the house sits on the edge of the landscape with no delineation between it and what is beyond, allowing you to be a voyeur into myriad lives. Our first summer there we watched a dingo bitch teach her pups how to hunt kangaroo right outside the kitchen window, honing their skills over those hot months. Particular animals became familiar: ‘Was it Gammy [legged] or Stumpy [tailed]?’ we’d ask, about the goanna in the laundry. These years absorbed in building the house kept me from doing much else on the land. I started dealing with the blackberry infestation—I have hundreds of hectares of it, that bastard plant— and shot dozens of feral pigs. But more importantly, by spending time on the land without taking any major decisions or big moves to change it, I evolved a capacity to see it differently. The native vegetation changed significantly since destocking. Pioneer plants such as Cassinia and Phragmites began to colonise areas and I felt alarmed and conflicted; my European roots told me I needed to act, put on my Fat Controller hat and do something. Instinct told me sit tight; the land will tell me what to do. Before long the Cassinia grew into small trees and I began to walk through spectacular mallee forests
full of emu-wrens, Richard’s pipits and rufous whistlers. Destructive pigs became a memory. The blackberry-control program, which had caused me such frustration, began to be effective. Somewhere along the way I started to see this place not so much as something I owned but as something I was entrusted to protect for future generations. And despite my accountant pestering me about profits, returns, balances, I was fortunate enough that it was not my primary motivation. Yes, economic sustainability was a goal but, importantly, the bottom line didn’t define my thinking; that could come once I’d made room for it. I felt that one antidote to the property’s remoteness and its brutal colonist history was to provide food and shelter where friends, thinkers, experts and folk who thought differently about the land could congregate and share their knowledge; create a social sustainability. Making room for seeing differently has been half my life’s work. Launching into a new paradigm of acting differently is shaping up to be the second act: discovering how this land can become economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. To be continued … n yambulla.com.au
Opposite page Yambulla’s six-bedroom solar-powered lodge brings modern comfort to a remote part of a remote property. The four interconnected buildings, along with a natural water-tank pool, overlook the sweeping valley below. 158
