Tag Archives: history

New poster: Imagining Yarnauwi before colonisation

13 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in art & craft, ecology, history, regeneration, trees, waterways

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Click to view a printable, A3 version of the poster.

Over the last few years, we’ve spent a great deal of time learning about the landscape of Yarnauwi, and the broader southwestern Fleurieu Peninsula. This has been essential for us in helping us to understand how the landscape works, and therefore how we can best work to ensure its health and function. We’re inspired by a statement from the 2015 Greenhorns New Farmer’s Almanac, where Connor Stedman writes, “Farms, forests, and grasslands can store and regenerate natural capital again, rebuilding the ecological fabric that is the ultimate source of our prosperity and survival. But to know how to undertake that stewardship, it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as the planted field.”

In this spirit, in this poster we’ve tried to imagine and illustrate the landscape of Yarnauwi and the surrounding area as it may’ve appeared before colonisation. It summarises our reading and research, as well as our experiences exploring more intact local landscapes. It’s a work of imagination, it’s definitely not to scale, but we hope it helps communicate some of the complexity of a functioning landscape and the interactions of the Kaurna in maintaining its function and ecological health over millennia. Then, as now, the southwestern Fleurieu was a cultural landscape, maintained through intentional management practices. This poster is also an effort to acknowledge our own place in the long history of this landscape. Continue reading →

The Wet Season 2016

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in ecology, livestock, trees, waterways

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The first big storm saw the dam fill and rivers broaden to ten times their normal size for an afternoon. A neighbour’s creek crossing dissolved in the flow, the rock and rubble broadcast along the river bottom. The second big storm saw our rainwater tank, still awaiting a shed to fill it, lifted vertically from its nest of stardroppers, vaulting a tractor and four or five fences before being swept off in the swollen waters of the Anacotilla River, carried across two properties and wedged under a red gum. The third storm came with days of warnings, threats of winds over 120km/h and rainfall to rival all of the previous deluges. It left all of South Australia without electricity, the farm a sucking, gurgling swamp, and me walking home through a darkened, scrambling city.

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Mist in the valleys

It’s been a demanding few months on the farm. The persistent moisture has made the ground unworkable, most of the farm inaccessible except on foot and the weather generally hostile to both our motivation and ability to do anything useful. The vast quantities of rain we’ve received however, have meant that moisture has permeated deep into the subsoil, so we console ourselves with the hope that as the weather warms, our tree plantings (including those from earlier this winter) will rocket skywards. Continue reading →

Book review: Going ‘Feral’ with George Monbiot

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in ecology, regeneration, reviews, trees, waterways

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17160008Our experience and vision for Yarnauwi has always sat in a tension between the wild and the cultivated. On one hand, we’re seeking to restore habitat long altered, while on the other, we’re determined to cultivate food, through both livestock and horticulture. It’s hard to say if one holds priority over the other, and, at risk of lurching into cliche, we try to ‘listen to the land’. Connor Stedman’s Essay on Soil in the 2015 Greenhorns’ New Farmer’s Almanac offers ideas that resonated with us, writing that to know how to be a steward of a landscape, “…it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore, and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as with the planted field” (2015, p. 35).

Stedman’s assertions provide a concise summary of our motivations for obsessing over the past ecological history of our particular patch, and theorising about the patterns that might’ve governed the landscape before colonisation. Fixated as we are on what was here before, there’s much to delight in in George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (Penguin, 2013). In it, Monbiot confronts what he describes as ‘ecological boredom’ brought about by the absence of the wild, and asserts the need to ‘rewild’ our landscapes. His vision of rewilding is not one of meticulous restoration of past habitats, but rather letting landscapes return to their own ecological stability. Continue reading →

Landscape history and future planning

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in ecology, history, planning

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Recently we’ve been obsessing a bit about the history of our landscape (here, here, and even here, for example). It comes as the consequence of the last few years of reading and thinking about how Australia’s landscape and water systems have changed over time, but we hope it’s not purely an intellectual exercise. Understanding how our landscape was 200 years ago acts as a good guide for planning its future potential and limitations. By attempting to unravel the threads of actions and consequences that have reshaped these hills and valleys over the last couple of centuries, we can also not just address symptoms (such as treating an erosive headcut with a Zuni Bowl), but can also have a go at working on the causes of dysfunction in our soil, water and ecosystems. A lofty goal, but as Wes Jackson quips, “if your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough!”

Landscape History - New Page

This spaghetti-and-meatballs flowchart is our first go at representing what might have happened in our neighbourhood over the last 180-odd years, compiled from reading, observations, historical records and discussions. It provides us with a list of things to do as we attempt to address elements of this (for example, in this year’s tree planting, we’re inoculating our seedlings with beneficial fungi to restore mycorrhizal networks). We expect this chart to be tweaked, adjusted and rewritten over time as we discover new ideas or revise our assumptions. Perhaps a next step might be to construct a sequel that shows how we might attempt to improve some of this stuff.

Are there connections, consequences or other things we’ve missed, overstated or got plain wrong? We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

The Salvage Season

23 Monday Mar 2015

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The steely gaze of a doll, complete with an electrical tape necklace.

