCIETY

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Published by the Australian Garden History Society Incorporated

ISSN 1033-3673 Vol 6 No 4 January/February 1995

Introduction

Jihe 1994 Conference of the Australian Garden History
Society was the third AGHS conference to Ire held in Mel¬
bourne and clearly demonstrated the way in which the
Society has matured. Garden visiting which was the 1988
theme is now well accepted and this time we took the
Society one step further by addressing the conservation of
the cultural landscape. We looked at the broader landscape
and how change has impacted on regional identity.

Mount Macedon on Melbourne’s doorstep was an ideal
illustration of the effects of change beyond the garden
gate. The Conference brought together speakers who set
the scene by giving us vivid and varied pictures of Mount
Macedon in the past. These pictures were contrasted with
current issues addressed by other presenters. Among these
were the dilemmas faced by various authorities managing
the area to satisfy the demands from urban development.
The field trips which followed the lecture programme con¬
firmed many of the points raised by speakers.

We were fortunate to be able to draw on local speakers
with a thorough knowledge of the Macedon Ranges while
the wider perspective was presented by Professor Michael
Hough from Canada. He shared with us his experiences of
preservation of regional identity in North America and
Europe.

The Conference was a thoroughly enjoyable and stimu¬
lating experience for those who attended. By presenting
these papers we aim to give all members an appreciation
of the issues addressed at the 1994 Conference. It is the
hope of the Conference Committee that these papers will
provide an ongoing stimulus for the Society to contribute
valuably to discussions of issues that affect the cultural
landscape. May we as a Society develop our role in the
community as contributors of rational comment on regional
identity and its impact on our landscape. In doing so, we
fulfil our broader mission of conserving, and enjoying our
garden and landscape heritage in Australia.

This presentation of the papers is dedicated to all who
contributed to making the 1994 Conference a success.

Helen Page, President , Victorian Branch
Pamela Jellie. Conference Convenor

Cover: New growth on a fern following high temperature
oxidation’ in bushfires at Greenvale, 1983- See article by
Gregor}' Moore on page 26.

Branches

ACT/MONARO/RIVERINA BRANCH

Mr Bruce English
GPO Box 1630
Canberra ACT 2601
Ph: (06) 288 2526

QUEENSLAND BRANCH

Ms Jan Seto
PO Box 459
Toowong Qld 4066
Ph: (07) 393 3354

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN BRANCH

Mr Richard Nolan

C/- The Botanic Gardens of Adelaide and State Herbarium
North Terrace
Adelaide SA 5000

SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS/SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH

Mrs Elizabeth Webster
Salisbury Downs
Blanket Flat
Bigga NSW 2583
Ph. (048) 352 205
Fax (048) 352 241

SYDNEY AND NORTHERN NSW BRANCH

Jan Gluskie
26 Marj' Street
Longueville NSW 2066
Ph. (02) 428 5947
Fax (02) 744 3924
Mobile 015 660 107

TASMANIAN BICINCH

Mrs Fairie Nielsen
Pigeon Hill, RSD 469
Bumie Tas 7320
Ph:(004) 33 0077

VICT ORIAN BRANCH

Ms Helen Page
c - Royal Botanic Gardens
Birdwood Avenue
South Yarra Vic 3141
Ph/Fax: (03) 650 5043

WEST A USTRALIAN BRANCH

Ms Anne Willox
PO Box 1323
Subiaco WA 6008
Ph: (09) 381 1675

The Australian Garden I listory Society was formed in 1980 to bring
together those with an interest in the various aspects of garden
history—horticulture, landscape design, architecture and related
subjects. Its prime concern is to promote interest and research into
historic gardens as a major component of the National Estate. It
aims to look at garden making in a wide historic, literary, artistic
and scientific context.

The editorial content of articles, or the products and services
advertised in this journal, do not necessarily imply their
endorsement by the Australian Garden History Society.

CHAIRMAN Margaret Darling

TREASURER Robin hewarne

SECRETARY Lester Tropinan

GUEST EDITORS Richard Aitken and Karen Olsen
c/- AGHS

Royal Botanic Gardens
Birdwood Avenue
South Yarra, Vic 3141
Ph/Fax (03) 650 5043

Correspondence should be addressed to the Secretary, AGHS,
C/- Royal Botanic Gardens, Birdwood Avenue, South Yarra,
Victoria 3141. Ph/Fax (03) 650 5043.

2

Opening Address

by Neil Robertson

I WELL REMEMBER attending the inaugural Australian
Garden History Conference at Illawarra and the excite¬
ment which accompanied it. For the first time, people
from all over the countiy were brought together to discuss
the importance of our garden heritage.

It seemed to me, and to others I spoke to, that this was
the dawning of a new era in Australian gardening. We had
a sense that at last gardens and gardening were being
valued as an important, indeed a precious, part of our cul¬
tural heritage.

Since then, the Australian Garden History Society
(AGHS) has grown and flourished. It is now, dare I say it,
a vigorous adolescent, which is just as well because in
1994 we need to be strong. Gardens are as much an
important part of our cultural heritage as ever they were
and, at this important time in our national development, it
is crucial that we ensure our gardening past is not over¬
looked.

As a principal player involved in the growing national
organisation of Australia’s Open Garden Scheme, 1 am
delighted to salute the AGHS as the only other national
horticultural organisation in Australia - at least, to my
knowledge we are the only two. Certainly we are the two
bodies most concerned with the maintenance and increase
of gardening in this countiy, and while our emphases may
differ from time to time, both bodies should always be
aware of the new challenges and of the threats - yes,
there are threats - to the important tradition we represent.

There is always a risk that gardening will be sidelined. It
is seen by many of its detractors as a genteel occupation
carried out by the leisured or the eccentric. But we know
that gardening is a passion. After all, it is the most popular

leisure pastime in Australia. Organisations like the AGHS
should be playing a larger role in leading debate or, at
least informing it, forming taste, and lobbying for the
preservation of our heritage.

I think we tend to underestimate the influence we can
wield. The membership of the AGHS includes many influ¬
ential people in our community and some fine thinkers.
The challenge for this Society is to harness these two ele¬
ments so as to influence the look erf our cities, our coun¬
tryside and our individual gardens.

For my own part, and for that of the Open Garden
Scheme, our concerns are with gardens of all sorts - large
and small, old and new. Our aims are to increase the
knowledge and awareness of gardening, of the diversity of
plants, and to disseminate a greater understanding of the
environment we live in. The Open Garden Scheme has
successfully brought together hundreds of thousands of
people since its beginnings in Victoria, and large numbers
of people are impressive bodies to the powers-that-be,
particularly when it is a common passion which unites
them.

But I will now come to the focus of this Conference, the
Macedon Ranges, and their wonderful gardens.

In my role as the National Executive Officer of Aus¬
tralia’s Open Garden Scheme, I spend much of my time
around the country visiting gardens and talking to garden¬
ers. The inevitable response to my announcing where I
come from - southern Victoria near the foot of Mount
Macedon - is: ‘We don’t have gardens there like you do’.

When considering the landscape of Mount Macedon
and its environs, we must remember that in the last 150
years it has changed more than it probably did in tens of
thousands before that. Today, where settlers cleared the
original forests, another generation of settlers would
happily create a brick and concrete jungle. One of the

The lost garden ofDemweit, Mount Macedon, photographed by Nicholas Caire, c.1876

3

La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria

challenges for town planners and other authorities in the
Macedon Ranges is that of controlling development. The
same pressures exist for any settlement: the more attrac¬
tive the area, the more people want to live there. As a
child of the area, I was fortunate enough to grow up in
what was then the rural and largely forgotten district of
south central Victoria. A trip to Melbourne was quite an
outing. Today I curse if I am kept waiting ten minutes on
the freeway. I like to have my cake and eat it as much as
the next person.

The Mount Macedon I knew as a child was of charm¬
ingly decayed large houses and wonderful romantic
gardens to explore. Above all, Mount Macedon had great
gardens and some wonderful gardeners. An early memory
is visiting Brookdale, then a nursery and the property of
Molly Ronalds. She was a difficult eccentric and main¬
tained contact with the spirits, with the result that she
would only sell you trees if your ancestors had the right
aura. Another enduring memory is of days spent at
Dreamthorpe. The more I visit gardens and talk to garden¬
ers, the more I believe that while gardeners are bred - and
I believe they most certainly are - the types of gardens we
make are those formed by our earliest experience of
gardens — the gardens of our mind’s eye. I was fortunate
in spending quite a bit of time at Dreamthorpe and for me
it will always remain an ideal.

Redlands was further away from the main drag and, in
its time, it was one of the most important gardens on the
mount. Here I digress for a charming little story of an
earlier bushfire when the Miss Tucketts’ household took
refuge in two boats on the lake, one containing the Miss
Tucketts and a picnic, and the other the servants and the
silver. They had their priorities right! There were many
other such stories, for Mount Macedon abounded with
characters and virtuoso gardeners. This tradition continues
and you will no doubt hear more about them during this
Conference.

Gardening in Australia has a rich oral tradition - much
richer, sadly, than its recorded history. Macedon is, in a
sense, a microcosm of gardening in Australia, and indeed
of the problems we confront as historians of gardens.
Bushfires and neglect, economic reality and subdivision
have all taken their toll on the legacy that comes to us.
Moreover, the gardens we see now represent only the tip
of the iceberg. So often when I talk to good gardeners,
they refer lovingly to a gardener who first captured their
interest and fired their enthusiasm for gardening. They
say, ‘If only you could have seen such and such a garden.
It was quite fantastic’. When asked what happened to it
they reply, ‘Yes, there are trees there now, but the garden
has gone.’

For me, garden history' is more than simply the history
of gardens: it is about understanding both the landscape
and the ways in which our forebears and precursors
viewed it, reacted to it, and attempted to change it. It is
also the story of these people - the figures in the land¬
scape - the gardeners.

I am always urging people to write about their gardens
- if only for their descendants. So much knowledge is lost.
It seems to me that what we need now - and perhaps this
is another challenge for the AGHS - is an authoritative

history of Australian gardening, to include the gardeners
and the vanished gardens as well as those which survive.

I will conclude with a story of happy coincidence.

In 1990, while working in England, Jane Clark - then a
student at the Courtald - and I took ourselves off to
Northamptonshire for the weekend to look at the Duke of
Buccleuch’s pictures. I had borrowed a friend’s very old
and singularly unreliable VW and, belching smoke and
backfiring noisily, we slowly made our way up the motor¬
way. Arriving rather late, we spent a lot of time looking at
the pictures, bought some Streptoccupus from the stall and,
as we went out, were directed to look at the gardens by
the gardener’s wife. The house by this time had closed for
the day. Making our way slightly furtively past the main
facade of the house, we encountered a woman walking
two dogs and, being polite colonials, guiltily apologised
for outstaying our welcome.

‘Not at all,’ was the response, ‘but where are you going?’

‘Off to see the gardens,’ we said.

‘Don’t go there, they’re full of bindweed. I ll take you to
see a really beautiful garden.’

And so up the hill we went, meanwhile being com-
mandingly cross-questioned by our kindly guide. When it
emerged that we were two Australians, she was more
delighted, since the garden we were being taken to see
belonged to her husband’s cousin, who was himself half-
Australian.

Entering the garden, we encountered a Sir David Scott,
very' ancient and rather irritated at being disturbed in his
weeding. My eyes were transfixed by the plastic pads on
his knees. Overcoming his initial unwillingness, he escort¬
ed us through the garden and back to the house. As we
entered the house, he asked, I don’t suppose you know a
place called Mount Macedon?’ 1 was able to reply that not
only did 1 know it but that I lived very nearby.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘come up to the drawing room. We have
been going through some old boxes and found some pho¬
tograph albums. I don’t suppose you know a house called
Derriweit?’

It transpired of course - and many of you will have
guessed - that Sir David was the grandson of Sir Charles
Ryan, creator of the mount’s grandest lost garden. The
albums were full of photos taken by his father Lord
Charles Scott late last century.

This was not all. ‘My aunt was an artist,’ he continued.
Her name was Ellis Rowan. I don’t suppose you have
heard of her?’ We were ushered up to look at the walls of
his bedroom and dressing-room literally papered with
plates of New Guinea’s butterflies.

The coda to this story is that we had a drink with the
Duchess, our earlier companion, and the albums found
their way back to Barney Hutton at Mount Macedon
where they mercifully survived the 1983 bushfires, even
though Derriweit did not.

Sir David Scott was recognised as a great gardener in
England. I like to think that his love of gardening was
formed at his mother’s knee and in the garden his ambi¬
tious grandfather created in that far-off antipodean par¬
adise, which is Mount Macedon.

4

A Forest at the Edge of the City

by Chris McConville

James OCHILTREE was one amongst many European
farmers who arrived in the Macedon region in the 1860s. 1
Some years later he reflected on the environment of
Macedon in the 1860s, an area with ‘wild bush grandeur
equal to any in Victoria’. In llomsey, Gisborne and
Woodend, farming shires around the base of Mount
Macedon, he had wondered at a landscape, with

not a fence, a house to be seen - gum trees shading the

sun - bracken, ferns, native grasses and black snakes every¬
where - wattles and light woods in full blossom, parrots of

eveiy colour, wild pigeons, curlews, possums at night. 2

- a landscape in short, recalled Ochiltree, where man had
not yet ‘made havoc with axe and pick’.

Much of this natural environment has now been erased.
Yet more than one hundred years later, pre-European bush
does survive in traces between farmlands, around the
roughest rock outcrops and along the verges of back
roads. Axe and pick have not yet wrought complete havoc
in Macedon. At the same time, European plantings, the
small clusters of houses at crossroads, the cuttings and
bridges carrying railways towards Bendigo and on to the
Murray River, the gardens planted around pastoral and
mountain properties and the windbreaks which define
roadways have helped to create a different beauty. Even
the towns, small and compact and with streets planted with
trees and views to wooded slopes and open fields, retain
that sense of a village in harmony with fannland so pleas¬
ing to the European eye and central to our Western expec¬
tations of landscape.

Macedon, unlike other fringe locales around the
metropolis of Melbourne, has retained a mixture of pre-
European wilderness, planted garden landscapes and
hamlet-like townships, a series of balanced layers built up
over one hundred years. Yet, as Melbourne spreads to the
north, in and around the Macedon region, that precarious
balance may be easily altered. The bulldozer and the
chainsaw can wreak havoc more speedily than did the axe
and pick.

Macedon was amongst the first areas of Victoria invaded
by Europeans in the nineteenth century. As we approach
the twenty-first century, the contemporary sprawl of the
city may well cover over any remaining traces of a relative¬
ly long European history. An attempt to ensure the sutvival
of the special qualities of this region might well begin with
a review of the historical processes which have created the
present balance between forest, farm, township and
garden.

A fixed point in the wilderness

From its first sighting by Major Mitchell in 1836, Mount
Macedon was always a reference point for invading Euro¬
peans. It told overlanders with flocks and herds that they
were on the correct track for Australia Felix and it warned
gold diggers that they had left the security of Melbourne
and were about to enter the wilderness, made more dan¬
gerous by the predations of bushrangers. Mount Macedon
defined a place in trackless nature. Mitchell climbed the
mount and from there first sighted Port Phillip Bay. In

another journey conducted by Governor Bourke, one of
his party. Captain Phillip Parker King wrote of the ‘beauti¬
ful country’ around the mount and of the ascent through
the Macedon Ranges:

we commenced the ascent, which we found quite laborious

and fatiguing, the hillside being covered with loose rock

and stones and veiy steep, and our way impeded by pros¬
trate stems of mountain ash which grows to enormous

size...in returning [we saw] some emus and kangaroos. !

In a landscape envisioned by these first invaders as wild
and overwhelming, most early descriptions concentrated
on the mount and the land immediately around it: land
covered in forest, dark and shaped by the prodigious
growth of trees and plants. Thus Robert Hoddle recorded
in 1841 that he noticed hollow' trees big enough to hold a
couple of horses and giant tree ferns from three ter six feet
in height. The first gold diggers left similar accounts of the
land around Mount Macedon. This time they were able to
put some human identity to the dangers of the forest, for
the land between Keilor and Woodend was a favourite
resort of bushrangers who held up and on at least one
occasion killed travellers on what was then known as the
Mount Alexander Road. To William Kelly, the Black Forest,
which lay across the road between Macedon and
Woodend, was a theatre of freebooting exploits and way¬
faring bloodshed’.' What a 'ghost-haunted lobby’ was to
young children, so, according to Kelly, appeared the Black
Forest to diggers travelling to the goldfields.

Towns in the forest

During the first rushes the gold-diggers inched their way
through the forest, finding old tracks crossed by new
bullock tracks and none ever becoming a main route. Even
before a clear roadway was cut through the forest, the Vic¬
torian Government was planning for a railway to the inland
goldfields and on to the Murray River. In 1856 tenders
were called for the first stage of the Melbourne-Mount
Alexander railway and in 1859 the section to Sunbury was
completed.

With the railway, townships like Gisborne thrived. Gis¬
borne was thought a ‘precocious little towney’ by William
Kelly, as it and other towns along the Mount Alexander Rd
swelled with diggers trudging north. When mining contin¬
ued at Castlemaine, Maldon and Bendigo long after the
initial rushes ceased elsewhere, these towns remained
bustling centres for several decades. By 1879 Gisborne had
six hundred people and the whole of the Gisborne Shire
had four thousand residents. Woodend, where there was
more work on railways than at Gisborne, had attracted
1510 residents and, within a Woodend and Newham Shire,
there lived a population of 3300.

Over the years as the towns have continued to serve
new generations of travellers by car, appearances have
changed. Some of the smaller travellers’ stops have all but
vanished. In the larger towns however, clusters of build¬
ings still reflect the life of bustling nineteenth century
service centres, where drays and coaches pulled into sta¬
tions, local shopkeepers and hoteliers united for custom
and the people who had settled more or less permanently
around railway stations built up their own local society,
visible through churches, mechanics institutes and schools.

5

Richard Aitken

Farms and factories

After 1870, anyone travelling through Lancefield and
Romsey would have noticed an unusual building. The
Lancefield Malthouse was built from wood and brick and
rose upwards like a string of pyramids. The Lockwood
brothers from Yorkshire had leased several hundred acres
at Springfield. They built their malthouse to make malt
from local barley. As it was only working at full stretch in
the harvest season they then converted the building into a
chicory kiln for work in the off season. The Lancefield
Malthouse, now demolished, was typical of the small local
enterprises which sprang up in and around the towns,
serving local farmers on the one hand and the demands of
the nearby city on the other. 5 Throughout the shires,
serving trains and feeding and sheltering passing travellers
kept the towns alive. At the same time many towns sup¬
ported scattered and often precarious small industries. At
Newham in the 1870s stood a large flour mill. Romsey had
a flour mill and a chicory mill, Lancefield a brewery/' At
North Lancefield Abbot and Derby opened their flour mill
in 1868. Eleven years later this was converted into a
brewery. The Trent Brewery was known for its high quality
beer and stout, made from clear local water and local
malted barley. 7 By the turn of the century the little town of
Riddells Creek was the site of a flock factory which contin¬
ued to produce mattresses until well into the twentieth
century. Outside the towns were several eucalypt distil¬
leries and stone quarries, but the main industry from the
1830s onwards was timber-cutting.

Many such enterprises did not last into the twentieth
century and buildings were often demolished. A few sur¬
vivors of local industrial buildings are still visible. Newham
Flour Mill still stands, and is important for its role in local
industrial activity and significant as a reminder of the range
of small scale local industry which characterised the town¬
ships of the area.

While Mount Macedon was winning a reputation as the
perfect site for experimental horticulture, much of the
shires around the Mount had swung from forestry to agri¬
culture. The pastoralists who arrived in the 1840s were
quick to see the richness of local soils and the constancy of
rains. Before the gold rushes, European pastoralists seized
broad expanses of land around Mount Macedon. These
were often formalised into pre-emptive right pastoral
leases. The Bullengorourke pastoral lease lasted from the
1840s until 1874. A farmhouse survives from this pastoral
era. Built in 1870 from basalt rubble, it is surrounded by
other farm buildings, lined along the drive by Monterey
pines with a rose garden and other plantings near the
house. Similar plantings around other properties erased
local grasses in the fashion described by E.M. Cure
The grass originally grew in large tussocks standing from
two to twenty feet apart. It bore no resemblance to a sward
and when one drove over it in a dog cart, a succession of
bumps was experienced from its lumpy way of growing.
Gradually as the tussocks were fed down by sheep and
cattle they stooled out and the seed was trampled into the
ground around and, in the absence of bush fires, grew so
that presently a sward more or less close resulted."

