Heart of the country

By Larry Schwartz

OUT HERE on the Wimmera, locals cherish the story of the night when the people of Murtoa were so incensed by a vote to locate the Dunmunkle Shire Council in nearby Rupanyup they stole the town hall.

Residents of Rupanyup woke one morning to find the five-roomed, weatherboard building gone. All that remained were the blocks on which it had stood. “Even the diminutive outbuilding was gone,” the Argus reported. “In the summer dust were the footprints of many men, the hoofmarks of many horses, and the wheelmarks of a jinker … towards Murtoa, nine miles away … And there it stayed until it was burned down in 1912.”

Today the small town of Murtoa, 300 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, is battling gamely for its life, despite the slide of shops and services towards the larger regional centre of Horsham.

“If you walk down the street you will see empty shops,” says Jim Hamilton, 58, who farms wheat, cereals and sheep at nearby Lubeck. “Whereas I can remember three grocery shops, we only have one. There were two baker shops; now we have none. There’s one butcher shop left.”

THE SURPRISE of the 18 September state election reflects the deep disaffection of country Victoria with urban Melbourne. Out here in the bush, Spring Street is literally and metaphorically miles away.

Out here on the Wimmera, small towns are struggling as populations dwindle, government services and facilities are lost, children leave town as soon as they finish high school, and the sense of community comes under threat.

But the bush is fighting back. Country people, used to trial by weather, know how to live with adversity and they know how to stick together. Just 2 per cent of Victoria’s population lives in small towns (of fewer than 1000 people) but, as Jeff Kennett discovered, they do things differently there.

Even though the overwhelming majority of Australians live in the cities, these small towns refuse to be forgotten and continue to loom large in our folklore and in perceptions of ourselves.

Ian Hyndman, 59, a retired regional health director and local historian who lives in Beechworth, suggests this is because the essence of Australia can still be found in the country rather than the city.

“I wonder whether they (Australians) have a subconscious feel that the real Australia is in the country and in small towns …

“The essence of Australia is in the countryside. That’s where the gold rush started and that’s where many of our forebears came from in the very early days.”

Whatever Hyndman believes, one thing is certain: Victorian country towns may be in strife but the people who live in them intend to fight.

WE’D SET out, photographer Penny Stephens and myself, beneath a full, orange moon. We planned to loosely follow the route taken by regional planners from Melbourne some 10 years before. They had investigated six small towns in Victoria as part of a study for the then Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

BACK THEN, in 1988, authors Henshall Hansen Associates concluded that small country towns would not remain viable unless they developed strategies to cope with change. As populations declined, services would be lost, undermining each community’s efforts to remain viable.

This is the story, a decade later, of two of those towns included in the study. Both Beechworth (population 2953) in Victoria’s north-east, and Murtoa (population 839 according to the last census but it claims 1000 on its “visitors welcome” sign) in the north-west, have shown a decline in the number of young adults since the study.

Murtoa, on the Wimmera, is a National Party seat, and Beechworth, in Benambra, was retained by the Liberals; both towns understand the full implications of distance from the city.

Eighty-two-year-old Kathleen Crouch from Murtoa sums it up succinctly: “We can tell you about Richmond and Collingwood and Ashburton etcetera, etcetera. But you meet someone in the city and they wouldn’t have a clue where Stawell or Horsham or Murtoa are. And that’s typical, I think.”

THE SIGN welcoming visitors to Murtoa is either out of date or errs on the side of optimism, but you’d hardly call it a dying town. It has fared better in recent years than some, despite the closure of services including two of three banks.

The town was first settled by squatters in the 1840s. The locality was subdivided in the early 1870s.

As you enter town today, you pass a fertiliser depot, cartage contractor, VicGrain bulk storage terminal and cabinet makers in premises that once housed the freezing works for lamb production, built in 1911. On past a rusted, corrugated iron workshop; an old wagon alongside a timber “pioneer hut”.

