RESTORING THE LAND

his bowel. After a desperate day spent lighting bonfires to attract a passing fishing boat, Eleanor and her son were picked up from the jetty and taken to a doctor. Her baby survived but it was clear remote island life was not all paradise.

Eleanor did not shy away from the hardship. Armed with only a well-thumbed copy of Home Doctor to refer to for advice on treating ailments, the dangers of living in such isolation faded as Eleanor’s confidence grew. She gradually lost that consuming fear of accidents and sickness in the wilds. ‘I was beginning to believe that I would be given strength to deal with them.’

Eleanor and John raised four children on the island: Venetia, Robert, Warwick and Ingrid. The children were educated by correspondence and then went to boarding school in Victoria for their later school years.

While living on the island, the family experienced many challenges including witnessing shipwrecks, losing beloved animals and making dangerous sea journeys. They relied on infrequent air and sea dispatches for supplies and medical assistance.

Although Eleanor was in charge of the house, she preferred being outside. She wrote that she ‘regarded a house merely as a place which one must enter after dark, the mind and body still hankering for the skies and the hills and the lovely living earth beneath one’s feet’. She often came home at 3 am with flounders slung over her shoulder after a solo spearfishing expedition. Her daughter Ingrid recalls that her mother did not like housework very much. From her Hawthorn home in Melbourne, Ingrid said that Eleanor thought ‘life is too short to worry about the dusting’.

Eleanor would read the Paris newspaper as she did the washing-up. She got the whole family learning Spanish via Linguaphone courses while they ate their meals. They listened to symphonies while weeding the carrot patch and absorbed some of the latest in poetry and literature as they waited for the billy to boil on the camp fire.

Eleanor wrote two books about the family’s life on Three Hummock: Escape to an Island and An Island Affair. She dictated romance novels while walking on the beach and typed while standing at a bench, decades before standing desks were a thing.

A quest to live a remarkable life, instead of an ordinary one, was what called Eleanor and John Alliston to Three Hummock Island. And it was a quest realised. Eleanor and John Alliston lived on Three Hummock Island from 1951 to 2002. Eleanor died in 2003 and John the year after.

Today the island offers eco-accommodation and is accessed only by charter flight or boat. It’s an experience for those looking to escape the ‘bumperto-bumper existence’, if only for a few days. n threehummockisland.com.au

Opposite page Photographs from the family’s album show the kind of life that the island offered, farming livestock and having adventures in their windswept and isolated haven from a ‘bumper-to-bumper existence’.

PART 1 of a series for Galah about Jim Osborne’s journey to create Yambulla:

Words Jim Osborne Photography Charlie Maslin; Hugh Stewart

a socially, environmentally and economically sustainable property on a remote block he inherited in the far south of New South Wales.

Ten years ago my sisters and I divvied up Nungatta, a 5000 hectare cattle station that lay about midway between Bombala and Mallacoota, as the crow ies. My family had owned it (yet never lived there) since the late 1940s. I hived o about 1500 hectares of the remotest part of the remote property. The girls sold the rest.

The part of the farm I chose to keep, paddocks known as Top and Bottom Yambulla, was the most unspoilt. It had a romanticism: a valley, surrounded by mountains I didn’t know the names of.

The idea landed while Dad and I were doing his last muster, he at 82, me at 42; just the two of us, poking after cows on horseback. I remember marvelling at the contour of the land. It felt sculpted by a giant’s hand. A few years later, after his death, as I dragged my belongings over the hills and into the Yambulla valley, I’m quite sure I was unaware of how much this land would change me.

For the past 200 years, Nungatta had been home to farmers, but also to Aboriginal massacres, hardship, alcohol, grit, boom, sweat and decline. My urban husband, George, gently (and wisely) encouraged me to consider a new beginning rather than grimly holding on to a chequered past that we didn’t relate to. Together we wondered how we could look at this land di erently.

To say that I had a vision at that point undervalues the evolving nature of this project. The only sustainable way I could see to keep cattle was through cell-grazing. This would require investment in fencing and water infrastructure. And the more I looked at this wide expanse of valley before me, the less inclined I felt to criss-cross it with fences.

I decided to build a house. Left to my own devices I perhaps would have built something a bit more ephemeral, an encampment, but George gently guided me into something more substantial. It’s as if he knew how important it would become to bring people here. Making them comfy, dry, warm, well fed and valued was essential to them coming back—the house couldn’t be a tent.

For eight years I busied myself building: felling and milling trees for timber; camping in a tent, then a shipping container, then a shed; hiring and ring architects and builders; staring down growing debts. My sister Catherine says we all have one ‘build’ in us; I seriously admire anyone who has more. What we ended up with is a spread; a series of ve connected timber pavilions with six bedrooms set along the contour so every room faces north and embraces the wonderful landscape.

Aside from a few planted courtyards there is no garden, >