6

Over tlie years, not only the native grass patterns were
altered but the open landscape of the grazier was also
broken up into patchwork fields, marked by different
colours of crops, trees as windbreaks and the clumps of
buildings around farmsteads. From Mount Macedon at the
turn of the century anyone looking out over nearby
country would see not just forest, but ‘remnants of the
Black Forest, corn fields and pasture lands interspersed
chequering the landscape with patches of light and
shadow’. 9

Romsey included some of the best agricultural land in
Victoria and, close to the expanding city much of the farm¬
land was taken up before the Land Selection Acts of the
1860s. One of the pastoralists of the 1840s, WJ. Clarke,
obtained control of much good grazing land by right of a
Special Survey. Clarke’s Bolinda Vale Estate remained the
classic pastoral holding, its wind breaks and stone fencing
characterising the southern parts of the Romsey Shire.
Clarke himself tried to become a model land-owner, sup¬
porting local agricultural societies and shows at the
Romsey Public Park and providing land for his tenants on
long leases. By the end of the 1870s, chicory, potatoes,
wheat and barley were cultivated in the north of the shire,
while the southern portions consisted of ‘grazing land of
the first-class quality’. 10 The farms, on rich chocolate soil
and divided into blocks of 60 to 300 acres, were let at 25
shillings per acre in 1894. May-making proved lucrative for
local farmers, probably as with other activities encouraged

by the nearby market in Melbourne. Most local farmers
over the years came to rely on dairying. The Romsey
Butter Factory opened in 1882 and enabled many to reach
markets in Australia and overseas. A Lancefield butter
factory was opened in 1894. Farming apparently suffered
during the war but revived during the 1950s because of the
wool boom and the fine stud herds built up by local
landowners. The Clarkes at Bolinda Vale led the way,
establishing an English Leicester sheep stud and a short¬
horn cattle stud.

New and old forests

In 1837, after the first Melbourne land sales, a party of con¬
victs were detailed to work in the forests around Mount
Macedon, cutting timber for the expected sudden demand
for building materials." The gold rushes inspired another
great push to cut down the forests. Props for mine shafts
and timber for boilers meant that huge trees of the Black
Forest were cut down and sawn up and dragged off to the
gold fields. By 1854, Dodgshon Timber Mill and the Chris¬
tian Timber Mill were operating around Mount Macedon.

At Cherokee (named by saw-millers from Oaklahoma),
most of the town relied on timber getting. Other parts of
the area were favourite sites for collecting firewood and
sending it off to Melbourne. By the J870s, all of the huge
forest trees which awed the travellers of the 1850s had
gone. Only then did the mills begin to close and timber
gatherers drift off, often to land selections in other parts of

View onto the plains from Alton, Mount Macedon

7

John Hawker

Victoria. The threat to forests, and the enormous stripping
of trees cause by mining, sawing of building materials and
cutting sleepers for railways and wood for fuel, had
destroyed the landscape of the Macedon wilderness.

A different type of forestry characterised the area at the
end of the nineteenth century. Macedon was, along with
Creswick, one of the key areas in Victoria’s state manage¬
ment of forests. When Victorian governments began to
reconsider their responsibilities for forests, Macedon filled a
central place in plans. In 1865 bushfires had destroyed
several local timber mills, burning prepared timber as well
as trees. From that point onwards local millers and
members of the the colonial parliament turned their minds
to replantings. From 1871, schemes for a state nursery at
Macedon were drawn up and, although delayed for several
years, the nursery was eventually used to replenish forests
elsewhere in Victoria. By 1872 the Macedon nursery had
eighty different exotic trees and more than twenty native
species. There were also trial plots in the basin of the Turi-
table Creek and near the nursery. In 1877 exotic trees were
imported from Scotland. By 1880 the Macedon nursery was
completely enclosed and in 1883 plantations of black
wattle and golden wattle were begun. Californian and
Himalayan timber trees were planted and an experimental
plot of fifty acres set aside for imported forest trees. During
1888 six thousand trees were planted at Macedon and
plantings continued for several years but were abandoned
during the 1890s. Three nurseries were managed by the
state between 1900 and 1914. Between them, the Creswick,
Macedon and Broadford nurseries raised more than one
quarter of a million plants during 1911-12. By 1914 more
than three million were raised. Yet many of these experi¬
ments faltered and, in the long run. the nursery did not live
up to expectations. A report on the nursery in 1904 noted
that: ‘as regards the raising of trees for general distribution,
Macedon has not been happily chosen as a site for a general
nursery.’ 12

Apparently the plants grown at Macedon were unfit for
transplanting to the north of the state. The revitalisation of
forests depended on the work of another state nursery at
Creswick. Yet the new science of forestry had already
made its mark on the area. Throughout the towns plantings
of exotic trees changed to appearance of otherwise bald
streets. And in the forests to the west of Mount Macedon,
especially beyond Bullengarook, increased control of state
officials gradually led to reduced illegal cutting and some
growth in stands of timber so that, by 1904, it appeared
that there was a ‘gradual encroachment of thick belts of
young timber on the lower slopes and foothills of the
mountain ranges’. 1 ' The threat to forested areas remained
and, in 1903 the Cyclopedia of Victoria demanded that at
Macedon the government must

rigorously preserve the forests from degradation by the
rapacious timber-cutter unless we are willing to see Victoria
degenerate into an arid desert which has been the fate of
the most fruitful provinces of the old Roman empire. 11

Experimental forestry was concentrated around
Macedon, but there were other changes taking place in the
landscape of the broader area between Gisborne,
Woodend and Romsey. Residents at Mount Macedon had
introduced exotic species into the mountains. Conifers

were planted by those taking up land and, on some of the
larger properties, owners cultivated rhododendrons and
holly. Charles Ryan, owner of one property on the mount,
had brought plants from around the globe to Mount
Macedon, ‘deodars of the Himalayas, gigantic pines of the
Yosemite Valley to the yews and hollies of old England’. 1 '

Mountain holidays

Over the last one hundred years Mount Macedon has
become recognised as a pleasant holiday resort within easy
reach of Melbourne. During the 1870s, the prominent
Williamstown banker and politician George Verdon trav¬
elled to Macedon, hoping to take advantage of Land Selec¬
tion regulations to a site for a rural retreat. Verdon pur¬
chased land under section 49 of the I860 land acts and
was subject to regulations requiring him to plant ten acres
of trees. Verdon named his property" ‘Alton’, after ‘Alton
Towers,’ the gothic mansion completed by Pugin for the
Earl of Shrewsbury in England. He developed a garden
around his property, the design of which was influenced
by Baron von Mueller. When J.A. Froude visited Mount
Macedon in the 1880s, he described Alton as ‘ a most
handsome mansion surrounded by well-timbered
grounds...in the winter, this highland home is sometimes
swathed in snow... In summer the heat of the sun is tem¬
pered by' fresh keen air of the mountain’.

Baron Von Mueller even visited the mount in 1883 ‘to
endeavour shaking off this dreadful cough’. By then many
of the urban elite were convinced that a few days in the
rarefied air of Macedon would cure them of the ills ol city-
living. 1 Amongst prominent Melburnians, David Syme had
taken up land under selection acts at Mount Macedon,
using his ‘selection’ as a mountain resort rather than as a
farm. 17 Other wealthy Melburnians took legal means of
obtaining their holiday houses on Mount Macedon, making
the peak and the road upwards from Macedon itself a
close parallel to the hill stations of the British Raj in India.
The hill station character of Mount Macedon stemmed in a
large part from the Victorian governor’s choice of Mount
Macedon as a summer retreat. The wooden cottage of
David Syme was purchased in 1886 as a summer residence
for the governor, Sir Henry Loch. Plans were then drawn
up to create a new residence, two storeyed and half-tim¬
bered in the Gothic style. At about the same time a new
house was being erected on Mount Macedon for Carl Pin-
schoff. Over the following two decades the character of the
wooded and wild Mount Macedon was changed as other
prominent Melbournians followed the governor in seeking
to build uplands retreats on the southern slopes.

The advantages presented by Mount Macedon as a place of
summer residence to those inhabitants of Melbourne who
could afford to indulge in the luxury of a country residence
became obvious thirty years ago.

So reported the Cyclopedia of Victoria at the turn of the
century'. From the peak there were views back towards the
Victorian alps and down across the flat plain to Mel¬
bourne...

though forty miles away Port Phillip seems almost at one’s
feet, its ever-restless water stilled with Melbourne lying
upon its shores and stretching a tangled maze of streets to
its most distant suburbs. 1 "

8

As at Mount Macedon, at Riddells Creek, the climate and
surrounds were coming to lie seen as a perfect antidote to
the degenerating tendencies of urban life.

Delicate people and children withered by the hot air of the
city and suburbs reacquired their bloom and freshness, lost
the languor and lassitude to which they might have previ¬
ously succumbed, once they had holidayed at Macedon
and surrounds. 1 ’

Destroying a landscape

Cool breezes, views and mountain trees brought holiday¬
makers to the area. But the cool breezes and sea air
wafting inland did not always temper summer heat. One of
the recurrent forces shaping the landscape of the district
has been (ire. In 1851, again in 1905 and 1939, and most
recently in 1983, huge fires have raged through the moun¬
tain forest and farmland. Vincent Buckley left a gripping
account of the bushfires of 1939 as they raged around
Romsey.

For those weeks we lived in an exploded bowl...the Mel¬
bourne hills started to burn with dozens killed in the
fires...this is what I could see from the slopes above
Romsey as we all waited for the cool change, and when it
came that time, it was with the unfamiliar smell of drench
and rot, a humid pretend-cooling before the real air started
to make its faint spirals on the skin."

In 1904 and 1905 fires destroyed pasture and stock
around the Black Range. Fire threatened Gisborne in 1944
and in January 1973 bushfires raced through parts of the
study area. The fires of 1 February and 16 February 1983
brought devastation not seen since 1939 and Black Friday.
This unpredictable and often uncontrollable burning of
landscape and buildings around Macedon, Gisborne and
Woodend has always remained a key force in shaping this
world. At the same time the undeniable attractions of the
hills, away from the city yet close to it, have been powerful
enough to attract commuters more than holiday makers.
While tourism made little broad impact on the landscape at
the turn of the century the new waves of suburbanites like
the old waves of fire may in the long run emerge as the
dominant force reshaping the appearance of the shires
around Mount Macedon.

As Victoria came out of the Depression of the 1930s, the
towns of the Mecedon region continued as small and
largely removed from the life of the metropolitan area.
Over the following fifty years the Macedon area became
more closely tied to the big city. However, so long as Mel¬
bourne sprawled to the south-east rather than to the north,
the Macedon area retained that distinctive balance of
farming, forest and gardens surrounding small towns. In
1994, even after taking into account the slow growth (even
decline) in Victorian population in the early 1990s, popula¬
tion in the area is expected to at least double between
1993 and 2020. Metropolitan expansion has swung steadily
to the northern corridor.

Already existing subdivisions are spreading across open
farmland and into forests. Recent attempts at subdivision in
several shires have drawn bitter opposition and at least one
has been abandoned. Changes to planning legislation and
a more open and rapid avenue for developers will result
from recent alterations to planning and building legislation

and from alteration to appeals procedures. The historical
texture of the Macedon region, relying as it does on a for¬
tunate balancing of traces from several successive historical
activities, is unique, unmatched by other fringe areas
around metropolitan Melbourne. The suburban juggernaut
can easily sweep away most of that distinctive historical
landscape. Clearing of windbreaks, new residential allot¬
ments with contemporary road patterns and building form,
and the breaking of the clear divisions between town and
country are already changing the region, key consequences
of the northward movement of the metropolitan boundary.

Writing in The Public Historian in 1991 Madeline Cirilo
Archer claimed that we turn to holistic preservation when
lifestyles and ecology have been threatened by rapid
development and growth, and where the preservation of
open space is essential to the integrity of historic buildings
and sites’. 21 On the northern fringe of Melbourne, and
widely recognised for its special human and environmental
qualities, the present landscape of Macedon will change
radically during the next decade. How well can the present
forested, farm and village environment be protected? The
past 160 years of European settlement have left distinctive
traces on the landscape of the area. At the same time there
are sites which reflect the culture of the pre-European
peoples of the area and others in which remnant flora
reflect the character of the area prior to European occupa¬
tion. If the history of the area is to remain visible in the
Year 2020, then future subdivision will need to be carefully
integrated into existing landscape units. Otherwise an ever-
expanding urban frontier will erase, more completely than
have the pick or axe or even bushfire, much erf the rare
historical landscape of Macedon.

References

1 Much of the material in this paper is drawn from research for
the Macedon Ranges Conservation Study by Trevor Budge et al.

2 Quoted in J. Reid ed., When Memory turns the Key: The
History of the Shire of Romsey, Romsey 1992, p4.

3 Milboume, Mount Macedon, 3rd ed., 1982, pp 26-7.

4 W. Kelly, Life in Victoria, 2 vols reprint 1977.

5 Reid, p 80.

6 ibid, 1879.

7 Reid, p 68.

8 Quoted in Reid, p 4.

9 Cyclopedia of Victoria.

10 Victorian Municipal Directory, 1879.

11 Our side of the Mountain.

12 Victorian Year Book, 1904, p 476.

13 ibid.

14 Cyclopedia of Victoria, vol 3, p 49.

15 ibid.

16 Letter from Mueller to Ralph Tate, Barr Smith Library Universi¬
ty of Adelaide, Macedon 29 November 1883, Mueller project
from Sara Maroske.

17 Syme selected land under gold field regulations, even though
the nearest goldfield was at Barry’s Reef sixteen miles away
in the Blackwood Range. See Reports on Land Selection at
Mount Macedon, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 1899-1900.

18 Picturesque Victoria, 1905.

19 Cyclopedia of Victoria.

20 Vincent Buckley Cutting green hay, Penguin 1983, p 38.

21 M.C.Archer,'Preservation in the 1990s’, Public Historian, vol
13 no 4, Fall 1991, pp 25-40.

9

The Simla of the South

by Paul Fox

jIhiS PAPER explores the cultural implications of imagin¬
ing Macedon as mount, garden-forest and antipodean hill
station. It examines how Macedon, created by scientific
idealism and the exotic, was part of the formulation of
space which translated the topos into a universal, idealistic
landscape of empire.

The paper also examines how, over time, myth and
memory shaped Macedon so that scientific, aesthetic and
imperial languages which shaped the initial representation
of Macedon’s gardens continued to be influential in the
landscape discourse of this country. When Macedon was
spoken of, it described a landscape paradigm.

Today Macedon asks us to re-view what we see and
speak of. It asks us to leave the mountain and conceive of
another prospect beyond the cultural memory of the hill
station.

This paper takes its title from the colonial novelist and
son of an East India Company official Rolf Boldrewood’s
Old Melbourne Memories (published in 1884) wherein
Macedon was described as an antipodean hill station, as
‘the Simla of Victoria’.

Boldrewood’s first impression of Macedon in the 1840s
as a ruined castle' is equally revealing. It suggests the asso¬
ciations which Macedon engendered in the nineteenth
century were not static but changed over time from typical
picturesque invocations to imperial likenesses. What then
does this change signify?

It suggests that initially Macedon was not conceived of
as a garden. It was nature, rather than cultivation, which
commended the site to Gerald Krefft, a scientific member
of the 1857 expedition to the Murray River, who recom¬
mended Macedon as a place of sport where city gentlemen
might indulge in hunting amidst the tree ferns. 2

Krefft’s perception of place as uncultivated nature
reflects a romanticism, not unlike Boldrewood’s pic¬
turesque metaphor, for during the 1850s the forest was
changed dramatically by the discovery of gold and the
accompanying demand for timber. These changes to the
forest continued. In 1869, ' hen the Melbourne financier
J.B. Were made application for land near the southern
boundary of the Macedon State Forest, together with Dr
Howitt (also an amateur naturalist), merchant and member
of the Victorian Legislative Council James Graham, lawyer,
George Traill, politician Archibald Michie, and editor of the
Age newspaper David Sytne, the timber there had already
been removed from this land for sawmilling purposes. 3 By
1874 the only mill still operating on that side of the range
was at Devils Hole — ‘mill after mill having ceased as the
timber became exhausted’.' Still, enormous quantities of
timber were taken out of the Macedon forest in that year.
In 1874 the Bullarook and Macedon forests had twenty
sawmills which supplied Melbourne each month with one
and a half million feet of timber while the goldfields towns
of Castlemaine, Sandhurst and Maryborough were supplied
with three quarters of a million feet.'

These gentlemen wished to establish summer residences
at Macedon. They conceived of Macedon as a sanatorium 6 .
From Upper Macedon, professor Herbert Strong wrote of

‘the pure mountain air’ and how after convalescing, his
wife and child were ‘looking forward with anything but
pleasure to descending to Melbourne again’. Here the
rhetoric of the Indian hill station is being indirectly used to
imagine the Australian landscape; a significant change in
perception from the earlier view of Anglo-Indians who in
the 1840s saw Tasmania and Western Australia as places of
furlough for those debilitated by the Indian climate.

Another significant change which occurred at this time
was that nature was turned into a garden. Syme's first
action on being granted his Macedon selection was to
fence the fern gully on his land to protect it from fern
getters. Nature was also to be restored; timber removed
from the site was to be replaced by ‘no less than 50 conif¬
erous trees of such kinds as afford useful timber’ which if
judiciously grouped would tend to the improvement of the
lots’. The languages of utility and aesthetics established
Macedon’s exclusivity and checked any renewal of appli¬
cations for the portions of the State forest by ordinary
applicants’. 7

Macedon was also shaped by scientific experiment. For
instance Syme showed an awareness of contemporary
colonial scientific thought when he proposed as a condi¬
tion of the grant that he would plant ‘any sort of trees the
Board may suggest or wish to have grown by way of
experiment’. He was acquainted with the writings of the
government botanist, Ferdinand Mueller whose ‘official
reports to the Board referred to the climate as being suit¬
able for growing such plants as tea, coffee and cinchonae’.
Syme also undertook to place himself in communication
with Mueller and offered ‘to test any such plants he might
recommend'." In the early 1870s the colony’s gentlemen
scientists, including the University Professors McCoy,
Strong and Nansen, together with the Director of the Mel¬
bourne Observatory, Robert Ellery and the Director of the
Melbourne Botanic Gardens, had all selected land at
Macedon on the condition they plant ‘useful timber trees’
including the sacred cedar of India, Cedrus deodara

Syme and his scientific colleagues, informed by theories
of acclimatisation, saw the colonial garden not only as a
retreat but also as being informed by a system of ideas
where science and utility complemented beauty.

Scientific analysis of the mount in terms of climate, alti¬
tude and soils was important in determining how nature
could be changed into the ideal landscape of the garden
forest. As Ferguson reported in 1870, Macedon possessed
‘a climate and soils peculiarly favourable for the growth of
non-indigenous trees’," 1 a perception which led two acres
of the newly established Macedon State Nursery in 1872
being planted with thousands of ‘the choicest and best
kinds of I-Iimalyan and Californian timber trees’. The fol¬
lowing year these experiments continued when 50 acres
near the summit 'were selected for experimential culture of
forest trees, large numbers of deodars, Himalyan spruce
and silver firs, for the culture of which the high altitude of
the locality are well adapted’." Macedon, as an experimen¬
tal station, witnessed the creation of forests reminiscent of
the Himalayas and California.

The resultant relationship of the garden to the forest was
a recurrent motif of nineteenth century Macedon. There the
garden contrasted with what the Inspector of State Forests,

10

William Ferguson described in 1870 as the ‘large areas of
State Forest Reserves at Macedon already denuded of
timber'.'- It was a relationship often commented on by visi¬
tors to Macedon.