The redbrick Marma Gully Hotel, with iron-laced broad veranda. Cockatoos squawk in Lake Marma Park, at the entrance of which a bronze digger in slouch hat stands at ease on top of a memorial. The lake is a hidden treasure.

“When we saw it,” wrote the authors of a 1905 publication, The Cyclopaedia of Victoria, “under the influence of a strong south wind, with the blue line of the Grampians in the distance, it was difficult to realise that one was at the very heart of
a . . . most arid region. In fact, the whole of Murtoa presents a charming oasis of trees and vegetation amid the monotonous surrounding country.”

Last year, farmer Jim Hamilton’s family held a party on his brother’s farm to mark their 100th year in the vicinity of Murtoa.

He runs a wheat, cereal and sheep farm, but, as yet, none of his children has taken up the farming life.

His wife, Alex, is a former teacher from Sunshine, in the inner western suburbs of Melbourne. Three of their four children have settled in Melbourne.

The fourth, Rob, 17, has missed out tonight on footy training to work on VCE mathematics studies. He thinks he might take a year off to work on the farm then study commerce.

“You’ve got to be philosophical about it,” Jim Hamilton says of his youngest son. “If they don’t want to be farmers, I wouldn’t be saying you’ve got to do it to carry on the tradition.

“Even the machinery dealers are rationalising. They’re closing the smaller towns down and building up the bigger ones.”

Peter Adler, 53, farms canola, peas, wheat, barley and lentils outside Murtoa. A big man with an easy grin, he stoops slightly and, lifting an orange cap to reveal a receding grey tangle, tells you the surname is German. “It means eagle. In my case, bald eagle.”

There had been little rain in the past few days. “Last year wasn’t going to be too bad, but there was a freeze at the end and that knocked us rotten.”

He’s filling up his blue ute at a service station. In the back of the ute is a dog called Blue, whose name echoes lines from an old folk song. “All I’ve done is fed and pat him,” Adler says. “What a faithful dog.”

Adler has been spraying crops. “It’s such a mild winter, I’m putting out insecticide for lucerne flea and red-legged earth mite. In an ordinary cold winter, they’re not even around.”

He, too, laments the decline in facilities. “There’s no dealers here,” he explains. “If I want O rings for my filters, it’s silly coming to town. But in Horsham you’ll go and do other things, which is sad for the town. You do other shopping and, hey, they miss out again.”

Adler’s forebears came to open country. There was no need to clear. He proceeds to trace the lineage. “Johann Gottlieb, Ernst August, Frank, me.” He is the fourth generation in a family that had migrated to Australia in the 1840s and came up from Winslow, near Warrnambool, before the township was subdivided in the early 1870s.

Almost 130 years on, they’re still on the land. Adler says he “forgot to marry until late”. He has two sons: Stephen, 8, and Luke, 6. He’ll let them decide whether they want to to farm. “That is for them to decide. I’ll throw the options to them.”

THAT NIGHT, we meet Adler’s wife, Trish, at the recently renovated Mechanics Institute Hall in Duncan Street. One hundred and sixty women from as far afield as Jung and Marnoo will dine on chicken and corn soup, roast pork, roast beef, carrots, peas, cauliflower and roast potatoes. For dessert there’s blackberry pie or fruit salad.

They call this a rural women’s dinner. They held a similar event in Lubeck and it was so well attended they were encouraged to meet again.

On each table is a trivia quiz. What is Elle Macpherson’s husband’s name? Name Tim Fischer’s sons. Who is the only female member of the AFL tribunal? In what year and how did Patsy Cline die? How many toes are there on the front paw of a working dog?

The lights go off after dinner and the women are treated to a slide show where they hear the local GP talk about a few years spent in faraway Zambia.

Five high-school students who have just helped wait on tables sit down to a meal in the foyer. “All my friends they reckon it’s a bit of a hole,” says Loren Reading, 17-year-old daughter of a Murtoa farmer and a school laboratory technician. “But I reckon it’s good living in the country because I love being outdoors and stuff. But all my other friends can’t wait to go to uni and get out of here.”