With the chilling of the air, it’s time for us to don our gloves and get stuck into mining the junk that lines the banks and bed of our erosion gullies. It’s become an annual tradition to pick a path through chest-high phalaris, filling bags with debris. It’s scratchy, dusty work, with plastic milk bottles and the remains of plastic bags collapsing into confetti with the gentlest of touches. Yet despite the discomfort, we can’t help but have a forensic fascination with what we unearth. Each discovery is a cryptic clue into the lives of our predecessors, those who decided that the headwaters of a creek would be the best place for their unwanted bric-a-brac.

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A broken clock amid bones. We’ll leave you to come up with your own metaphors.

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Maintain the rain! Piecing together the past to imagine a future

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in ecology, history, planning, regeneration, trees, waterways

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It’s been a dry year on the Fleurieu Peninsula. After the inundation of 2013, 2014’s rainfall came in almost 200mm shy of the year before, and about 100mm short of the average. By February 2015, the dam had receded to a few centimetres of sludge, and the water carter had come to top up the stock water tanks. While there’s no doubt that the Fleurieu Peninsula has had the Mediterranean pattern of dry summers and cool, wet winters for some time, recently I’ve begun to wonder whether this pattern has shifted towards greater aridity as successive land-uses have cleared the landscape.

Curruckalinga, looking over St. Vincent’s Gulf, 1846, George French Angas, depicting a mosaic of woodland and open grassland. From the description: “This view is taken from the rocky hills near Mr Kemmis’s Station, to the northward of Rapid Bay … The undulating appearance of the country here represented, together with the singular manner in which the trees are dotted about in all directions over the landscape … principally ‘casuarinae’ or she-oak, with ‘eucalyptus’.” From the collection of the State Library of South Australia, B15276/33.

At the time of European colonisation, the Fleurieu Peninsula was most likely covered with a mosaic of woodland, forest and grasslands, maintained through Aboriginal burning and land management practices. In his paper on the discovery and settlement of the Fleurieu (1986), Rob Linn draws from the diaries of settlers in his descriptions of the landscape of the South Western Fleurieu. Writing in 1838, William Giles described the landscape around Rapid Bay, as “a most beautiful valley, the soil of great depth covered with most luxuriant herbage … on the sides of these hills we found plenty of keep for sheep, and wherever the grass had been burnt in these places it was looking beautifully verdant … fine land, excellent water, plenty of timber …” This was echoed by John Stephens in 1839, describing the “country from Cape Jervis upwards” as “very picturesque” and “well-timbered” (Linn 1986). Continue reading →

Visions of the Past: historical photos of Anacotilla

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in history

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4567. Anacotilla Bridge

Anacotilla Bridge on Main South Road, with Lorna Kelly (riding side saddle), E.C. and G.F. Kelly (c1896). Image courtesy of the Yankalilla & District Historical Society.

Our farm, Yarnauwi, is one lot of the once expansive Anacotilla pastoral property. Just over the ridge, in the Anacotilla river valley, are the old workers’ cottages, and on the hillside opposite, the sprawling homestead and outbuildings. We’ve recently been corresponding with the Yankalilla and District Historical Society about our interest in the property’s history, and they shared with us a number of photographs from the late 1800s onwards.

4563. Anacotilla

“Anacotilla”, Second Valley, home of A.C. Kelly in the 1880s. Image courtesy of the Yankalilla & District Historical Society.

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The Anacotilla cottage and outbuildings, 2014, viewed from Main South Road, near Paradise Drive. While the cottage has undergone substantial additions and renovations, the original two-room dwelling still exists at its centre.

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The Fleurieu in the 50s and 60s: A Second Time at Second Valley

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in exploring, history

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Second Valley jetty, looking north towards Normanville.

Second Valley jetty in the 1960s, looking north towards Normanville. 

In this special guest post, Joel’s dad Jeff Catchlove shares some of his memories and photographs from camping trips to the South-Western Fleurieu in the 1950s and 60s.

Second Valley has always been close to my heart. I’ve just turned 70 and reminiscence is inevitable. Our childhood was unencumbered – most of us were poor, though we didn’t know it. There was no TV but we just as eagerly listened to Biggles, Hop Harrigan, the Goons and Hancock’s Halfhour on ‘the wireless’. We also played outdoors every day, both at school and at home. Children’s books were limited to Enid Blyton, Captain W E Johns and Eagle or Daily Mail Annuals. We dressed in suits to go to ‘town’ on the trolley bus or train and the family acquired its first car when we were ten or so years old. That revolutionised the possibilities of where we could go as a family. Our FJ Holden quickly ushered in trips to Mt Gambier, the Great Ocean Rd, even Queensland so my dad and we could visit his Air Force mates again.

Camping at Second Valley in the 1960s, with a week's worth of rations.

Camping at Second Valley in the 1960s, complete with a week’s worth of rations.

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Yarnauwi: A Kaurna name for the farm

20 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by in events, regeneration

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In August 2014, Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi granted us the name Yarnauwi to describe the landscape of our farm. We approached Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, a body of Kaurna people and linguists dedicated to the revival of the Kaurna language, for a property name as a way of acknowledging the enduring connection of the Kaurna nation with the landscape of the South Western Fleurieu.

Bald hills

Continue reading →