When ethnographer and author of Random Rot: a
Journal of three Years' Wanderings about the World, Edge
Partington in 1879 visited Derriweit Heights, the Macedon
garden of Charles Ryan, he commented that 'the contrast of
the wild bush beyond only added to the beauty of the
garden’.’ 1 The forest also caught the attention of lady
painter and photographer, the Duchess of Buckingham and
Chandos. Visiting Macedon in 1892 as a guest of the Victori¬
an Governor the Earl of Hopetoun, she noted ‘sometimes
you see a whole side of a hill covered with skeleton trees,
as the colonists to make a clearing, ring the trees...thus
killing them; and sometimes forest fires have occurred and
some of these giant skeletons are all charred and present a
sad and pitiful spectacle'." This landscape contrasted with
the Macedon garden retreat which in the case of the lowest
part of Charles Ryan’s garden had literally replaced the
forest after it had been burnt by bushfires in 1878. 15

Ryan, by replacing despoiled nature with the artificial
contrivance of the garden, created an idyll which provided
the elite with a language by which to discuss the landscape
beyond the garden. When Edge Partington walked to a
waterfall beyond the garden, accompanied by Ryan’s
daughter Ellis Rowan, he witnessed ‘all the ferns complete¬
ly despoiled’ by the ‘wretched pic-nickers’. By contrast
Derriweit Heights protected ‘a winding gully where a small
stream ran’ which was enhanced by ‘all sorts of ferns, col¬
lected at different timed both here, and in Tasmania and
New Zealand’." 1 The Macedon garden, as conceived by the
educated colonist, protected nature from the uninformed
mass who would destroy it.

The view of Macedon offered by private visitors like
Partington and the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos
was very different to that popularised through the colonial
newspaper. While the Melbourne press revealed Ryan’s
taste by describing unique plant specimens growing in the
garden. Edge Partington disclosed the intimacies of the
Ryans' private world; at Derriweit he came across for the
first time in Australia ‘old English engravings and some old
china’. 17 A man who in wild places was of the opinion ‘it is
the fear of the revolver that brings men to their senses’, 18
was put at ease at Macedon by signs of civilisation.

Partington’s work was printed for private circulation
only. By contrast, the press pieces written by garden
designer and nurseryman, William Sangster 19 illustrate how
the private domain of Macedon was translated for public
consumption by botanical journalism. As a Macedon nurs¬
eryman and garden designer, Sangster was well placed to
read the plant and garden not only botanically but also as
signs of culture, science and possession. At Derriweit he
not only comments on the rare Himalyan Rhododendron
Dalhousie’ with creamy white bellflowers eight inches
across but also tests, and finds wanting, the nexus between
the luxuriance of the original forest cover and agricultural
productivity. He reports how it had been incorrectly
‘expected that ground which produced timber over three
hundred feet in height would also give an abundance of
fruit’ when planted with orchards; recounting how the site

had been selected ‘for orchard purposes by an old axeman
who had assisted to fell many a forest giant on this and
neighbouring selections’. 20

The press characterised the Macedon garden by its rare
plants. In 1881 the Melbourne Leader described Ryan’s
garden as having plants ‘not possessed by anyone else’ in
the colony. 21 Ryan actively encouraged this perception by
seeking out rare plants throughout the globe. During his
1882 travels to England and Europe, he visited the United
States so as to ‘obtain many other species than those kept
in English nurseries’. 22

Macedon, with its deodars, Himalayan spruce, Assam
tea, Rhododendron Dalhousie, and Indian ducks on the
State Nursery 1 lake 21 had been re-created in the image of an
Indian hill station by the time the Governor, Henry Loch
rented David Syme’s property Rosenheim as a temporary
summer retreat in 1884. Like Simla, Macedon now came to
be defined by the vice-regal presence. This association was
confirmed when the Victorian government purchased
Syme’s property, after Ryan and his brother-in-law, Sir
William Clarke had persuaded the governor of the need for
a permanent Macedon residence. 21 The resultant identifica¬
tion of Macedon with Simla was further enhanced in 1886
when a new two storey residence in tudor style architec¬
ture’ 21 — remarkably similar to Snowden, the official Simla
residence (from 1885) of the Commander-in-Chief in India
- was built at Macedon. 26

‘The view from the Governor’s Residence’, sketch by Lady Loch,
subsequently published in the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (1886)

11

Paul Fox collection

Guilfoyle papers, University of Melbourne Archives

A sketch of Mount Macedon from William Guilfoyle’s sketchbook, April 1887

12

The British experience of the Indian sub-continent
defined Macedon in other ways. In 1881 tea plants from
Assam were planted in a six acre extension to the State
Nursery/ 7 followed in 1884 by the introduction of cinchona
and jute seeds collected during that year at the Calcutta
International Exhibition. 2 "

This reduction of the globe to imperial simulacra
allowed Boldrewood to picture Macedon as an Indian hill
station, the Governor's residence to bestow Macedon with
the imperial associations of Simla, and Australian travellers
to liken Indian hill stations to Macedon. When Alfred
Deakin, a member of the colony’s political elite, travelled
to the Himalayan hill station at Darjeeling in 1890, he jotted
in his diary: ‘cleared patches of garden and diy grass like
Macedon — gardens on steep slopes and crests of hills. Lies
beyond the plain influence - an upland oasis of cool’.*'
Similarly Boldrewood, writing in 1884, compared its ‘cooler
air and lower heat’ with the plain below where ‘all plant
and animal nature alike suffer from the unpitying sun'.' 0
Through the use of shared imperial metaphors, Bol¬
drewood and Deakin could assert the primacy of their
caste’s claims to the colonial landscape.

In this way the private preserve of the garden was
invested with authorative public meanings. Macedon’s
gardens were seen not only in terms of the taste and
wealth of the garden owner but also as imperial metaphor.
Derriweit illustrates this. Whilst Ryan created Derriweit as
the archetype hill station garden, his daughter Ellis Rowan
symbolises the imperial expeditioning that procured the
new, the rare and the exotic which distinguished Ryan’s
garden as the foremost garden of the colony. As the
Duchess of Buckingham recounted, Rowan, ‘one of the
best (lower painters in the world, told her of her adventur¬
ous journeys in search of specimens, she having visited
wild parts of Queensland and the islands where no lady
had ever been’.' 1

Here Rowan is portrayed as belonging to the male world
of exploration, discovering both terra and flora incognita.
For Rowan what lay beyond her father’s private garden
was the imperial landscape which empowered her to paint,
collect plants and discover the unknown. This imperial
acquisition of knowledge involved the translation of
indigenous understandings into the European languages of
science and aesthetics. According to the Duchess, Rowan
made ‘friends with the natives and got them to procure her
rare plants’ and educated them in her needs. ‘She generally
has to get them to escort her to the place’ as ‘she says their
idea of helping is to pull handfuls of blossoms so she can
rarely paint what they bring her’. 32 The search for the unil¬
lustrated flower led Rowan to picture indigenous geogra¬
phies as European landscape so that many of her paintings
depict both flower and landscape."

At Derriweit, Rowan created her own domestic space.
Edge Partington recounted 'there is a delicious little room
leading out to a fernery into which the dining room leads.
In this Mrs Rowan does all her painting’. Rowan also deco¬
rated much of the room painting a frieze of cats and frogs,
one of which Partington reported was ‘an exact image of a
(male?) friend’ of his. 31

It is usual to consider Macedon as a site created by men;
yet women travellers and artists defined Macedon. For

Madame Buvelotpainting, Monsieur Pfund reading,
c. 1870-73, sketch by Thomas Clark possibly at the Buvelot’s
Mount Macedon retreat

instance Lady Loch (wife of the first governor to take up
residence at Macedon) sketched Macedon from the veran¬
dah of the vice-regal residence" whilst Madame Buvelot is
seen, in Thomas Clark’s 1873 pencil sketch, painting
scenery above the fireplace possibly at the Pfund’s
Macedon retreat.* Macedon is pictured for a mass audience
by the governor’s wife, whose Macedon sketch was subse¬
quently published in the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia,
as well by male artists like Louis Buvelot whose Morning
at Macedon, composed of ‘a few gum trees, a water hole
and a distant mountain range', was reproduced in the Aus¬
tralian Illustrated NetvsT Similarly, newspaper travel writer
and art critic, James Smith turned to Ellis Rowan to inquire
as to the presence of ‘picturesque but little known walks
about Macedon’. 38

Away from the public gaze, Macedon was also another
place. It was a retreat where even the Governor, the Earl
of Hopetoun, like some antipodean echo of Marie
Antoinette playing milkmaid, dressed as a jackeroo. 3 ' 1 Yet
the private could become part of public discourse. The
only time Sangster writes of Macedon’s domestic space as a
journalist is to describe the drawing room belonging to an
aesthete bachelor, Sir George Verdon. Designed by Verdon
to advertise the beauty of colonial woods, Sangster per¬
ceives the room not as a private apartment but as part of
the public discourse concerning forests. He relates Alton’s
timbered interior to its garden, ‘a valuable experimental

13

(a )llecii<>n: Ballarat Fine Art Ciallerv

plantation that has not cost the country a single penny’. 10

Sangster’s is a political commentary. Six years earlier,
after ‘trenchant criticism’,' 1 ten thousand acres of the
Macedon state forest was thrown open to selection in 1879,
despite the soil’s unsuitability for agriculture. Only a thou¬
sand acres was preserved for the summer residences of
Melbourne merchants. 12

Thus the Macedon garden, conceived from its inception
by a leisured cognescenti as a parody of the Selection Act’s
intention to provide a livelihood for the selector who was
expected to clear the land of its forest cover; now stood as
a rebuke to governments which allowed the destruction of
state forests. Macedon, conceived and claimed as an impe¬
rial site, was a signifier of the colonial elite’s critique of
democratic practice.

As Joel Sydner has argued in Territorial Photographs,
claims to the national landscape of nineteenth century
America were related to a ‘knowledge-hungry, acquisitive
and aggressive scientific-professional class’." A class can
define a territory. At Macedon, despite the 1879 loss over
selection, the imperial language by which this group
claimed its authority to see and speak continued to exert
influence over the official discourse. When another report
on forests was commissioned in 1896, the government
turned to the Inspector-General of Forests to the Govern¬
ment of India, Rippontrop.

One hears echoes of earlier cited opinions in his assess¬
ment: the reason for the self-evident mismanagement of the
forest property of the colony are well known, and were in
fact first pointed out to me by independent colonials; they
are political and centre in the disregard of the general public
weal where this clashes with monetary profits of individuals
or classes who can exert direct parliamentary influence’."

The garden is about vision. At Macedon the hill garden
acted as mount to survey the lie of the land. Macedon's
geographical designation as a mount also recalls the
garden mount found in seventeenth century gardens and in
nineteenth century colonial gardens such as Ripponlea. A
mount is about power. Those who own the garden also
have the right to the prospect they can see: whilst those
excluded from the private domain may only look at the
mount from a distance. It is only through reading newspa¬
pers or illustrated journals that some picture of it can be
gained. Macedon thus exists in the imagination, simultane¬
ously known and unsighted, a colonial site created by
global, imperial symbols.

What Macedon represents is a view of the self in the
landscape. It tells how language, science and power create
a picture. If there is to be a nerv view created in this
country, a different language of vision will need to be
developed. The first step may be to come down off the
mountain and sight a different prospect.

Notes

1 Australasian, 5 April 1884.

2 Gerald Krefft, Krefft papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of

New South Wales.

3 ‘Land Selection at Mount Macedon', Victorian Parliamentary

Papers, 33, 1899, p. 8.

4 Illustrated Australian News, 24 February 1874.

5 Riverina Herald, 25 February 1874.

6 D Mackinnon to Daniel Mackinnon, 28 December 1875;

Charles Strong to Daniel Mackinnon, 2 March & 16 July 1887,
Mackinnon papers, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria.

7 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, op.cit.. p. 8.

8 ibid., p. 9. Cinchona produced quinine. Mueller was of the
opinion that we ought to consociate Peru Bark with naturally
growing fern trees, but only in the warmest valleys and
richest soils.' Ferdinand Von Mueller, ‘Select Plants (exclusive
of timber trees) readily eligible for Industrial Culture’, Pro¬
ceedings of the Zoological & Acclimatisation Society, I. 1872.

9 Nigel Lewis N Associates, Alton and Hascomhe, Alton Road.
Mount Macedon (Victorian Conservation Trust, 1986), pp.10-
13.

10 Forest Commission of Victoria, Macedon. Forest Nursery Cen¬
tenary 1873-1973, nd. p. 12.

11 William Ferguson, ‘Report of the inspector of the State
Forests’ June 1873, p. 8.

12 ibid., p.12.

13 James Edge Partington, Random Rot. A Journal of three Years
Wandering arvund the World (Guardian Office, Atrincham,
1883), p. 136.

14 Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, Glimpses of Four Con¬
tinents: Letters written during a tour in Australia, New
Zealand,and North America (John Murray, London,1894).

15 Partington, op. cit., p.137.

16 ibid., p. 137-8.

17 ibid, p. 137.

18 ibid., p. 257.

19 J. 11. Foster, Victorian Picturesque: Tire Colonial Gardens of
William Songster (History Department, University of Mel¬
bourne, 1989), p. 1.

20 Australasian, 17 January 1885.

21 Leader. 19 March 1881.

22 Australasian, 21 December 1883.

23 Victorian Acclimatisation Society, Council Minute Book, 27
April 1874.

24 Victorian Parliamentary Papers, op. cit., pp. 14-15.

25 leader, 20 March 1886.

26 Part Barr & Raymond Desmond, Sitnila. A Hill Station in
British India (Scholar Press, London, 1979), p.75.

27 Leader. 2 April 1881.

28 Weekly Times, 8 November 1884.

29 Alfred Deakin, ‘Diary, India 1890-91', Deakin Papers, National
Library' of Australia.

30 Australasian, 5 April 1884.

31 Duchess of Buckingham & Chandos, op. cit., p. 84.

32 ibid., pp. 84-5.

33 Conversation with Jennifer Phipps, Australian Art, National
Gallery' of Victoria.

34 Partington, op. cit., p. 138.

35 Margaret Rich, From the beginnings of European settlement. A
collection of Australian watercolours & drawings 1800-1983
(Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 1984), p.24.

36 Andrew Garren (ed.), Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, 2,
p.282. I am indebted to Helen Vellacott for this reference.

37 Austr alian Illustrated News, 7 October 1874.

38 Ellis Rowan to James Smith, undated letter, James Smith
papers, Vol.5, Michell Library.

39 Duchess of Buckingham & Chandos, op. cit., p. 77.

40 Australasian, 17 January 1885.

41 E J Semmens, Notes on Forestry, Semmens papers, University
of Melbourne Archives.

42 Argus, 3 May 1879.

43 Joel Snyder. ‘Territorial Photography’ in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.)
Landscape and Power (University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London, 1994), p. 199.

44 ‘Report on the State Forests of Victoria prepared in Compli¬
ance with the request of the Hon. R. W. Best. Minister for
Lands by B. Rippontrop, C.l. E.’, Victorian Parliamentary
Papers, 42, 1896, p.3.

14

The Forest Resource of the Macedon Ranges

by F.R. Moulds

TT HE FORESTS of the Macedon Ranges are the residuals
of a large forested area along the Dividing Range, includ¬
ing the Wombat Forest of the Daylesford and Woodend
region. They comprise stringy bark, peppermint and gum
forests on the lower slopes and mountain ash, alpine ash
and snow gum on the upper slopes and summit. The prin¬
cipal differences between the southern and northern
aspects of the Ranges are that the south has no ironbark
and box species (grey, yellow or black) whilst the north
has no mountain ash or alpine ash forests.

These forests were dedicated as State Forest and Timber
Reserves at different stages in the 1870s, when it was
realised by the Victorian Government that the enormous
demands for timber during the gold rush period, and later
for railway sleepers and bridge timbers, had largely denuded
the accessible forests. As a further step to rectify the situa¬
tion, the Government established the State Nursery at
Macedon in 1872. Its task was to raise, plant, and distribute
suitable trees for re-forestation of areas such as Mount
Macedon. This site had been virtually cut out after almost
thirty years of saw-milling activities (from the 1850s) by no
less than thirty sawmills. The location of these are shown in
a booklet recently published by the Gisborne and Mount
Macedon Historical Society, written by Barney 1 lutton and
myself, titled Macedon Ranges: a History< of the Forests and
their People. The State Nursery has been operating continu¬
ously since 1872, although it was re-built after being com¬
pletely destroyed in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires. Numer¬
ous other private nurseries were established both before and
after the 1870s and have contributed very greatly to the
diversity of flora in the Macedon Ranges region.

The first report on the State Nursery, written in 1873 by the
then Conservator of Forests, Mr William Ferguson, makes
interesting reading, especially regarding the tree species he
saw as useful for this area. He comments in his 1873 report:

About two acres of the trenched ground is now planted
with thousands of the choicest and best kinds of Himalayan
and Californian timber trees...considerable numbers of the
best kinds of English and American timber trees are being
planted in nursery rows... quantities of acorns from old trees
have been sown, also white thorn and several other kinds
of hedge plants...quantities of the best kinds of elm, plane
and other deciduous tress that are best grown from cuttings
will be put in the ground immediately.. Fifty acres near the
summit of Mount Macedon will be planted with large
numbers of the deodar cedar, the Himalayan spaice, and
silver firs as well as European timber trees...a considerable
portion of the Macedon Ranges is entirely denuded of
timber and presents a good opportunity for testing many of
the timber trees of Europe.

Perhaps strangely to us now, the only Australian species
suggested were jarrah and red gum, although wattle culti¬
vation was intensively canvassed and carried out in the
1880s to try to ensure bark supplies for the tanning indus¬
try (an unsuccessful venture). Even tea planting was solidly
supported, and also the chicory industry: Baron Von
Mueller was a great supporter of new species introduc¬
tions. Special reserves were sometimes set aside, such as
the chicory plantation at Riddells Creek in the foothills of

the Macedon Ranges.

In addition to Government and private nursery activities,
and parallelling them in many ways, during the late 1870s
and for the following two or three decades, many hill
station properties were established on Mount Macedon.
These were mostly - but not entirely - situated on the shel¬
tered southerly slopes. The soil conditions and cool
summer climate were quickly recognised as being ideal for
the growing of a wide range of European and American
trees, both conifers and broad leaved species. Many New
Zealand trees and shrubs were also established during this
period in particular gardens, such as the ‘Karori’. The
number of unusual and rare tree species planted during this
period is quite remarkable. The Mount Macedon dwellers
were an adventurous lot in developing their gardens.

The Government continued to experiment with a wide
range of commercial timber species through the Macedon
State Nursery. However, the principal species used for
departmental plantings narrowed down over the next fifty
years or so. Finns radiata dominated, with some Oregon
(Douglas fir), and limited plantings of spruce, cedars,
cypresses, redwoods and a small range of oaks, maples
and beeches.

There is occasionally some speculation about the
reasons for the concentration on a relatively few tree
species. The reasons were entirely commercial and wind¬
break and shelter-belt oriented.

The principal remaining public forest areas on the Mount
are now included in die Macedon Regional Park. This will
continue to be developed in the future, mainly as a recre¬
ation and conservation area with walking tracks, look-outs,
picnic areas and the like. The total area of the Regional
Park is 3,290 hectares. A special area within the Park is the
small 1.9 hectare reserve surrounding the Memorial Cross at
the top of Mount Macedon. The Cross and reserve gardens
were built by Mr William Cameron of Cameron Lodge at
Mount Macedon and were officially opened in 1935 by the
then Premier of Victoria, Sir Stanley Argyle. Cameron also
financed the constmction of Cameron Drive, which led to
the Cross, and provided a fund for the maintenance of the
Cross and gardens which continued until last year.

Mr Cameron’s proposed construction of the Cross is suc¬
cinctly laid out in a letter from his representatives to the
Secretary of the State Forests Commission:

Dear Mr Strahan,

I have been asked by Mr William Cameron. ‘Cameron
Lodge', Upper Macedon, to ascertain the proper steps to be
taken to obtain an authorization for his proposal to erect an
Australian Soldier’s Memorial, in the shape of a plain Latin
Cross in Stawell Marble, on the top of Mount Macedon. The
cross is to be 30 feet high, and so illuminated by electric
light that it will be visible on a clear night from Melbourne.

It would Ire made accessible for tourists by a circular raised
platform, approached by a flight of steps from a carriageway.
I take the liberty to approach you in this manner, and wish
to assure you that whatever details you may require will be
observed, in the event of the permission being obtained.

Yours truly,

J.M. & H.E. Coane & Anderson.

Within six weeks Cameron had received permission and
was starting work, a primary objective of the project being

15

Public Record Office of Victoria

L.4433.

Pun

shewing Site for

State Nursery

Macedon

110 M0TTO 10 EE MAK
IU IMS PUN.

COPY IT si —10 BE USED.

Plan of State Nursety Macedon

the provision of work for unemployed.

Along with the Cross, in 1983 the small inlier of exotic
vegetation which Cameron had developed as a garden was
destroyed by fire. The area is now under consideration for
restoration by the Trustees for the Appeal for the Restora¬
tion, Development and Maintenance of the Memorial
Cross. This subject is at present being discussed by the
Trustees with the Historic Buildings Council (HBC), which
has listed the Cross and immediate surrounds on its Regis¬
ter so that reconstruction work is appropriately guided.
The Cross is important not only as a memorial for those
who lost their lives in the First World War, but also
because it became for many a symbol of courage and sur¬
vival after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bush fires’. The HBC
citation states: ‘the size, simplicity of the design of the
Cameron Memorial Cross, along its siting on Mount
Macedon. is a rare example of a memorial commemorating
those who died in the First World War’.

Perhaps we can say now that the Macedon Ranges has
matured as a landscape with its integration of gardens into
the natural beauty of the forested surrounds. In a recent
issue of English Country Life, Marcus Worsley stated:

What is needed are forests of diversity which will end up as
forestry of delight. Never should a forester approach a
woodland site with pre-conceived ideas in his mind. Rather
he should approach it with humility, to hear what the site
has to say to him and then use his expertise to respond.

Foresters and gardeners should now unite in using their

skills and endeavours to make the very best of the unique of
the Macedon Ranges. Some of the early gardeners, especially
those of Scottish origin, had a mixed forestiy and horticultural
background, and must have appreciated the chance to
develop their gardening skills in a forest environment. Simi¬
larly, the generations of foresters who were based at the
Macedon State Nursery, such as the Firths, Venvilles, Bickers,
Ords, Incolls and Franklins, contributed through their work
an extra dimension to the cultivation of gardens in the area.

The 1983 Ash Wednesday tragedy showed that fire is
still the number one threat. At Macedon the forest resource
has changed dramatically. The snow gum stands were
almost completely burnt over, but have recovered well -
their regeneration is by ligno-tuberous growths and from
natural seed distribution. Unlike stringy barks, manna
gums, peppermints, and other gums, snow gums do not
have dormant buds under the bark which give rise to
adventitious growths or coppice shoots and the subsequent
development of a new crown. One plus is that the alpine
ash extended its range in the Regional Park by natural
seed-fall after the fires, spreading even into areas formally
occupied by pine plantations. The regenerated stands of
alpine ash are healthy and vigorous, growing at the rate of
about one metre in height per year. Natural systems dictate
that alpine ash and snow gum must have at least twelve to
fifteen years free of fire to ensure long term survival. After
eleven years these trees are still not bearing seed, so
another fire this summer would be disastrous.

16

Scotched Eucafyptforest, Mount Macedon 24 February 1983

In summary, because of the fires there has been a total
loss of almost all the generally mature alpine ash and snow
gum. The appearance of the snow gum and alpine ash
forests has been completely changed - they are covered
with a ‘nurse-crop’ of nitrogen fixing acacias which will
protect the young eucalypts before eventually dying out.
However, natural regeneration has been good, with suc¬
cessful crown renewal of the mixed stringy bark/gum/pep-
permint forests. The acacia seeds were obviously in the
ground awaiting a fire for their germination.

The boundaries of vegetation on the Macedon Ranges
have now become fairly securely established in a manner
similar to many parts of United Kingdom and Europe.
Forests occupy the upper slopes and are only occasionally
broken by high level private property inliers, or by grazing
properties, cultivation, small holdings and hobby farms on
the lower slopes. Town planning statutes will endeavour to
maintain this pattern against some pressure for further sub¬
divisions. Current restructuring of local Government
boundaries will tend to show whether the Gisborne Shire,
for instance, remains predominately rural as the current
Council desires, or will be caught up in the current and
future expansion of the metropolis. The cost and availabili¬
ty of water supply will be a key factor in any future expan¬
sion, and may even affect the range of species to be culti¬
vated in the longer term. It is also possible that the current
Regional Park covering much of the ranges natural forest
may be up-graded to a State Park, thus giving more author¬

ity to its management in the future.

A further boost to the diversity of planted species in the
region has recently been given by the Shire of Gisborne’s
decision to establish a Botanic Gardens in a bend of
Jackson’s Creek in Gisborne, opposite the municipal
offices. The Gardens will feature New Zealand trees and
shrubs and some 200 or so have already been planted in
co-operation with the Royal Botanic Gardens in Mel¬
bourne. The theme is partly a recognition of the sister city
relationship with Gisborne in New Zealand.

Finally, I would like to read a newspaper reference titled
‘Macedon State Forest after the Fire’:

Though the Macedon State Forest has not been irreparably
injured by the recent fire, serious damage has been done
both to exotics and native trees...There are now fully 12
miles of fire-breaks, from half a chain to a chain wide...The
various breaks would under ordinary circumstances check
fires, but they were nearly useless in such a violent gale as
that of Sunday the 5th inst. Witnesses say they saw bark
and sparks carried 400 yards from trees 150ft high.

The fire seems to have started on the north side of the
mount, and it was probably caused by picnickers. A cele¬
brated beauty spot' has been seriously marred, Lady Loch’s
four-mile drive is disfigured, and the ‘Lilac Walk', so named
from the abundance of the native lilac C Prostanthera
lasianthos), is very much spoilt.

This was not a report of the Ash Wednesday fires, but an
extract from the Australasian newspaper dated 25 January,
1896 - almost 100 years ago. Some things never change.

17

Gregory Moore

Francine Gilfedder

Sowing the Seeds

shady trees, being opened to sunlight. The earliest land¬
holders were generally involved with the timber industry,
and by the 1860s and 1870s, orchards had been planted on
the cleared land. The Macedon State Nursery was estab¬
lished in 1872 to provide trees to replant areas for fire¬
wood, building timber, fencing and farm requirements, and
to generally improve the forest environment. This nursery
was the first public nursery in the State and a number of
private nurseries were also established around this time.
These included the well known firm of nurserymen, Taylor
& Sangster, who commenced operations at Upper
Macedon in 1873 and John Smith & Sons of Riddells Creek
who had commenced operations some ten years before
that, in 1863.

One could adopt a number of approaches to provide
some insight into these three most influential nurseries, the
State, Taylor & Sangster's and Smith’s. This could Ire bio¬
graphical, chronological or geographical, or alternatively,
by examining the published catalogues to see what plants
were being sold. Mr Barney Hutton of Mount Macedon,
has already undertaken a considerable amount of research
on these nurseries, some of which has been published in
the Australian Garden History Society Journals. However, I
believe in the short time available it is of greatest value and
interest to look at the characteristics shared by these nurs¬
eries and those that distinguish them from each other,
which make them important in the context of the develop-

View of trees remaining at the State Forest Nursery, Macedon

The Early Nursery Industry
in the Macedon Ranges

by Francine Gilfedder

In A REGION of such agricultural and horticultural
importance as the Macedon Ranges, it is interesting to
examine the historical development of the horticultural
industry to understand its cultural associations with not
only the great gardens and broader landscape of the nine¬
teenth century, but its lasting impact on the Ranges today.

I am indebted to Barney Hutton and other members of
the Gisborne Sc Macedon and District Historical Society for
much of the detailed research, such as chasing up numer¬
ous newspaper references and copying early photographs
of the nurseries discussed in this paper. It was their early
efforts which sowed the seeds as far as the present extent
of our knowledge of the horticultural history of Macedon.

The development of the horticultural industry is associat¬
ed with the general settlement of the Macedon Ranges,
starting with the development of townships after the sale of
Crown Land in the 1850s and the construction of the
railway from Melbourne to Bendigo, the Northern Trunk
Line as it was called, in the early 1860s. At the same time,
higher up on the mount, the burgeoning timber industry
brought more people into the area and resulted in large
tracts of land on the mount, previously covered with tall

18

Reproduction of curly photograph of John Smith and Sons Nursery, Riddells Creek

ment of horticulture in Victoria.

I will briefly examine some of the more interesting bio¬
graphical aspects of the people associated with the nurs¬
eries. At the time, the business relationship between Victo¬
rian nurserymen was such that in order to make available
the considerable range of plants listed in catalogues, coop¬
eration with specialists in the field was essential. Finally,
and probably of most interest to those at this Conference, I
will examine the legacy to modern gardeners from these
nurseries and show that these three operations of the 1860s
and 1870s were responsible for sowing the seeds for the
development of the unique horticultural heritage of the
Macedon Ranges. Unfortunately, since the Ash Wednesday
fires, there is a much reduced number of trees and nursery
remnants of this renowned locality, but plants originally
introduced by these nurseries are now grown widely
throughout the State.

State Nursery

In 1872, the State Nursery was surveyed by John Lardner,
and commenced operations that year under William Fergu¬
son, who had been appointed Overseer of Forests in 1869.
The following year, 1873, the site was reserved which

comprised 41 acres of land, a stone cottage and office and
two timber cottages, for Ferguson and his staff. A few years
later, in 1875, a stable and forge were built and by 1901,
the size of the site had increased to 91 acres.

William Ferguson was appointed the first manager of the
nursery and he became the Conservator lor Forests for the
State. McLelland, a Scot, was the second manager, holding
the position from 1872 until 1881. Joseph Firth was
manager for a remarkable forty years from 1881 to 1921, a
legacy which is recognised by Firth Park, located between
Bullengarook and Trentham.

The nursery was considered a successful enterprise and,
by 1901, three other Government nurseries had been
established in Creswick, Havelock and Tintarra. In 1919, in
a structural re-organisation, the Forests Commission took
over administration of the nursery.

In its production of trees of many different species
which were widely distributed throughout the State, the
State Nursery was voluminous. Some estimates put the
figure at 20 million trees in the first hundred years. The
nursery was completely destroyed in the 1983 Ash
Wednesday fires. Other than the cast cement Italianate
fountain, a lone windmill palm (Trachycarpus fortuneiO

19

W.H. Smith Photography from Francine Gilfedder collection

and a few mature conifer trees, any other historic compo¬
nent was lost in the flames.

John Smith & Sons

At Riddells Creek, the private nursery of John Smith & Sons
was established as early as I860 (which is the date given
by his catalogue) or possibly 1863 (when the nursery is
first listed in the rate books and other records). Smith had
trained as a professional horticulturalist in Edinburgh and
London and was well equipped to establish his own
nursery, along with his four sons. The nursery specialised
initially in fmit trees and, some ten to twenty years later, in
soft fruits, bulbs, azaleas, rhododendrons, greenhouse
plants and orchids.

In the 1860s, John Smith & Sons were large exporters of
native trees, plants and seeds to Europe and other coun¬
tries. Large consignments of tree ferns (presumably from
the slopes and creeks of Mount Macedon) were shipped
overseas with some extra large specimens being sent to the
Imperial Gardens at St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace
Gardens at Moscow, and for the garden of the Emperor at
Vienna as well as the Royal Gardens at New England,
Edinburgh and New York.

The nursery won many horticultural prizes which includ¬
ed, in 1866, first prize at the Intercolonial Exhibition in
Melbourne for strawberries described as ‘remarkable for
their size and lusciousness’. A prize was won in 1875 at the
International Exhibition in Vienna with the apple ‘Newton
Wonder’. At about this time the nursery was working with
12,000 apple trees on blight proof stock. The range of
plants increased significantly, particularly of conifers and
oaks (20 species and 50 varieties). The nursery is credited
with introducing the first golden oak to Victoria, and possi¬
bly the Commonwealth, and this is still a very rare plant in
the nursery trade. Of the first batch, only two survived the
journey from England. One was given to the Botanic
Gardens in Melbourne (thought to have died and since
been replaced) and the other is planted on the banks erf
Riddells Creek, where it is in a neglected state today.
Another uncommon plant thought to have been introduced
by the nursery was the silver elm Wlmus variegata ‘Pic-
turata’). A beautiful and mature specimen, possibly con¬
nected to Smith’s nursery, grows at the edge of Riddells
Creek and the school reserve. The nursery’s collection of
daffodils and orchids was also quite extensive.

Smith was quite a public figure, involved in various com¬
munity projects and a frequent correspondent to the news¬
papers. In erne letter of c.1910 to the Romsey Examiner, he
provides an insight to the impact of the increased local
population when he writes about his lack of adequate
water supply because of the expanding population at
Upper Macedon. More importantly, Smith’s letters to the
editor provide us with valuable information on the extent
of the operations of his nursery and of his fame, even if by
his own acclamation since only three catalogues have ever
been located, those being for 1871, 1873 and 1881.

In 1869, the Australasian probably summed up the
importance of the nursery when it stated that the finu had
done more towards the cultivation and reliable nomencla¬
ture of hardy fruits than all the Horticultural Societies in
Victoria put together.

Although the nursery was subject to some significant
floods, and was reputedly washed away in 1906, John
Smith’s sons, Thomas and Walter, carried on the business
after John’s death in 1886. The rate books record that
descendants remained on the property until 1945. The
house and garden that remain are possibly one of the earli¬
est private nurseries in the state, which can be compared
only to Marriner’s of Colac, and the garden is still largely
intact.

Early photographs show Walter Smith’s house and
nursery from a point near the church across the creek. The
exotic trees around the nursery are quite mature, and the
land along the creek is very open compared with the
almost impenetrable vegetation today. Other early pho¬
tographs show people walking along the gravelled drive,
and either side of this many exotic shrubs and trees are
displayed in a well developed garden. Another feature of
the nursery was the lily pond which was photographed for
many postcards and was one of prominent tourist attrac¬
tions of the Riddells Creek area.

Remnants of the nursery site today are elms, willows, a
particularly good specimen of a bunya bunya pine tree as
well as mature shrubs. There is a planted semicircular drive
(now disused) leading to the main road. The house garden
includes two large BUXUS, a vast exotic tree collection, of
Cednis, Quercus, Cupressus, Viburnum, Agapanthus,
Arbutus, Ceratonia, Cordyline, Finns pinea, P. canariensis
and Cednis atlantica f. glattca. Rock edging along the
drive and paths defines the garden beds. There is a large
oak near the house along with remnants of a privet hedge.
Mature plantings extend out from the garden and along
Riddells Creek, continuing along the public reserve that
runs through to the main road and the church.

Taylor & Sangster’s Nursery, Macedon

This famous nursery operated between 1875 and the 1930s
and is now a private garden where the owners are trying
to re-establish much of the form of the old nursery display
garden after the 1983 fires caused considerable damage,
including the loss of the original house.

In 1866, William Taylor, formerly a gardener at Govern¬
ment I louse, joined with fellow Scot, William Sangster, for¬
merly a gardener at Como, to form Taylor & Sangster’s
Nursery at Toorak. Both were established gentlemen of the
horticultural circles and won prizes at the Intercolonial
Exhibition for their conifers, azaleas and ornamental foliage
plants. In 1873, Messrs Taylor & Sangster assumed a
licence to occupy land at Upper Macedon. This licence
was issued subject to the conditional planting erf at least
ten useful timber trees per acre. Illustrations of this time
show adjacent land, where there was a large sawmilling
operation, well cleared and open.

Soon after the establishment of their nursery at Macedon,
the firm undertook many contracts to design and layout
some of the most important of the Macedon gardens, such
as Sir George Verdon’s Alton, which today still features
many of the rare and beautiful trees planted in the mid
1870s. In 1876, Taylor & Sangster acquired freehold title to
their 13 acres of land and their application contained a list
of species planted in the nursery for permanent display,
and those for a second area of nursery stock. Taylor &

20

Sangster continued to operate the nursery at Toorak as
well as Upper Macedon, producing their first catalogue in
1879, although this was specifically for the Toorak site.

Like Smith at Riddells Creek, Sangster used the local
press to hi.s advantage and there are many articles describ¬
ing the business' success, what is being grown, and the
local conditions, all of which provide glimpses of how the
gardens and plantings at Macedon were developed with
the assistance of Taylor & Sangster. In one such article in
the Australasian of 1883, Sangster comments:

It is understood by gardeners generally that most of the
Melbourne nurserymen possess also nurseries in the colder
districts, where the work of raising plants can be more
easily carried on than in the immediate vicinity of the
metropolis. Such an establishment is the nursery at Upper
Macedon of Messrs Taylor and Sangster, of Toorak. The
site, which is at about two-thirds of the elevation of the
mount, is a block of fourteen acres, sloping generally to the
east. The soil is, for the most part, a rich peatmoss choco¬
late, and in this almost every kind of plant appears to
thrive, climate being evidently a more important factor in
plant cultivation than the character of the soil. The contour
of the ground has prevented the nursery being laid out in
prosaic squares, and thus, of necessity, the main drive and
the paths have been formed on landscape lines. A spring
from the higher ground has been led in front of the cottage,
and thence throughout the nursery wherever its services tire
likely to be needed, rejoining at last the little stream at the
lowest part of the ground, where it meanders through a
dense mass of ferns. That the mount originally carried some
very fine timber is evidenced by the presence of several
immense stumps; one of these is prostrate near the creek
long served as a bush laundry, affording ample protection
in all kinds of weather. Another, still erect, measures 13 feet
through at as high as a man can reach. The semi-nude con¬
dition of the mount is, from a climatic point of view, veiy
much to lie deplored, but the work of clearing is not likely
to be stopped; the greater part of the mount has been
selected, and will doubtless ere long be the site of numer¬
ous pleasant abodes and beautiful gardens.,. The belt of
shrubs and trees on either side of the main drive through
the nursery is the principal testing quarter in that property,
and very interesting is the stroll through it in the company
of the senior partner, who is also for a good portion of the
year the resident. To hear that damages sustained by many
of the trees were occasioned by heavy snowstorms will
astonish habitual dwellers in the lowlands, but we regret to
say that in many of the pleasure-grounds on the mount the
damage done by snow has been very considerable. Apart
from accidents of that character, most of the conifers and
deciduous trees grown in Great Britain are completely at
home.

At this time, Sangster was at work on the garden at Rip-
ponlea, Elsternwick, as well as two important properties on
the mount, Arc! Choille and Braemar. Taylor died in 1892,
leaving Sangster to carry on until his death in 1910. Jane
Sangster, a daughter, then carried on both the Toorak and
Macedon nurseries until 1930.

Views in old postcards and photographs show gentian
lining the drive for its full length as well as ornamental
conifers placed in a garden setting. There were ornamental
ponds and creekside walks and the site was open for
public display. Once sold, the site declined, and the fires of
1983 contributed to its demise. A more recent owner of the
nursery was the head gardener at the Fitzroy Gardens, who

ran the site as a nursery with his wife. After he died around
1969 his widow ran the property as a cut flower business,
supplying Kellov'-Fawkner with flowers for their Rolls
Royce showroom and leaving the hydrangeas and daffodils
still growing there today. A Mr Porter, now of Clifton Hill,
came to the site during World War II for holidays, the
owners being relatives. He remembers the stone retaining
wall near the present carparking area as the pride of the
owners, filled with peonies and other flowers. There was
also a large horse chestnut in this area. The drive was then
paved with white pebbles.

Today, Taylor & Sangster’s site covers approximately
13-5 acres, of which two acres have been planted with
Pinas radiata and an equivalent amount remaining as
bushland. The rest of the area has been planted with a
wide variety of exotics and many are self-seeded or sucker-
ing plants. The property is set on the east side of a steep
hill, with pathways, pittosporum hedges, holly walks, and
a stream with stepping stones at the base of the property.

It contains low stone wall remnants, and a stone pond near
the entrance. Individual plant specimens of note include
the Japanese umbrella pine near the stepping stones on the
stream. Many trees and shrubs are listed on the National
Trust of Australia’s Significant Tree Register.

Summary

In summary, the legacy of the contribution of these horti¬
cultural enterprises can be seen in a visit to any of the fine
gardens of the Macedon Ranges. The grounds of properties
such as Ard Choille, Duneira, Durrol and Karori, reflect the
variety of plants introduced by these early nurseries and
the great efforts of the people who tended these gardens
under difficult conditions. Many individual trees are listed
on the National Trust's Register of Significant Trees and the
gardens contain interesting examples of rare shrubs, such
as the holly cultivars at Durrol. The contribution that is
more difficult to assess is the extent of the horticultural
diversity of these nurseries and the plants first introduced
by them and distributed throughout the state, interstate and
overseas. Further research in this area would undoubtedly
be most rewarding and revealing. Finally, one of the most
direct legacies of these nurseries and their impact on the
Macedon gardens, has been that of encouraging tourism in
the Ranges. With the development of a direct rail link, not
only were the nurseries able to convey their wares
throughout the state and elsewhere, but they w'ere also
able to provide a popular destination for tourists, who
visited the many display gardens, staying in various guest
houses and resorts in local towns and on the mount. The
popularity for garden and nursery visiting remains a feature
of the Ranges today for bodies such as our own, the Aus¬
tralian Garden History Society, and for others such as the
Open Gardens Scheme and a number of charities for
whom garden openings have been an important annual
social event attracting great numbers from Melbourne and
further afield over many years.

References

Trevor Budge & Associates (TBA Planning) Macedon Ranges Cul¬
tural Heritage and Landscape Study, for the Shires of Gisborne,
Romsey, and Newham Woodend, 1994.

21

Recollections of a Life in a Garden

by Karin McKinnon

IjADIES AND GENTLEMEN, it gives me great pleasure to
speak at this Conference but I have been given the impos¬
sible task of giving a run down on five generations cover¬
ing a period of 75 years in fifteen minutes!

When my mother, father and their new baby, my sister,
were renting a house at Mount Macedon because of the
wonderful air and to escape the flu epidemic which was
raging, they used to sneak up this drive at Durrol because
they were intrigued and unable to see the house from the
footpath! This photo was taken soon after the house was
built in 1903- Note the hoof prints and the marks of the
carriage wheels. Even in those early days the garden was
quite well established.

On a train trip to Melbourne, my father who was com¬
muting, was saying that he wanted to buy a house on the
mount and Mr Foster Woods said that he wanted to sell a
property which turned out to be Durrol. In August 1919, it
was sold to my father Mr Stanley Allen, ‘walk in, walk out’.
(There were no big removal ist vans in those days so it was
quite a common occurrence!)

One of the earliest recollections was the big move to a
rented house in Melbourne for the winter months. The
horse-drawn van backed up to the back verandah, and
was loaded with all the household and personal effects
including the fowls! The two ponies were ridden down but
the cow was never taken! In those early days, it was quite
a large household because there were my parents, three of
us, a nurse and later a governess, a cook and a parlour
maid and two large dogs.

The Christmas concerts which the governess produced
were very memorable; the household, grandparents, Miss
McGee and the married couple who lived in the cottage
were invited and we three children sang, recited and put
on a play. We did 'The King’s breakfast’ by A.A. Milne
once, the King, the Queen and the dairymaid and the dog
was the Alderney!

In those days, the house was lit by its own gas engine
and this monster is not a piece of Ned Kelly’s armour but
the gas engine called ‘The Light of Australia’ which very
ingeniously mixed benzolene and water to form gas with
the help of weights which hung from a large tower. Some
nights, the lights would get dimmer and dimmer - then
there was a great panic to wind up the weights before
being plunged into total darkness, since gas would escape
once the weights were wound up. Electricity came to
Mount Macedon in 1930, which meant we had power as
well as light.

Another interesting event was the sealing of the Main
Road. Mr Chris Cowper of Ard Rudah’ organised the col¬
lection and then wanted the road called Cowper Avenue.
This sounded awfully suburban, but for years the sign
posts ‘Cowper Avenue’ were placed at Calder Highway
and Honour Avenue although someone always removed
them. Even now in the 1993 phone book a few people live
in Cowper Avenue while the rest live in Main Road.

Between the two wars, Mount Macedon became very
popular and the tennis tournament became one of its high¬
lights. There were lots of friends with whom to play tennis

and go ferreting; Margaret Darling was one of them (we
used to buy the ferrets at the eastern market and some¬
times they would escape in the car while being taken to
Durrol for the holidays, much to the consternation of the
driver. Other times we went on shooting picnics with
Doug Hatrick who owned the garage and had a marvellous
fire truck. Occasionally we were allowed to ride on the
bonnet and the boys were allowed to shoot by the head¬
lights from the bonnet. We spent much of our time riding
with the many friends who also had ponies; we were
allowed to ride anywhere but we had to be home in time
for meals. Many times we took our lunch so that we could
go further afield, like to Hanging Rock, Woodend, Riddells
Creek and The Black Forest. On some very hot evenings
we would leave late in the afternoon, rendez-vous at some
picnic ground with some of the mothers for a chop picnic
and then ride home by moonlight in the cool. This was a
great highlight of the holidays.

So as not to disturb the cook, Mum used to make deli¬
cious sponge cakes, biscuits, red current jelly, raspberry
jam and clotted cream in her kitchenette. Afternoon teas
were very lavish for the tournaments, tennis parties of my
mother’s, bridge parties and cards. Of course we had to
pick the raspberries and red currents and look after the
animals. If it was too wet for tennis, and it often was, we
would play cards, which we also did sometimes at night.

After Ian and I were married we spent many happy holi¬
days with our children with Mum and Dad; we tried to
give our children a similar happy carefree life but much of
the freedom had gone and there were not so many young
with whom to play and ride. My sister and her family lived
on a property near I lolbrook which they could not leave
because of the risk of bush fires and my brother preferred
Barwon Heads, so we were the lucky ones.

In 1929, Miss Edna Walling was commissioned to draw
up a plan for the sloping northern site and also for below
the tennis court which luckily was never constructed. She
cleverly altered her original plan during construction. The
placement of the sundial broke the long flight of steps
which gives one the chance of a breather. For some years
the Edna Walling garden has been rather neglected,
because so much of our time has been spent replanting the
southern border which was completely devastated by the
1983 bushfire. We have now turned our attention to rejuve¬
nating some of the rhododendrons, and this has opened
up the Edna Walling garden; it has lost much of its privacy
and secrecy but it shows the wonderful design of her plan.

In 1987-88, we did reductions, which has made the
kitchen bright and sunny and given us a small family
room. We changed two maids’ bedrooms into a laundry
and bathroom, removed the old laundry, the maids’ bath¬
room and the outside bathroom on the end of the veran¬
dah, the scullery and the egg room all of which were on
the north side of the house. We also removed the gas
engine shed and the last of Mr Foster Woods’ cages where
he had kept pheasants many, many years ago.

The Ash Wednesday fire was devastating and the house
would have certainly been burnt if it had not been for
David Marshall, who bravely took the water cart over the
mount in the early hours of Thursday morning and put it
on the burning shrubbery before the fire reached the

22

Durrol, Mount Macedon

house. Everything was tinder dry because for months there
had been no rain - the water restrictions were limited to
sixty litres per person, which was useless in a large garden.
Perhaps some of you do not know that there was a bad
fire on Mount Macedon a fortnight earlier which burnt a
great tract of land to the north. This was dreadful for those
who were burnt out, but saved hundreds of lives in the
later fires and halted the Ash Wednesday fire. Of course,
the fire has made the garden more interesting because we
were getting less and less lawn. The fire cleared the lawn
for us which we could never have done, but it was rather a
drastic way of doing it.

It was so hard to know where to start with the replant¬
ing but, when I decided to introduce a riding track for the
grandchildren, the garden started to take shape, and quite
a lot of things regrew which was a great help.

The west end behind the birdbath was very badly burnt
and the house could be seen from the road, which is hard to
imagine now. Before the fire we could not see the south or
west sky at -all and, because of the loss of trees all over the
mount, we get constant winds and much more sunlight. We
were very fortunate that the SEC agreed to put their wires
underground along part of the Main Road and so saved our
huge trees, which were not burnt, from their chainsaws.

We were also fortunate that the fire never started in the
Edna Walling garden, but the blackened gums show how
close it was. The south side of the fernery was severely
burnt and the treefems in this part of the garden died and
had to be replaced - yet down in the gullies everywhere
on the mount, incredibly, the treefems sprang into life with

vivid apple green fronds in a sea of blackness about three
weeks after the fires!

There are many problems in such an old garden as
Durrol, as things grow bigger and bigger. The very 7 rare
weeping holly is encroaching over the drive and the limb
of the huge oak nearby has been bolted seven times: there
are constant decisions and work to be done to take the
garden into the twenty-first century!

Before concluding, 1 would like to share with you the
story of our grandmother who (aged in her sixties) wanted
her own garden and, so as not to interfere with Mum's gar¬
dener, she made tin English woodland garden down the
gully. It was quite an achievement because of the steep¬
ness and she conscientiously brought back the tools each
night. It was a lovely spot; she planted conifers, birches,
daffodils, bluebells, forget-me-nots and foxgloves. When
the lawn had to be mown Gran took down the clickety-
clack steel-rimmed mower, but the returning of the mower
over the rough steep terrain was too much and she had to
get help; it eventually became very overgrown. Then eigh¬
teen months after the Ash Wednesday fire, the burnt out
gully burst into bloom with a sea of foxgloves from the
seeds Gran had planted over fifty years earlier. We rescued
some and placed them round the garden.

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your Conference and the
visits to the many gardens.

I wish to thank Barbara Strange for coming down from
Mount Macedon to show some of her slides which illustrated
some of the points of interest.

23

John Hawker

Urban Development Confronts Rural Heritage

Strategies for the Macedon Ranges
in the twenty first Century

by Trevor Budge

The HISTORY of the Macedon Ranges has been a con¬
tinuous process of urban development meeting rural her¬
itage. How we treat the urban-rural fringe has become one
of the major issues confronting planning, community
development, conservation and heritage planning.

Our past strategies for dealing with issues such as these
may not be sufficient to protect hopes for the future and
also to cater for the economic expectations that an area
such as the Macedon Ranges promotes.

This paper explores the need for individuals and the
community to be actively involved in setting policy and
strategies and particularly to play a role in local govern¬
ment. the paper also suggests that new approaches to
planning may be needed. Four structures or techniques rel¬
evant to approaching these issues for the Macedon Ranges
are discussed:

• stmcture plans for relevant areas

• urban ‘fences’

• financial incentives

• purchase or transfer of development rights’.

Each of these structures requires much more sophisticat¬
ed techniques than have been viable or attempted to date.

An area like the Macedon Ranges requires far more
innovative and imaginative approaches than have been
tried elsewhere if long-term sustainable results are to be
achieved. These approaches require a partnership between
the levels of local government, the community and individ¬
ual property owners. They should focus on collaborative
decision-making which goes beyond specific issues to a
strategic approach for the whole region.

In particular, such an approach to an area like the
Macedon Ranges promotes the idea that recognition of the
outstanding heritage, including the landscapes and
gardens, is a vital component of future planning and devel¬
opment.

Local councils have played a critical role in setting policy
and practice to conserve and manage the natural environ¬
ment. It is tnte that the Shire of Gisborne has displayed a
remarkable enlightened approach in regard to the heritage
of the Macedon Ranges, in fact the shire was the leading
council in ensuring the undertaking and completion of the
Macedon Ranges Cultural Heritage and Landscape Study.

The study in many respects was innovative with its
emphasis on cultural heritage and landscape as an integrat¬
ed and consistent theme to explain and interpret the
Ranges. It also emphasised the treatment of three local
government areas as a single region. The study was not
approached as a series of discrete areas - the municipal
boundaries did not come into the assessment and analysis
of the area. The study encompassed a broad canvas of her¬
itage with its many historical themes and the various roles
the region has played in the life of the region, in relation to
Melbourne and in a state and national setting.

The Macedon Ranges Cultural Heritage Study has amply
demonstrated the diversity, complexity and depth in her¬

itage places and buildings which are now such a feature of
the whole area. In all, the study identifies 1,051 individual
significant places, including 23 gardens. Thirty landscape
units which comprise the Macedon Ranges area have been
documented. The Study has provided detailed citations for
256 places which have been recommended for inclusion in
the respective municipal planning schemes. A further 403
places have been recommended for future research and
possible inclusion in the local planning schemes. Two her¬
itage precincts have been documented and a further four
listed for further research.

The heritage elements collectively in their style, their
function and historical development clearly distinguish the
Macedon Ranges as a particular form of cultural heritage
not seen elsewhere in Australia. Perhaps the most signifi¬
cant thing and of relevance to the conference is that the
area almost certainly contains the finest collection of
private gardens in Australia.

However, I don’t want to look back - let’s look to the
future. I want to argue that there are important actions
which all interested persons must take if the heritage you
treasure is to be retained and properly managed. You
cannot avoid the political process, not a party political
approach, but getting involved in the decisions and the
decision making which really counts. As Victor Hugo
wrote: ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in
the world, and that is an idea whose time has come’.

While we might bemoan lost heritage, and we cannot
overlook it, we have come a long way since the National
Estate was coined, as ‘the things we want to keep’. The
Commonwealth, all states and many local governments
have taken a wide range of actions to ensure the retention
of significant heritage. Volunteer groups have never been
stronger - but it is quite clear that without ongoing com¬
munity and individual action there will be further loss of
heritage.

I particularly refer to the fact that the greatest threat to
area like the Macedon Ranges is their sheer attractiveness.
So many people want to live in and near the area, use it
for recreation and leisure and capitalise on its tourist value,
that the area is now facing its greatest threat. It is in danger
of being over-loved.

The issue of urban development confronting rural land¬
scapes and heritage has been with us a long time - I think
it started in 1788. There is little doubt it will be with us
forever. What we do in any one place in resolving that
issue sets the pattern for that area for the foreseeable
future. Some of the changes we make are effectively
forever. One of the most dramatic changes we make is to
impose the straight line on the landscape, providing an
order which is indelible.

New straight lines are being imposed on the Macedon
Ranges all the time. There is continuing pressure for new
residential development in the towns and villages and for
rural, residential or hobby farm development in these
areas. At current rates of population growth, the existing
population level of about 25,000 persons would double
over the next 25 years. The key questions are: where
should those people be housed, in what areas, in what
types and forms of urban settlement and in what styles of
housing? There is now an emerging fear that the Macedon

24

Urban Land Authority Annual Report, 1994

Urbanisation on the march

Ranges or at least parts of it will become part of suburban
Melbourne. If you stand on the lop of Mount Macedon you
can see the suburbs. If you stand there long enough you
can almost feel that you see the suburbs advancing
towards you. Should the suburbs extend in a continuous
path to the foot of Mount Macedon? Can the region still be
a rural landscape if it is a part of contiguous Melbourne?

If you question the apparent inevitability of urban
growth then you have a process by which you will achieve
this and ensure the protection of the heritage of the area.
You must find out who is making the decisions, what are
the relevant Acts and policies which are in operation and
how you can influence the decision makers. Just as signifi¬
cantly you need to know what changes are occurring and
what influence they will have.

The role of local government is critical in the process. In
the Macedon Ranges, it is likely that, with local govern¬
ment restructuring in Victoria, the present three councils
administering the area will be reduced to one. A far easier
prospect to manage the heritage of the area you think.
Well possibly, what is the new local government area
embraces large areas of urban and fringe Melbourne and
the Macedon region is not the focus of their activity. Even
if there is only one council and it basically embraces only
the Macedon Ranges, what are the policies of this new
council for the heritage of the region? Good work requires
a long period of development of a working relationship
with various authorities, of building a trust with the com¬
munity on sensitive management issues. All that has to be
built again with new councillors and staff and new policies
developed. The community of the Macedon Ranges and
those with a deep interest in the area cannot afford to
stand back from that process and simply let it happen —
they must be part of that process.

As well as local government reform, we have seen here
in Victoria and elsewhere, a strong move to an economic
rationalist approach. A number of recent studies have
shown that heritage can pay its way and that it is the back¬
bone of the livability of many places and can contribute

substantially to the economic base of many areas.
However, in any approach which seeks to remove the bar¬
riers to any form of development, heritage is likely to be
cast aside. There are still individual battles to be won. The
greatest threat to the loss of heritage is not the big battles,
which everyone focuses on, it is the cumulative impact of
the little battles, which, if they are lost, add up to a major
change which is barely discernable piece by piece.

One of the major recommendations of the study was to
ensure the protection of buildings, sites, gardens and land¬
scapes through protecting these places in the relevant local
planning schemes. The requirement for permits for demoli¬
tion and major alteration are tin essential component of
any heritage protection plan. The support of the relevant
owners and the community for these controls is critical, it
is not only local government but state government who
approve such controls and they must be lobbied and
encouraged to implement them.

However, as necessary as these controls are, they are
essentially negative. It is critical that in areas like the
Macedon Ranges that we start to pursue positive support
for heritage. The Heritage Study recommended that local
government support heritage protection and conservation
by funding a heritage advisor and setting up a restoration
fund. There is now tax deductibility for certain approved
forms of heritage work. The Commonwealth needs to be
lobbied to ensure that such measures are not only contin¬
ued but also widened in their scope and monies available.

Overseas, it has become necessary to go beyond these
incentives and look at other opportunities to protect what
is critical. In many areas of the United States, the intrinsic
value of areas has led to schemes such as the transfer of
development rights or the purchase of development rights
to ensure that a particular area is preserved the way it is.
These innovative concepts cannot be dismissed as part of
the possible long term strategies for the area. They need to
be on the agenda. In other areas, urban growth boundaries
have been established. These are like ‘fences’ which define
the limit of urban development for a long period of time -
up to twenty years.

The best overall solution lies in clearly establishing a
proper strategic policy for the region, with structure or
development plans for the key components. The first
strategic policy decision is how many people should live in
the area. Once that is decided the next question is where
they should live and then what form of development
should take place in those areas. One of the key tasks for
the new Macedon Ranges Council is to set out a maximum
population figure for the area and set in place policies not
only to achieve that number but to reinforce it. To date,
the Shire of Gisborne is the only one of the three Macedon
councils to effectively do this. Over ten years ago they set
a maximum population figure for the Shire and the key
urban centres and have prepared detailed plans to imple¬
ment those targets and spelt out the style and type of
development they want. All that has been done on the
basis of extensive community consultation and support.

Herein lies the message for the Macedon Ranges for the
future: dear, well articulated policies based on sound long
term strategies, based in turn on community input and
ownership.

25

Bushfires

Nature’s Renewal and the
Rebirth of a Garden

by Gregory Moore

Abstract

In Australia the term bushfire conjures up images of
destaiction, damage and even death. Like the Ash Wednes¬
day fires, the recent fires in Sydney were seen as both dev¬
astating and catastrophic to both the natural environment
and human life and property.

However, bushfires are not destructive in the natural
environment. They are simply a part of the normal
ecology, to which native plants and animals have adapted.
Certainly, there will be individual plants and animals that
are damaged or which die during a fire, but the popula¬
tions and communities continue. Indeed, in many cases the
communities that are known and loved by so many Aus¬
tralians are often dependent on fire, and without fire their
future survival is jeopardised.

In gardens where there is often a mixture of native and
exotic plants, bushfires present some interesting problems.
Some of the native plants are often well adapted to the fire
and survive; others may be killed but regenerate readily
from seed. Many of the exotics, however, lack adaptations
to fire and have to be managed if the garden is to be re¬
established properly and quickly.

Identification of the type of damage that individual
plants have suffered, the characteristics of the fire and the
adaptations of the plants must all be considered in deter¬
mining whether specimens will live or die and how the
garden is to be managed. Making a correct diagnosis of the
plants condition after fire can save a great deal of money,
time and effort in restoring a garden.

Introduction

Following as it did, a prolonged period of drought, the
summer of 1982/83 was particularly severe. Not only were
temperatures high, but rainfall continued to be low. As a
consequence, a number of natural and semi-natural commu¬
nities were showing symptoms of serious drought, and the
risks of fire were substantial. Throughout the summer there
had been a number of serious fires, and it seemed likely that
there would be fire damage to many plant communities.

Furthermore, as the summer progressed, the drought
began to affect not only the natural communities but rural
and then eventually urban communities. In Melbourne, as
the gardens dried and then water restrictions were imposed,
the effects on street trees, public gardens and domestic
gardens became clear. The brown lawns that soon became
ev ident were soon overshadowed by shrubs and then trees
wilting, and in some instances subsequently dying. The
drought was one of the most severe on record, and its effects
on vegetation proved to be extensive and long lasting.

It is now a matter of record that the Ash Wednesday fires
ol 1983 were not only widespread but. sadly, destructive of
property and human life. In the Macedon region, a taste of
what was to come had already been experienced with the
fires at Greendale and at Macedon itself earlier in the year.
Although significant in their own right, these fires are often
forgotten about, or are grouped with the Ash Wednesday

fire when the impact of fires on the region are considered.

The fires that affected the natural, semi-natural and
created garden sites at Mount Macedon and its surrounds
are worthy of review. The different sites responded to the
fires in quite different ways, and the management implica¬
tions of these responses are far reaching. The lessons to be
learnt are quite profound and can applied elsewhere, as
the fires in the Sydney region of earlier this year demon¬
strated, and as the fires in New South Wales and Queens¬
land this spring have also demonstrated.

The effects of fire in the eucalypt forests
of Mount Macedon

There is a considerable body of literature describing the
role of fire and its effects on forests and other plant com¬
munities dominated by eucalypts (Gill and Groves, 1981;
Groves, 1981). It is essential that the importance of fire as a
natural ecological factor in such communities is recognised
by all who live amongst the vegetation and who are
responsible for its management. Eucalypt dominated com¬
munities are inevitably fire prone and fire dependent. It is
impossible to have such communities without the periodic
occurrence of fires and, conversely, the presence of such
vegetation makes the occurrence of fire inevitable.

In general, eucalypts have a number of spectacular
adaptations to stress and to fire in particular (Table 1). In
the Macedon region, and indeed on the mountain itself, a
number of different eucalypt dominated communities can
be identified. The first is a tall open forest community
dominated by species such as mountain ash (Eucalyptus
regnans), and in some places associated with other species
such as mountain grey gum cypellocaipa) and mess¬
mate stringy bark (E. obliqua). In other places there were
mixed eucalypt open forests with species such as E.
obliqua and the peppermints, E. racliata and E. dines as
dominants, and there were even a few remnant stands of
snow gum (E. pauciflora ).

These communities were all burnt during the fires of
1983, most on Ash Wednesday, but some in the earlier
fires. The effects of the fires varied as did the communities’
response. However, it is worth noting that in these natural
communities, bushfires are not destructive, destroying or
devastating but are rather the logical conclusion of one set
of natural cycles, and the beginning of another. Without
the fires these communities could not be what they are,
they could not renew themselves and they could not con¬
tinue. The fires clean up, recycle and renew the communi¬
ties, and in every sense they rejuvenate the communities
that have been burnt.

In the mountain ash dominated forests, the effects of fire
were swift, sure and predictable (Groves, 1981). Individual
mountain ash trees are very sensitive to fire and almost all
were killed in this case. The trees killed can remain stand¬
ing for many months and even many decades after the fire.
It is usually assumed that regeneration in such communi¬
ties’ is from seed that is stored in the soil, and for some
species such as many of the Acacias this is true. Indeed, a
hot fire which damages the seed coat of the Acacia seed
can be the trigger that allows germination. However, for
the mountain ash and many other eucalypt species, there is
virtually no seed in the soil or litter because the seed is

26

Table 1: Common Eucalypt adaptations to fire

Thick bark

Sclerophyllous leaves

Epicormic buds

Lignotubers

Woody fruits

Fibrous/stringy bark

Volatile oils in leaves

Seedling regeneration

harvested by insects, usually ants. Within four to six weeks
of the fire, the fruits and foliage on the trees at the time of
the fire are shed, providing both a nurturing mulch and a
seed source for the regeneration that follows (Neville,
1986). In mature mountain ash forests there are few, if any,
juvenile trees and the community can lx? described as even
aged. Amongst the reasons for the lack of young trees, the
competition from established trees and low levels of light
are important factors limiting growth. Fire is the key to
regeneration and continuity.

The fire affecting mountain ash trees, which lack many
of the adaptations to fire of other eucalypt species,
removes competition and allows high levels of light to
reach the forest floor. Within weeks of the Ash Wednesday
fires, the processes of renewal and regeneration were in
evidence. Large ‘toadstools’ appeared which were the fruit¬
ing structures of the mycorrhizal fungi associated with the
mountain ash roots. There was also significant litter,
including seed scattered over the forest floor, and the ferns
and tree ferns were already re-establishing their canopies
and displaying a pristine new foliage.

In such a community it is best in many ways to leave the
community to itself. Recovery will occur and is often com¬
plicated by human intervention. However, at a site like
Mount Macedon it was not possible to leave dead and
dying trees standing where they can present real hazards to
life anti property because of the high visitor traffic. Accord¬
ingly, some clean up operation was necessary, but as the
effects are often long lasting and unpredictable, they should
be kept to a minimum to allow for natural regeneration.

Similar events were taking place in the snow gum forests,
where individual trees had been killed, but the processes of
renewal, reseeding and regeneration were well underway.
In the mixed forests of messmate and peppermint, regener¬
ation not only involved the processes above, but many indi¬
vidual trees had survived the fire, and epicormic shoots and
lignotuberous shoots were beginning to emerge as the
communities commenced a new cycle of growth.

Much of the literature describing regeneration after fire,
gives tin impression of an even and generalised process of
recovery. Such generalisations can be dangerously wrong,
because they underestimate the impact of local topograph¬
ic, environment and micro-climatic affects. In the Macedon
region, recovery from the fire was much slower on norther¬
ly facing slopes (Lawton and Stockton, 1985). In some
instances there was no seedling regeneration at all on such
slopes, and the forest was re-established from lignotuberous
and epicormic shoots. Clearly, aspect has a significant effect
on recovery from fire, and must be considered in post-fire
management (Parry-Burton and Foster, 1987).

Similarly, the effects of micro-climate on seedling germi¬
nation and recovery after fire can be profound. Often the

Epicormic shoots show the rapid recovery of this eucalypt five
months after a fire

27

Gregory Moore

Gregory Moore

Fire damaged conifers atMacedon, 25March 1983

layer of black charcoal that is left behind after the fire,
while it is nutrient rich, absorbs heat and so seedling ger¬
mination and establishment may not occur for months after
the fire. Accordingly, many species germinate in the
‘nature’s little greenhouses’ that are provided by the fallen
debris, logs and tree trunks that occur on the forest floor
after fire (Neville, 1986; Parry-Burton and Foster, 1987).
Removal of this debris, far from being good management,
can reduce seedling germination and establishment, delay
recovery and affect the composition of the community that
re-establishes in the wake of the fire. Furthermore, the
fallen logs, branches and tree trunks can also trap soil par¬
ticles and other debris that is moved by heavy rainfall, and
which can lead to erosion (Neville, 1986).

In these natural and semi-natural communities, fire cannot
be seen as destructive or devastating, even though individu¬
als die and valuable timber may lie lost. These communities
are fire dependent. Fire is pail of their ecology and does
neither harm nor good; it is simply pan of nature's cycle. In
such places natural fires should be allowed to take their
course and, in managing such areas, the inevitability of fire
must be recognised. If people are to live in such places their
homes must be properly constructed and appropriate fire
prevention plans and techniques implemented which will
allow such fires to burn without threatening the property or
lives of the people that live amongst them.

It is disappointing that in a place like Victoria, which is
probably the most fire prone region on the planet, the

Table 2: Criteria for assessing plant condition

Cracked and lifting bark
Bark separated from cambium and sapwood
Dead cambium (discoloured/dark brown)
Ringbarked major branches or trunk
Ringbarked trunk at soil or mulch surface
Dead or seriously damaged roots
Presence of dormant buds for recovery
Presence of epicomiic or lignotuberous buds
Capacity for suckering

lessons of our fire history have not been better learned. In
such forests, fire is not the enemy to be fought but rather
an ecological factor that requires thoughtful, visionary and
professional management. Victorians should be leading the
world in such management, rather than looking for inap¬
propriate lessons from elsewhere or repeating the mistakes
of the past.

The effects of fire on the gardens
of the Macedon region

The effects of fire on created landscapes are often dramati¬
cally different from those in natural and semi-natural com¬
munities. The Macedon region has long been renowned
for its spectacular and historic gardens and many of these
also bore the brunt of fire in 1983. The burning of such
historic garden sites raises many issues about post-fire
management that had not been considered before. Much
harm was done because people adopted immediate posl-
fire management practices that were applicable to forests
rather than to major, substantial and historic gardens that
housed valuable collections of exotic and native species.

In considering the effects of fire on gardens, it is essential
to recognise what fire does to plant material. Some plants
are burnt, some merely singed and others affected by the
blasts of hot air that accompany the strong wind associated
with bushfire. The effects on plants of burning, singeing
and scorching are quite different, and must be managed in
different ways after the fire. Furthermore, as always in
dealing with biological systems, there is a strong variability
amongst different genera and species. In short, you have to
consider the characteristics of the plant to determine what
its response to fire will be and how it should be managed.

It was interesting to be in Mount Macedon a few days
after the fire and see the bulldozers piling ferns and tree
ferns into great heaps on the assumption that they were fire
sensitive and had been killed. In fact, the opposite is the
case, and the growth habit of the tree ferns (Cyathea aus¬
tralis) and many of the ground ferns (Polysticbum sp.,
Blechnum sp.) is such that they are unlikely to burn and as
a consequence are very fire resistant. The fibrous leaf liases,
not only hold a great deal of moisture, but are slow to
burn, and these characteristics provide ample protection for
the growing apices within. The ferns in fact had suffered
little damage in the fire. They had been defoliated, but
would soon produce new fronds and show full recovery.

It is interesting to note that lessons had not been learnt
from previous fires, such as the famous 1939 fires. In

28

photos of the Warburton region taken immediately after
the 1939 fires, which were of an intensity greater even than
those of 1983, huge mountain ash trees had been reduced
to a thin line of white ash on a velvet black background.
However, the tree ferns though blackened and frondless
where still standing and most recovered ter be the mature,
over-centurions that can be seen today in the regrowth
forest. The ferns should never had been bulldozed in 1983,
because the lessons of earlier fires were clear. The ferns
are important because they contribute so much to the
ambience and the texture of the landscapes, both natural
and created in the Macedon region.

Mount Macedon has been renowned for the fine collec¬
tion of conifers that its many gardens contained. It is
usually assumed that conifers are very fire sensitive and as
a consequence many trees were felled in the days immedi¬
ately after the fires. However, not all conifers are killed by
fires, and indeed some are renowned for their longevity
and fire resistance. The thick bark of the redwoods renders
them fire resistant, and usually they recover from fire
quickly and well. Other species such as some of the decid¬
uous conifers also cope well with fire. Often these trees are
removed after fire unnecessarily and their removal can
cause major impacts on the gardens they once dominated
(May and Moore, 1983).

Given the significance of the conifers in the Macedon
region, much greater care should have been given to those
which were felled and those which were left standing imme¬
diately after the fire. A century old redwood is a very valu¬
able specimen. As redwoods go, it is still in its infancy, but it
can contribute much to the landscape after the fire because
of its height, form and foliage texture. The thoughtless
removal of conifers that have survived the fire literally squan¬
ders a century or more of time, effort, care and opportunity.

For other exotic plants, whether they are killed or
survive the fire depends upon the nature of their injury
and the habit and adaptations of the species. Many of the
rhododendrons that were burnt in the fire were killed, but
those that were scorched by hot wind blasts, although
looking rather sorry, had suffered little more than defolia¬
tion and soon produced new leaves and shoots. In such a
case, it is necessary to identify the type of injury and the
fact that the cambial layers have not been damaged in
determining how the species should be managed. By
leaving scorched rhododendrons in place an important
element of many historic gardens were soon restored.
Once again, in the enthusiasm to clean up after the fire,
viable rhododendrons were removed and this represents
poor, rather than good management.

For many exotic plants, although the stems and foliage
were killed in the fires, the root systems remained alive
and active. In some cases, regeneration from the rootstocks
is not only useful, but provides a rapid means of re-estab¬
lishing valuable vegetation. However, caution must be
exercised because for grafted exotics the rootstocks may
not only be the wrong variety, but in some cases are differ¬
ent species that are not wanted in the garden context (May
and Moore, 1983). This scenario is amply demonstrated in
the recovery' of rhododendrons and roses amongst other
species. The opportunity for budding and grafting of pre¬
ferred, or even new varieties on to these rootstocks was

often not even contemplated let alone tried in most
gardens. It should be remembered that budding and graft¬
ing onto" established rootstocks can provide an attractive
and substantial specimen in a very short time.

Bulbous and cormous plants are often unaffected by fire,
which has no real effect on their subsequent growth, apart
from providing a boost in soil nutrient levels. Indeed, follow¬
ing the fires the displays of such plants in the following May
through September was often quite spectacular, especially in
the absence of so many other garden species. In talking
about such plants it should be remembered that while there
are many exotics of this type such as daffodils, freesias tulips
and irises, there are also native species such as our orchids
and the insectivorous droseras. For certain of the rhizoma-
tous species, the effects are very similar and once again the
fire has little impact upon their subsequent growth.

It is also worth noting that the adaptations described
earlier for eucalypts (Table 1) are also possessed by many
other species, both native and exotic. For example, the lil-
lypilly can possess a lignotuber, some species in elms
possess epicormic buds, many species of shrubs and trees
have thick bark, sclerophyllous leaves are possessed by
many native and exotic species and, of course, many
species possess woody, fire resistant fruits. In evaluating
the chances of survival of these species, it is worth consid¬
ering their adaptations and the likelihood of their survival.

The role of the horticulturist in
post-fire management

Immediately after a fire, it is important that professional hor¬
ticultural advice is available to those responsible for manag¬
ing the gardens that have been affected. It may seem to
many that at such a time, when property and personal pos¬
sessions have been lost, gardens would have a low priority.
However, the experience at Macedon was quite the con¬
trary. Many people had lost everything in the fire, but they
had come to the Macedon region because of the environ¬
ment and because of the gardens, and in many cases, the
gardens were all they had left. In such cases, the gardens
were a top priority and were symbolic of a commitment to
the future, of regeneration and of a determination to rebuild.

Rarely in such circumstances is professional horticultural
advice a part of the post-fire management strategy. Given the
horticultural significance of the Macedon region, such a situ¬
ation cannot be allowed to occur again. As part of the fire
management plans for places such as Mount Macedon, the
Dandenongs, or even the Blue Mountains region of Sydney,
where there are large historic and significant gardens, there
must lie the availability of proper post-fire advice.

After a fire, it is essential that the horticulturist identify
those plants that have survived and those which have suc¬
cumbed to the fire (May and Moore, 1983). These decisions
are sometimes difficult to make, but a number of simple cri¬
teria (Table 2) can be used to assess plant condition. It is
important to determine whether the cambium has been
damaged by the fire. This can be done on young tissue
simply by peeling back the young bark and looking for the
bright green cambium layer in some species or a nice light
to pale brown cambial layer in others. Dark brown layers
normally indicate that the plant is dead or dying. In older
parts of the plant, especially for thick barked species, it

29

might be necessary' to tap the bark to see if it has lifted
from the cambium or to remove a small section of the bark
to allow cambial inspection. If the cambium is dead, that
part of the plant or the whole plant should to lx? removed.

Another symptom that is worth looking for is the lifting of
the bark from the cambium or the development of substan¬
tial cracks in the bark. Care has to be taken with species like
the gum barked eucalypts that shed their bark in strips sea¬
sonally. However, when the bark lifts, it is often a sign that
the cambium has been killed, and that the branches or
trunks so affected have no prospect of recovery.

It is also necessary to establish whether the root system
of trees and shrubs remain viable after the fire. Often trees
and shrubs growing in well mulched garden beds were
ringbarked by the intensity of the fire around the base of
the trunk as the mulch burnt. In some cases, whilst the
tninks and foliage appeared to be little damaged, the plant
had been ringbarked and in many instances was doomed.
In other cases, the fire or the burning mulch killed the
lateral and feeding roots that are near the soil surface. In
such cases recovery' is often unlikely.

In assessing the affects of fire on any vegetation or plant
community, it is essential to remember that there are two
important constituents of the stress imposed by the fire.
The first is the intensity' of the fire, usually measured by its
temperature, and secondly the duration over which the
plants experience the effects of the fire (Moore, 1975). Fre¬
quently, plants can survive very high temperatures if the
durations are very' brief, but can be killed by less intense
fires that burn for longer durations.

It is also important to realise that the fire can change the
environment in which the plants grow. Removal of foliage
and overstorey cover exposes plants in the understorey and
at ground level to much higher levels of radiation, to stronger
winds and to wider fluctuations in temperature. Sometimes,
plants that have survived the fire succumb to a second dose
of stress in the weeks and months that follow. In the
Macedon region, after the 1983 fires, many plants suffered
significant damage from the severe frosts and snow falls that
occurred in the following winter (Lawton and Stockton,
1985). Previously, many of these plants would have been pro¬
tected by the other plants growing around them.

The role of the horticulturist is significant. Not only can
the fabric of a garden be saved after fire, which can sub¬
stantially reduce the time for re-establishment, but econom¬
ic factors can be addressed as well. Immediately after the
fire, clearing up of dead or dying plant material is carried
out by the emergency authorities without cost to the land
owner. A quick diagnosis of whether plants are likely to
survive or not means that a swift and economical clean up
can be made. However, by delaying for some months after
the fire, the clean up and removal costs are usually borne
by the land owner and in some cases can amount to many
thousands of dollars. After one fire, the estimated removal
costs for a number of dead conifers exceeded $50,000. As
you can see, the financial stakes can indeed be high.

Conclusion

It can be seen that the effects of fire on natural and semi¬
natural plant communities in the Macedon region are
neither destructive nor devastating. Fire is part of the

natural ecological cycle of these communities, and without
the fire the communities can neither regenerate nor persist
through time. In such communities, fire is inevitable,
usually on a periodic cycle and, as a consequence, fire
must be properly managed in these regions.

Even in the exotic, grand and historic gardens of Mount
Macedon, fire is not necessarily the totally destructive and
devastating force that many believe. Properly managed,
gardens can be re-established and regenerated speedily
and effectively, Certainly, some specimens die and others
are so severely damaged that their aesthetic value no
longer merits their retention, but other specimens are
barely affected and rapidly recover. Furthermore, the fire
may be the stimulus for the revitalisation of an aged or
senescing garden, and so provide an opportunity for new
and innovative garden design and plantings. Great gardens
are not static museum pieces but rather dynamic and
evolving communities of plants. Fires are really just part of
the change process, provided that they are anticipated,
planned for and properly managed after the event.

The role of the horticulturist must not be ignored in the
consideration of fire and its effects on regions like those in
the Macedon district. A professional horticultural input into
the pre- and post fire management of large, significant and
historic gardens is essential if these gardens are to cope
with fire, to recover quickly and continue to be part of the
heritage of the nation. Too often in the past, fire has come
unexpectedly and been poorly managed. The price of such
poor management is high in such significant assets.

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the support of Dr F. May in
reading the draft of the manuscript and for his suggestions,
and the assistance of Mrs L. Woodbridge and Ms M. Dali
for their patience and assistance in preparing the text. Due
acknowledgement is also given to final year students in the
Bachelor of Applied Science program at the Burnley
Campus - J. Lawton, G. Stockton, M. Neville, E. Foster,
D. Parry-Burton and C. Parnell - who conducted research
under supervision in the Macedon region, and who have
contributed to the thoughts presented in this paper.

References

Gill, A. M. and Groves, R. H. (1981), Fire and the Australian
Biota, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra.

Groves, R. II. (1981), Australian Vegetation, Cambridge Universi¬
ty Press, Cambridge.

Lawton, J. and Stockton, S. (1985), Vie Effects of Aspect on the
Recovery From Fire of an Open Forest, unpublished project
report, VCAH Burnley.

May, P. and Moore, G. M. (1983), Bushfire Damage at Mount
Macedon, Gardening News, 3(2), p.p. 16-17, Royal Horticul¬
tural Society of Victoria.

Moore, G. M. (1975), The Effects of Ileat Stress on the Physiology
of Eucalyptus obliqua L'Herit Seedings, Honours Thesis (Mel¬
bourne University).

Neville, M. (1986), Vie Influence of Aspect on Regeneration Fol¬
lowing a Eire in an Open Forest at Greendale, unpublished
project report, VCAH Burnley,

Parry-Burton, D. and Foster, E. (1987), Vie Effect of Aspect on
Species Composition and Distribution Following Fite in an Open
Forest at Greendale, unpublished project report, VCAH Burnley.

30

Conserving the Natural Resource

by Max Gilbert

TlHE DESTRUCTION of roadside vegetation in the provi¬
sion of services can be devastating. By the time the State
Road Construction Authority's Design Guidelines are com¬
plied with in respect to pavement width, shoulders and
roadside drains, the farmers have cut down the trees along
their fence line to prevent limbs falling on their fences, the
State Electricity Commission (SEC) has cut the trees to to
protect the power lines according to code, Telecom has
removed vegetation to trench in communication cables,
and the Eire Authority requests a bare earth policy from
fence line to fence line for fire prevention, a roadside is
likely to be barren.

However, it is possible to co-ordinate and accommodate
the wide range of demands on a road reserve and still pre¬
serve the natural beauty and often unique species of vege¬
tation along the roadside.

Gisborne Shire is fifty kilometres north west of Mel¬
bourne encompassing part of the Macedon Ranges. It
includes the townships of Mount Macedon, Macedon, New
Gisborne and Gisborne. The area has a constant growth
rate of six percent, with seventy-five percent of the
working population commuting outside the shire. The
Macedon Ranges form an important part of the natural
beauty of the area with most road reserves being heavily
timbered.

In 1983 the Ash Wednesday bush fires devastated two-
thirds of the area of the shire and destroyed over 500
houses, commercial, and public buildings. In the aftermath
there was concern within the community over such matters
as effective roadside fire hazard control, the re-establish¬
ment of roadside vegetation and the need to ensure that
the area’s natural beauty was restored.

The establishment of roadside conservation values in
1984 was the first step in preparing an overall roadside
management plan. In the Gisborne shire, the results of the
assessments have since been used in implementing road¬
side conservation strategies in three main areas:

• Fire prevention works and roadside vegetation

regeneration control,

• State Electricity Commission assets, and

• Road construction.

Fire prevention works and roadside vegetation
regeneration control

‘Eire Prevention Plans’ (FPP) developed for the shire cate¬
gorised roads into strategic and tactical fire breaks, with
recommendations for degrees of roadside clearing to
achieve the desired ‘fire safe’ environment.

The Fire Prevention Plan was overlaid with a Conserva¬
tion Assessment Plan (CAP). Where conflict occurred
between listed fire prevention works and conservation
values - for example, if extensive roadside clearing was
recommended on a roadside with a high conservation
value - on-site meetings were held to determine appropri¬
ate treatment to satisfy both requirements. The following
solutions illustrate some of the treatments developed by
the shire in order to meet safety requirements and maintain
the integrity of valuable roadscapes.

Mount Macedon Road is a main road connecting the Calder
Highway to the townships of Macedon and Mount
Macedon. The road has been assigned a ‘high conservation
value’ rating and is also classified as a strategic fire break.
Much of the roadside vegetation was burnt in the 1983
fires, requiring a large number of advanced trees to be
removed. The fire also initiated vigorous regenerative
regrowth. During the conservation assessment survey,
localised areas of rare native orchids were also identified.
The potential conflict of extensive roadside clearing to
achieve the required strategic fire break, and the need to
retain the natural roadside beauty, especially as the road is
the ‘gateway’ to Mount Macedon, was resolved by preserv¬
ing ‘blocks’ of undisturbed revegetation and native orchids.

The ‘block’ areas were physically roped off by shire staff
in consultation with members of the local fire brigade and
Macedon Ranges Conservation Society. The remaining
areas were then slashed in accordance with the standard
Fire Prevention Plan. The result has been the retention of
an attractive roadside landscape, the preservation of the
orchids and satisfactory fire prevention works to prevent a
fire from spreading along the roadway.

A second method of achieving a suitable fire break and
retaining important visual features of the roadscape was to
combine the development of fire breaks with that of SEC
pow r er line clearance along the road reserve. An appropri¬
ate area was cleared of all trees and slashed, however sub¬
stantial stands of advanced trees were able to be retained
between the cleared area and the road itself.

Many roads within the shire have large well-established
trees with dense undergrowth on the roadsides. The con¬
servation assessment of these roads is considered high
because of the large trees. Ter maintain the visual attractive¬
ness of the large trees and to meet fire prevention stan¬
dards, the undergrowth was removed by slashing using a
telescopic mower (and in some areas by hand slashing).

State Electricity Commission assets

A tree clearing coordination Committee was established for
the Shire of Gisborne in 1976. The committee, with repre¬
sentatives from the SEC, the shire, the Department of Con¬
servation and Environment, the Macedon Ranges Conserva¬
tion Society and other interested parties, was established to
control and co-ordinate the tree trimming practices of the
SEC. Committee members would assess all powerlines
prior to the SEC tree crews commencing works. Members
would walk along the route of the SEC conductors and
physically mark all trees to indicate whether they should
be totally removed, lightly trimmed or pruned. Such dili¬
gence ensured a desired standard which meant the trees
were not mutilated, but were trimmed aesthetically and to
the requirements of the SEC code.

With this background of co-operation between the SEC
and the shire, other works have been initiated to preserve
the landscape value of road sides. These have included:
undergrounding SEC assets; relocation of power lines;
combined SEC/Fire Prevention clearing, and aerial bundled
cable.

After the 1983 Bush Fires, there were few roadsides
remaining on Mount Macedon which retained their former

31

Francine Gilfedder

canopy of trees. Only two such areas were untouched by
the fire. Both these sections of road contained power lines
which, if cut to code, would require the removal of the
only remaining green trees on the mountain, also destroy¬
ing the canopy effect over the roadway. The two area were
along the Mount Macedon Road and Brougham Road.

Funding for undergrounding 1.3 kilometres of high and
low voltage powerlines was jointly provided by the council
and the SEC. The end result of much labour and finance
was the retention of a magnificent avenue of trees which, if
not protected by undergrounding, would have been neces¬
sarily removed, leaving a barren landscape behind.

Devonshire Line on Mount Macedon was renowned for
its magnificent avenue of mountain ash prior to the 1983
fires. The trees were burnt in the fire and required
removal. SEC overhead lines ran the full length of the
south side of the road. The local residents and council
were keen to re-establish the landscape, however, the
SEC’s code did not allow for the re-establishment of the
mountain ash. With the coordination of the shire council,
residents raised $16,000 in local contributions and attracted
a two-to-one grant from the SEC’s cable undergrounding
funds. The powerlines have now been installed under¬
ground and the naturally regenerated mountain ash are
being allowed to grow naturally, to re-develop the pic¬
turesque Devonshire Lane.

In many instances the SEC, through the recommenda¬
tions of the tree clearing coordination Committee, have
relocated powerlines altogether to preserve either a partic¬
ular species of tree or stand of trees. This has been

Honour Avenue, Macedon. a decade after 19SJ bushfires

achieved through three different practices;

(i) zigzagging powerlines from one side of the road
reserve to the other and back again,

(ii) using a one side offset crossheads on the power poles
instead of the standard T* construction allowing poles
to be located closer to tree than normal, and

(iii) staggering the standard offset of the powerlines but
still retaining these on the same side of the road
reserve.

‘Aerial Bundled Cable’, comprised of heavily insulated
conductors twisted together to form a single cable, has
recently been introduced into Victoria by the SEC. The
ABC reduces the amount of tree clearing to meet code dis¬
tances because the ABC is a single strand instead of the
normal three strands spread on a cross arm. Because it is
heavily insulated, ABC allows branch overhang and
reduced clearance distances from the conductor itself.

Low voltage ABC is now in use throughout the shire and
its introduction has saved the need for heavy pruning of
trees where it has been installed. An example is Alton
Road, Mount Macedon, where the road reserve had a
canopy of oak trees meeting across the pavement. Use of
standard conductors would have destroyed the canopy,
however, the use of ABC required only a ‘hole’ around the
cable to be cut, thereby preserving the effect of the trees.

Road construction

The Gisborne shire has for a number of years recognised
the importance of preserving the roadside landscape. With
increasing urbanisation, and the area being a very popular

32

tourist attraction for people from metropolitan Melbourne,
growth in vehicular traffic volumes has been rapid. This
has applied pressure on council to upgrade many roads,
some from gravel to sealed surface, or widening existing
narrow sealed roads.

In order to achieve the protection of the roadside vege¬
tation, cater for the increased traffic volumes and provide
road conditions of a standard expected by motorists, the
Shire adopted modified design standards and construction
techniques, which were sympathetic to the environs while
providing improved road surfaces. One example is the
popular tourist route which passes through the Barringo
area in the foothills of Mount Macedon. It consisted of a
network of gravel roads which carried high traffic volumes
including tourist and commuter traffic. These roads were
sealed using the modified design and construction tech¬
niques safe for motorists, but aesthetically winding
amongst the trees and following the natural contours of the
land. Of interest is the high acceptance by the motorists of
the lower standards of road geometry with traffic travelling
at appropriate speeds.

Conclusion

The Roadside Evaluation Assessment is the first step in for¬
mulating policies regarding the management of the road¬
side. It is a necessary tool in discussions with other bodies
who are involved in the use of the roadsides, as it gives an
important basis on which to encourage other parties to
cooperate in the preservation of the roadside vegetation.

With cooperation between various authorities and local
bodies, it is possible to achieve the desired result of
preservation of the roadside landscape. It is a time-con¬
suming process with many meetings, but the end result is
rewarding and has been well worthwhile for the Shire of
Gisborne.

33

Frandne Gilfedder

Necessity or Aesthetic Nicety?

Regionalism and place making
in today’s landscape

by Michael Hough

Ladies AND GENTLEMEN; I’m delighted for this oppor¬
tunity to participate in your Conference. As a theme, Mount
Macedon is apt and has a significance that goes beyond
local boundaries. It is a familiar one in almost every place I
have come to know. Why is so much of our living environ¬
ment loosing its diversity and identity? Most of the butter¬
flies and wildflowers I collected as a schoolboy are now
on Britain’s endangered species list, and originally distinc¬
tive places have become indistinguishable one from
another. Ask people where a place is - is it Toronto,
Chicago, Milan? Most people wouldn’t have a clue. There is
little that tells us that it’s Istanbul. If the differences
between one place and another are the result of harmo¬
nious interactions between the ecological, cultural, and
economic forces that sustain life, then there is no question
in my mind that place and identity are essential and funda¬
mental to our well-being and to life in general, and must
be seen as a central issue of our time.

Definitions of place

In nature, regional differences are inherent. They are the
product of natural history, evolving from processes that are
infinitely complex and that produce infinitely varied adap¬
tions of plants, life forms and physical landscapes. For
instance, river landscapes in the western plains of Canada
are different from those of the Precambrian shield, the
wildflowers one finds along roadsides in Tuscany are dif¬
ferent from those of Ontario. Such differences are also true
of vernacular forms where the natural processes of the
land are overlain by human influences. The vernacular can
be described as built form that grows out of the practical
needs of the inhabitants of a place, and the constraints of
site and climate. In the farming landscapes of the Yorkshire
Dales in England, the dry stone walls that were built over
centuries to define property and fence in sheep reveal the
complexity of the surface geology and character of the
land over very short distances. 1 They reinforce the differ¬
ences imposed by nature and came about not from choice,
but from limitations of know-how, directly available build¬
ing materials, and age-old traditions in wall building.

In a social context, regional identity in the past was deter¬
mined by the cultural and institutional linkages that tied
people to one place and dictated how they should lead their
lives. Limitations of travel and a lack of choice to live any¬
where except where you grew up made it so. Thomas Hardy
has written about this in less of the d’Urbervilles. He describes
how Tess looked over the countryside to the next town from
her bedroom window, and wondered what magical experi¬
ences existed there. She knew every detail in her own village,
but knew nothing about the town only a few miles away.

Another facet of place is that of naming. 'Hie cliff off which
one jumps in the despair of unrequited love isn’t a place until
it becomes ‘Lovers Leap’.- I remember on my first day in
Edinburgh as an architectural student, I wanted to know what
some of the city’s great landmarks were. So I stopped an

elderly Scotsman. ‘Excuse me sir’, I said politely, ‘can you tell
me what that castle is up there?’ The old fellow looked at me
for a full ten seconds with an expression that can only be
described as a mixture of pity and disgust. ‘It’s no that castle’
he replied eventually, it’s the castle’. I left feeling pretty
stupid, but seeing the castle and Edinburgh in a new light.

Some historical notes

To better understand the nature of place it is useful to review
it from a historical perspective. I’d like to begin by examining
two regional scenarios, almost a century apart, that illustrate
how radically human development has affected both our per¬
ceptions and the realities of the modern landscape.

The first was in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1880s when
Patrick Geddes, the visionary Scottish biologist, sociologist
and regional planner, built his Camera Obscura in a disused
observatory. The Camera Obscura was a projection devise
mounted at the top of the observatory tower that over¬
looked the city. Its purpose was to project a panoramic
image of Edinburgh, and the rural region surrounding it,
onto a large flat white table below. In spite of industrialisa¬
tion, many cities still retained a sense of being urban enti¬
ties set in a rural and undisturbed landscape, each with
clearly defined ecological, economic and productive bound¬
aries and identities. Geddes’ purpose was essentially educa¬
tional. He wanted to show people that to understand the
city one had to understand its link to the rural countryside;
that Edinburgh’s identity was tied to the interdependence
between the protection of nature, societal needs, and a
viable economy: what he called Place’, ‘Folk’ and ‘Work’. 3

The second scenario is set in our time when the distin¬
guished American landscape architect, Phil Lewis, began
analysing patterns of urbanisation across the United States
from satellite photos taken at night. Based on the observa¬
tions he made at the Centre of Environmental Awareness, 1
he showed that urban systems in North America are linking
up to form rings of urbanisation around a variety of signifi¬
cant natural features. The emerging pattern that he found is
a somewhat circular network of cities across the US that, as
he has said, has altered our view of how urban areas
should be perceived and managed’. 5

Examined at a smaller scale, where towns and cities in
Patrick Geddes’ day were at the centre surrounded by a
larger landscape, today it is what remains of that landscape
that is forming the centre. A once ecologically complex and
resilient rural environment has become fragmented within
the city. Even though the city centre still retains a level of
identity through its past connections with site and history, in
the expanding urban edge there is little to reflect where
development stops or where the rural landscape begins. Phil
Lewis foresaw this decades ago when he began mapping
the diverse natural and cultural features of the mid-western
states of Illinois and Wisconsin. His purpose was to alert
people to these patterns of priceless heritage and protect
them from future development. The environmental corridors
that he identified from this work have today become the
basis for regional ecological design, and the necessary struc¬
turing elements for shaping urban growth.

There are remarkable similarities in the motives and
underlying philosophies that dominated the thinking of
Patrick Geddes in the 1880s, and Phil Lewis almost a century

34

later. Both were concerned with integrating nature into the
growing cities. Both recognised the need for education and
public support -as a necessary basis for policy and legislation
to protect natural and cultural landscapes. And both under¬
stood the need to maintain the identity of city regions.

Environmentalism and the restoration
of regional identity

If we look at these issues from another perspective, we find
that environmentalism has its roots in the Romantic move¬
ment and the creation of the urban parks and gardens of
nineteenth century America. Romanticism grew out of the
growing isolation of urban people from the natural world
that resulted from industrialisation." It was concerned with
the study of an organic world that was harmonious and
holistic — a view that we know today as an ecological per¬
spective. It was in this context that the first parks were
born. Drawn from the eighteenth century English style of
landscape gardening, 7 they were places for contemplating
nature and natural forms that would heal the spirit. The
nineteenth century parks, therefore, were conceived as
places that excluded the grim city. A Victorian moral ethic
also prevailed that the opportunity to view nature would
improve the moral standards of the workers." The landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted emulated the pastoral and
spatial qualities of these parks in Central Park, New York,
which he designed with the unique qualities of the site in
mind. He used locally native plant communities in his
spatial compositions of woodland, meadow, and water and
incorporated the native rock of the site to dramatise the
underlying geological character of the city region. Olmsted
was also the first planner to link parks together, where one
could experience streams and forests as a continuous
system of natural environments and trails. Boston's Emerald
Necklace is an example of such a system. These early parks
were possibly the first attempt to bring cities and nature
together and establish a distinct sense of place within them.

In the American mid-west many peoples reacted to the
destruction of the native tall grass prairie landscape that
came about from industrial agriculture, urbanisation, and
inappropriate horticultural practices. Jens Jensen, the well
known American designer, spent most of his life educating
peoples on the beauty and sense of identity that made this
landscape special, and he built many parks and gardens in
his efforts to restore the native prairie to the region.

In Canada, a community of artists known as the ‘Group
of Seven' painted the Precambrian scenery of Georgian
Bay and the Canadian wilderness, and they taught people
to see and appreciate a regional landscape of extraordinary
power and untamed beauty. In fact, critics could not
believe that such scenery existed, some even saying that
their paintings should Ire banned since it would discourage
immigration to Canada:' Since that time, the universal
access provided by the automobile has allowed cottaging
to spread throughout these regions. Development, power
boats, water pollution, and the ‘gardenisation’ of natural
lakeshores, have led to the decline of wildlife and natural
diversity in many places. This is a universal problem and
has to do with two things: firstly, supply and demand (the
limited availability of the resource and the insatiable
demand for it); secondly, sustainability (these beautiful and

highly attractive landscapes are inherently limited in their
capacity to sustain human activities).

Homogenisation and the fragmentation
of nature

Today, we all recognise the shift away from what is distinc¬
tive to what is similar in the places we live in. Endless sub¬
divisions and international skylines, the industrialisation of
the countryside and the destruction of its diverse plant
communities and wetlands, seem to be the result of choice
rather than constraint in society’s ability to control and
reshape the environment. It has also emphasised the psy¬
chological separation between city and countryside; the
perception that Nature does not exist in cities except as
horticultural artifacts and individual phenomena discon¬
nected from their context and origins.

The English novelist John Fowles, the author of The
French Lieutenant's Woman, The Magus, and many other
books, summarises the problem in his article ‘The Tree’. 10
On a visit to Linnaeus’ garden in Uppsala, Sweden, he had
this to say about it’s owner, whom he called ‘the great
indexer of nature’ and who, between 1730 and 1760, classi¬
fied much of earth’s animate beings. ‘Perhaps nothing is
more moving at Uppsala than the actual smallness and
ordered simplicity erf that garden and the immense conse¬
quences that spaing from it in terms of the way we see and
think about the world ... for all its air of gentle peace, it is
closer to a nuclear explosion, whose radiations and muta¬
tions inside the human brain were incalculable and contin¬
ue to be so’. Fowles suggests that humankind has evolved
into an isolated creature, that sees the world anthropocen¬
trically. The power of detaching an object from its sur¬
roundings and making us concentrate on it is an implicit
criterion in all our judgements. A great deal of science is
devoted to ... providing labels, explaining specific mecha¬
nisms and ecologies - in short, to sorting and tidying what
would seem in the mass indistinguishable from one
another’." I would suggest some other perceptions and
values continue to influence our views of nature and place.

Ideals and visions

The predilection to see the animate world as individual
phenomena rather than as communities has resulted in the
transfer of plants and animals from places where they natu¬
rally belong, to places where they don’t. There are utopian
ideals and predetermined visions at work here about what
places ought to be, rather than what they actually are. The
consequences, as you undoubtedly are well aware, have
resulted in massive imbalances to indigenous natural
systems worldwide and in total lack of sustainability in
many others. An examination of the role of water in the
urbanisation of natural communities provides an example.
The age-old concept of the oasis has evolved from the
notion of the ultimate utopian ideal - the garden. At a
small scale the garden has symbolised the cultural idea of a
fertile and beautiful place in an arid and hostile land. As
such, it has added to the environmental and cultural diver¬
sity of many places. The urge to expand this ideal to
include entire regions, however, has been achieved at
enormous cost in the withdrawal of groundwater, the
transfer of water supplies from distant river systems, and

35

the consequent deterioration of regional character. In Cali¬
fornia, nearly 90 percent of the population lives in the
southern, arid and sun-soaked two thirds of the state. 12 Yet
75 percent of till natural water flow occurs in the nonhem
third. A statewide system of aqueducts carries water from
where it is plentiful to where it is scarce, and has permitted
agriculture to use 85 percent of the State’s annual water
consumption, the remainder going to urban and commer¬
cial uses. 13 Much of this supports green lawns and a vast
array of plants that have been imported from regions of
high rainfall. This artificial landscape symbolises the imbal¬
ance between the vision of a garden oasis, and the ability
of the environment to sustain the ideal. 'I'he loss of region¬
al identity, therefore, is the consequence of transferring
natural environments from their places of origin, to places
where they don’t belong and cannot be naturally sustained.
It’s the Florida in Arizona syndrome, or the ideal of a
Garden in Eden at the expense of nature and a prescrip¬
tion for environmental catastrophe.

The imposition of social values

Social factors have always affected issues of identity. The
pressure to conform to predetermined standards of
behaviour, through by-law or community expectations, is a
characteristic of much new development, and works
against the practical needs of privacy, personal life, or con¬
venience. A colleague of mine from the University of Mani¬
toba aptly described the problem to me some years ago,
after he moved into a new residential area in Winnipeg. He
was determined to create an outdoor environment that
suited his own needs and tastes rather than those of his
neighbours. So he decided to return his front yard to a
landscape of native prairie woodland rather than to the
required turf of the street. Over five years his little prairie
landscape established itself, and for him it was a poignant
reminder, in miniature, of the native landscape that had
been there before. However, his neighbour was not so
pleased with this eyesore. In his view it stuck out like a
sore thumb from the rest of the street. My friend wrote me:

during that first summer he paid me a visit and asked when
I intended to cut my lawn. Not really knowing the gentle¬
man and not taking his statement seriously, I retorted that
lawn cutting was a waste of energy and I was planning on
getting a goat. My neighbour’s jaw dropped, and once he
had regained his composure lie stormed off muttering
something under his breath. A few minutes later I saw from
my kitchen window a lawnmower sitting in the middle of
the front yard. Thus was his subtle response.

Alternative approaches

Creating a sense of place involves new ways of thinking
about the environment, and how decisions are made. Con¬
temporary environmentalism in North America is identified
in three important ways: firstly, it is a citizen-driven move¬
ment; secondly, its philosophical thrust is based on an inte¬
grated view of nature that includes human society; and
thirdly, it is based on restoring environmental health to
local and regional places. Across Europe and North
America citizen groups are initiating projects to restore
landscapes destroyed through urbanisation and are associ¬
ating themselves with government as partners in decisions

that affect them directly. I'd like to suggest some of the
principles that seem appropriate to this broader view
together with a few examples from my own experience.

Knowing the place

Regional identity has to do with two fundamental criteria:
firstly, with the natural processes of the region or locality -
what nature has put there; secondly, with social processes
— what people have put there. Olmsted, in designing
Central Park, knew this. He revealed the essential structure
ot the land on which New York City is built by leaving the
granite rock exposed wherever it occurs on the site. It
clearly expresses the relationship between bedrock and
New York's skyline, and reinforces the underlying charac¬
ter of this now urbanised landscape.

In the Canadian prairies, major efforts to restore the native
landscape are ongoing. I recently began the restoration of a
river valley in the City of Saskatoon. Saskatchewan. The pro¬
tection and management of the valley lands are controlled
by a public agency, the Meewasin Valley Authority. As part
of its mandate, the Authority undertook a redevelopment of
the Saskatoon Art Gallery lands that form part of the river
valley. The property and river bank had been badly degrad¬
ed over many years by landfill, parking lots, and mown turf.
In its larger context, the essential identity of Saskatoon is
shaped by its river that flows through the city as a green
prairie corridor, rather than as an urban one typical of Euro¬
pean cities. My natural response was to restore the site to
better reflect its unique prairie qualities. The gallery could
then be appropriately thought of as a pavilion set in a native
landscape, rather than an urbanised extension of the city. A
wide variety of locally native plants were planted, and a trail
system and observation point were woven into the design.
The most difficult task of the entire process was persuad¬
ing a highly conservative City Parks department, steeped in
the conventions of horticulture, to forgo its usual turf and
lollipop tree maintenance regime typical of every park in
the Canadian west, and manage the site as an evolving
native community. Miraculously, we succeeded. But it
remains the first, and the last, example of naturalised land¬
scape in the city.

Necessity and sustainability

What we learn from the vernacular is that necessity creates
the need to be self-sustaining, and the combination of the
two has everything to do with regional identity. Some
modern cities have, for very practical reasons, been forced
to become sustainable. A good example is Tucson,
Arizona, a city that is entirely dependent on ground water
and whose landscape was of the ‘Florida in Arizona’ type,
totally alien to its region. When the city was faced with the
crisis of severe water shortages after years of dropping
ground water levels, it initiated conservation and education
policies designed to drastically reduce water consumption,
"lhese have had a marked effect on the character of the
city. The public landscape and private gardens are now
planted with water resistant native plants replacing much
of the exotic water dependent species. From a city that
could have been described as anywhere in south-western
USA’, it has become a city that dramatically reflects the
diversity and character of its desert region."

36

History' and heritage

One obvious lesson that history teaches is that of change.
Nothing stays the same. The essence of all landscapes is that
of dynamic continuity and evolution. We also know that
when they are preserved as museum species, they are in
danger of becoming fossilised. We see much evidence of
this in the formal gardens, parks, and pioneer villages that
have been labelled as heritage. While these places are inher¬
ently tied to their geography, vegetation, climate, and politi¬
cal and social contexts, preservation frequently isolates them
from these evolutionary processes. Some, like the formal
gardens of Versailles, for instance, have been meticulously
maintained in the way they were originally conceived. They
have quite literally been frozen in time, reflecting the
intense boredom that the courtiers of the day were reported
to suffer from.

There is obvious validity in treating some places as his¬
toric museums, to be studied for their artistic genius, or as
nineteenth century follies. The problem comes when
change and adaption to new physical and social conditions
are precluded from the process of preservation. There are,
however, some good examples of where this has taken
place. The Royal parks in London, for instance, were once
private estates and have since been made public, adapted
to diverse interests and activities. Central Park, New York is
another where the restoration of Olmsted’s original land¬
scape in the 1970s went hand in hand with painstaking
consultation with its users - the New York communities
that laid claim to the park as their own place. In the Lake
District National Parks, park policies permit farming and
development to continue while protecting and encouraging
the diversity of these landscapes. Farmers within the
Pennine Dales Environmentally Sensitive Area, may receive
government financial support to continue farming in sym¬
pathy with the needs of the environment. And in France,
there tire ‘living farm museums’ where farmers are paid to
continue farming in the old ways in the interest of conserv¬
ing old traditions. 1 '

Doing as little as possible

The greatest diversity and identity of a place, whether
one is talking about a remnant wooded valley or a cohe¬
sive neighbourhood community, often comes from
minimum, not maximum interference. Jens Jensen was
commissioned to design the Sears and Robuck estate in
Chicago’s American mid-west. His plans called for a
minimum disturbance to the beautiful native ravines on
the property. When the client saw how much Jensen was
charging to do the job, he challenged his $1,000 fee for
what appeared to be so little work. Jensen replied that
lesser men would have charged far more just to ruin a
lovely site. 1 '’ In fact, proponents of the formalist style at
the time dismissed naturalistic design since it contained
very little of what they thought was art. In a 1902 article
in Architectural Record, it was argued that ‘the principles
of the natural style have no value as far as artistic expres¬
sion is concerned . 1

In summary, we can learn three things from current
effort at naturalising and restoring natural diversity to local
and regional places.

Firstly, that no landscape can be returned to its original

natural state. Cultural history has, in situations such as the
Canadian prairies, completely altered the complex relation¬
ships between soils, plants, animals, and fire that existed
prior to the presence of human beings. Bronte grass, for
instance, was originally introduced into the prairies to feed
the other major introduction, cattle. Restoration involves
the creation of managed landscapes that are a mix of
culture and nature; altered but nonetheless resilient and
self-sustaining communities.

Secondly, local neighbourhoods, communities, and
interest groups are essential to successful projects, since it
is they who have the emotional investment in their own
places to initiate and sustain action. The ecological
restoration of Toronto’s Don River is one of many initia¬
tives by local citizens and now supported by government.
The last remaining marsh (the Rattray Marsh) on the Lake
Ontario shoreline within greater Toronto is protected not
only by legislation, but by the community association that
spearheaded its preservation, and by the people who
front it. Over the years local residents have been encour¬
aged to plant locally native species in their gardens, a
practice that has created an involvement in the protection
of the marsh.

Thirdly, there is a need for a larger watershed and
regional perspective and a larger public constituency in the
protection of wild places. This can best be achieved, in my
view, by beginning with local places, and expanding into
larger regional contexts. Barry Commoner, the distin¬
guished American ecologist, has provided us with a funda¬
mental principle of ecology: that everything is connected to
everything else. It’s this basic truth that remains central to
the issue of place and regional identity.

References

1 Michael 1 lough, Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Region¬
al Landscape , New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.

2 Grady Clay, ‘The Emerging Places in North America’, public
lecture at the University of Guelph, Ontario. 1986.

3 Philip Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Gecldes, London:
Koutledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

4 Environmental Awareness Center, Focus, University of Wis¬
consin, School of Natural Resources, College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences, Cooperative Extension Service, July 1984.

5 ibid.

6 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1979.

7 Michael Laurie, ‘Nature and City Planning in the 19th Century’
in, Ian C. Laurie (ed), Nature in Cities. New York: John Wiley,
1979.

8 ibid.

9 Roger Boulet, The Canadian Earth. Cerebus/Prentice Hall,
1982.

10 John Fowles, ‘Seeing Nature whole’, Harpers, Vol 259, No
1554, Nov. 1979.

11 ibid.

12 Crane S. Miller and Richard S. Hyslop, California: the geogra¬
phy of Diversity, Pomona: Mayfield Publishing, 1983.

13 ibid.

14 op. cit., Michael Hough.

15 ibid.

16 Robert E. Grese, Jens Jensen: Maker of Natural Parks and
Gardens, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992.

17 ibid.

37

Issues and Solutions

by Jan Schapper

TThE MACEDON REGION is in a unique situation. This is
not only because of the quality of the physical, landscape
and cultural resources of the area, but also because of its
intellectual input over many years. For ten years now there
has been an ongoing collaboration between the region and
School of Environmental Planning at the University of Mel¬
bourne. This has generated a number of important studies
and has provided the research needed to underpin good
planning practice.

After the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, a range of
studies were undertaken which led to the publication of
Design for Change in 1985. This publication won a Merit
Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Following this, regional planning and visual assessments
were carried out by different groups of students, in class
work and by thesis and research work. This had several
benefits. As mentioned above, it offered the Macedon
region the intellectual capacity and the facilities of the Uni¬
versity. More importantly, it offered the students - future
planners and landscape architects — the opportunity to
learn in a real planning situation, with all its biophysical
and cultural complexity, and to develop an awareness of
and passion for the landscape. The staff of the organisa¬
tions involved in these studies assisted the students with
great goodwill and patience, for which I thank them
wholeheartedly - it is important for students to lie encour¬
aged in their work.

By 1990 it was evident that, because of the expansion of
Melbourne and development in the Macedon region,
further work was needed. In particular, a study which
identified the region’s cultural and landscape heritage was
required. A pilot study was carried out by Master of Land¬
scape Architecture students and this was used to support
the successful application to the Heritage Commission for a
grant to undertake the Macedon Ranges Cultural and
Landscape Heritage Study.

Trevor Budge was a principal consultant for this study,
and three of our past students were on the study team. The
team worked closely with a steering committee which
included representatives from the shires, the university, and
the Heritage Branch of the Ministry for Planning and
Development.

ft-

Focusing on the Macedon region at this Conference is an
important exercise. The challenges facing the region now
are not the same as those explored in the early studies, but
they are as difficult and as demanding.

The region is exemplary in several ways. Firstly, it
demonstrates a complex mosaic of natural and cultural
environments. These need to be managed well in order to
retain the framework and the character of the region, while
also allowing appropriate development to occur. Secondly,
the approach taken has been to underpin planning with
research, so that wise and informed planning decisions can
occur. The intellectual input into planning has been of a

high standard, of which we can be proud. Furthermore,
community participation and the involvement of all the
shires in the region should be a lesson to those who think
participation of a wide cross-section of interests is not pos¬
sible. And finally, a passionate appreciation of the moun¬
tain and its environs has underlined efforts to maintain the
character of the area, whether garden, forest or pastoral
landscape.

It is vital that we understand our landscape and its her¬
itage. Landscape heritage reflects attitudes of people to the
environment they live in. The community at all levels has a
stake in landscape heritage for it embodies our culture and
our identity. As Henri-Frederic Amiel C1821-1881) said: ‘Uti
paysage quelconque esl un etat de I’ame'; that is: ‘any land¬
scape is a condition of the spirit.’

The view from the Mount; Hanging Rock picturedfrom the garden
ofArd Choille

38

Richard Aitkcn

Contributors

Trevor Budge was the principal consultant for the 1993
Macedon Ranges Cultural Heritage and Landscape Study.
As a geographer and town planner he has worked exten¬
sively for municipalities and shires in regional Victoria,
Tasmania and South Australia. He lives in Bendigo and is
actively involved in education and community affairs.

Paul I’ox as a historian and curator of the Australia Post
Museum for which he recently curated an exhibition on
the cultural landscape of northern Victoria. His published
papers on the perceptions of the Australian landscape
are important to the understanding of our landscape and
garden history.

Max Gilbert is the director of engineering services for the
Shire of Gisborne and a local resident. He has been
involved in developing policies and strategies to pre¬
serve the natural environment within the shire. He has a
particular interest in roadside conservation.

Francine Gilfedder is a landscape architect and horticulturist
with a special interest in cultural landscapes. She has
undertaken surveys of the cultural landscapes of munici¬
palities and shires within Victoria and interstate. In 1993
she advised the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service on
the management of exotic plants in World Heritage Areas.

Michael Hough is a landscape architect and professor at the
Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University,
Toronto. He is the keynote speaker at the Greening Aus¬
tralia conference in Perth. His latest book Out of Place,
addresses the loss of identity and change in unique
natural and cultural landscapes and what designers can
do to maintain the special character of an area.

Chris McConville has worked on many urban conservation
projects, including the Macedon Ranges Cultural Her¬
itage and Landscape Study. He has worked on radio,
written several books on urban history and lectures part-
time in Heritage Studies at Victoria University.

Karin MacKinnon grew up at Durrol Mount Macedon,
which her father purchased in 1919- The garden was
already well established when in 1928 her parents com¬
missioned Edna Walling to create a sunken garden on a
sloping site. Mrs MacKinnon has nurtured her garden
through drought and fire.

Gregory Moore is the principal of the Victorian College of
Agriculture and Horticulture at Burnley. With his stu¬
dents he made an extensive study of Mount Macedon
after the 1983 bush fires.

Frank Moulds was the chairman of the Forest Commission
(now incorporated in the DCNR) and is the author of a
history of forestry in Victoria and the Macedon Ranges
forests. He is the president of the Gisborne and Mount
Macedon Historical Society and is actively involved in the
restoration of the memorial cross on Mount Macedon.

Neil Robertson is the National Executive Officer erf the Aus¬
tralian Open Garden Scheme, and a long term resident
of the Macedon region.

Jan Schapper is the Associate Dean (Professional Programs)
at the School of Environmental Design, University of
Melbourne. She was an editor of Design for Change, a
study which was undertaken in the Macedon region after
the 1983 bushfires.

The garden in the landscape: Prunus serrulata at Duneira, Mount Macedon

39

Calendar of Events

FEBRUARY 1995

SYDNEY & NORTHERN NSW BRANCH _

• Sunday 26

A talk given by Mr Roy Rumsey, retired grower and
importer of hybrid tea and heritage roses, on his life and
experiences in the nursery industry. Time: 2.00pm Venue:
Annie Wyatt Room, National Trust, Observatory Hill,
Sydney. Cost: $5.00 including refreshments. Enquiries: Jan
Gluskie (02) 428 5947 or Tempe Beaven (02) 969 3043

TASMANIAN BRANCH _

• Sunday 19

Day in the Nile District - The day will begin with morning
tea at ‘Clarendon’ provided by the Clarendon Committee.
This will enable members to view the work to the garden¬
ers cottage which we helped fund. We then visit some
very interesting private gardens in the Nile district. More
details in the February newsletter. Time: 10.30am Enquiries:
Ann Cripps (002) 25 I860 or Prue Green (003) 97 8281

VICTORIAN BRANCH _

• Thursday 23

Tour of Parliament House Gardens with Neil Gemmill
(Head Gardener) and Andrea Macdonald (Landscape
Architect). Time: 6.00pm. Venue: Parliament House, meet
at Spring Street pedestrian entrance. Cost: No charge.

• Garden and Landscape Photography Short Course 1995.

Bookings now available for second course. For further
information and a booking form please contact Jackie
Courmadias on telephone/facsimile (03) 650 5043. ■

MARCH 1995

ACT & SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH_

• 3 March

Ainslie amble. For further information telephone
(06) 258 4547.

SYDNEY AND NORTHERN NSW BRANCH_

• Friday 31 March-Sunday April 2

Parks, Gardens and Cemeteries Seminar - Sponsored by
the National Trust of Australia (NSW), Australian Garden
History Society, Sydney and Northern NSW Branch and
Dubbo City Council. FRIDAY 31 MARCH: The Conseiva-
tion and Management of Historic Parks and Cemeteries.
Saturday $25.00 Sunday no charge. Bookings and
Enquiries: Jill McCann (National Trust), PO Box 1713,
Dubbo, 2830. Telephone (068) 81 4222.

TASMANIAN BRANCH_

• Sunday 19

Channel Gardens - Three interesting and different
gardens plus some nurseries including Mr and Mrs R.
Harvey’s garden at Nichols Rivulet, Mr and Mrs C. Lewin-
camp at Cygnet and Mrs A. Lawton at Wattle Grove.
More details in the February newsletter. Time: 10.45am
Enquiries: Jan Ross (002) 62 2279.

VICTORIAN BRANCH_

• Saturday 18

The Living Sculptures of Edna Walling - A gourmet
brunch and a private viewing of Voe Living Sculptures of
Edna Walling exhibition with an introductory talk by Rae
Rogers of Bickleigh Vale. Also, exhibitions of architectural
landscapes by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Lucy
Mahony and Charles Bush self portraits. Venue: McClel¬
land Gallery, Studio Park, McClelland Drive, Langwarrin.
Cost: $25.00 per head which includes gourmet brunch.
Time: 9-OOam to 12 noon Bookings essential: (03) 650 5043

APRIL 1995

ACT & SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH_

• Friday 28

A Palette of Gardens: heritage week seminar on significant
gardens of the ACT. Enquiries: telephone (06) 258 4547

SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS BRANCH_

• Sunday 23

Open days at ‘Hillview’, Sutton Forest, former country
residence of NSW Governors. Cost: $4.00

VICTORIAN BRANCH_

• Saturday 8 and Sunday 9

Bendigo Gardens Tour: with Michael Searby and Kevin
Walsh. Self-drive tour including private and public his¬
toric gardens, strolls, slide-show and lecture. Car pooling
available. Enquiries: (03) 650 5043.

MAY 1995

VICTORIAN BRANCH_

• Saturday ^-Saturday 13

Lord Howe Island. Guided tour with Rodger Elliot.
CoNrACT & Bookings: National Office (03) 650 5043

JUNE 1995

ACT & SOUTHERN NSW BRANCH_

• Watercolour plan workshop. Telephone (064) 535 578

VICTORIAN BRANCH__

• Tuesday 13

Lecture by Helen Armstrong on ‘Australian Gardens:
styles and influences’.

AUGUST 1995

VICTORIAN BRANCH _

• Tuesday 8

Annual General Meeting - Talks by Miffy Gilbert on Wombat
Park, Daylesford and Linda Ford on Delatite, Mansfield.

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