There’s much ado in the kitchen. Soap suds and gleaming dishes. Carolyn West heads a group of volunteers catering for weddings, dinners, afternoon teas, an annual agricultural show and other functions at the Mechanics Hall. Eight women are assisting her tonight.

West came to Murtoa from Horsham in 1966. Her husband works as a farm laborer on a property owned by a Uniting Church minister. Once he had a job at the flour mill. But the flour mill closed years ago.

A daughter in her 30s has come back to live in the town. West’s son-in-law has a business in Horsham. Houses are inexpensive here, she says. “You can buy what you want in these little towns.”

The catering tonight is voluntary; it’s “not on” to expect pay for helping out in this way. Community spirit is as vigorous as ever, West says. “We’ve lost a lot of the government departments,” she says. “We still have our bank. Even though we’re losing all of this, I think the atmosphere in the town is very strong. People seem to believe that a town should stick together.”

The pluck and determination to endure are apparent in a song to Murtoa, penned by a local man, Peter Janetzki, for the town’s 125th anniversary year in 1997.

…Now the SEC and Rly’s have been relinquished The PMG and Land Department gone Some banks, the hossies closed, without our say in it – Let’s stick in there and make this town our own.

“YES IT’S a girl,” says a sign in the window of the Golden Era Service Station. “Claudia is her name. All well! Dad.”

With a population of 2953 last census night, Beechworth was the largest of the six towns in the regional towns study. It prides itself on being the state’s “best preserved” town.

Indeed, there has been little change to its streetscape of the 1880s.

James Toole, a Beechworth postal clerk in his mid-40s, and voluntary information officer (“I don’t know dates and all that type of thing but I love my town”) conjures up the past.

“When the mist is down and the horse and carts are coming down the main street, sometimes you can’t see it but you can still hear it, you’re back in the 1860s to 1880s. And you can walk around on a clear moonlit night and you can imagine the tents and the noise and all that sort of thing.”

The way he says it, you might think this was a caricature of “olde” Victoria. Not so, he says. Nor does he appreciate hearing it referred to as a tourist town. Beechworth is for its residents, not just visitors, he insists.

“It’s not Sovereign Hill. It’s not Mickey Mouse land.”

The town was founded only after the discovery of gold at nearby Spring Creek in February 1852, by which time 8000 diggers were camped in the area.

A post office, newspaper, hospital, school and tannery had been built by the end of the 1850s. The prison that now holds 110 inmates and employs 52 staff, nursing home, flour mill, museum and railway were completed in the following decade. By 1874, there were 61 licensed hotels in or near the town.

After the gold boom, the population declined. But the town buildings remained intact. A big proportion of the population earned their wages at public institutions, particularly the May Day Hills psychiatric hospital, which has since closed. LaTrobe University has purchased the 106-hectare site and is creating a campus overlooking the town for short-term courses in tourism, hospitality, viticulture and sports management.

Beechworth’s interests appear to have been bolstered. The August 1994 merger with Yackandandah, Rutherglen and Chiltern to form the Beechworth-based Indigo Shire is considered preferable by many to the prospect of being part of Wodonga City Council, as had earlier been intended.

A $2 million State Government-funded development project is also due for completion in May 2001. It includes restoration of buildings such as the local museum, town hall and courthouse.

WITH A yellow sun and wings emblazoned on a six-pointed blue star, the Creative Healing Centre (naturopath, homeopath, hypnotherapist) is offering 10-minute head/neck massages for just $5.

The African Heritage store has sculptures of hippos and frogs, lions and guinea fowl.

The Parlor & Pantry serves antipasto, focaccia, cashew nut and broccoli souffle roulade or chicken jamboneaux.

As if in defiance, a corner store advertises “Deep Fried Mars Bars, $1.50”.

John “Snowy” Anderson, 69, has cycled to work at his barber shop for 46 years. “There’s been a lot of change over the years,” he’ll tell you. “Different hairstyles and all sorts of things. I nearly went out of business when the Beatles hit the country with their long hair and what have you. It just got so quiet. Fellows who I thought would never grow their hair long, just let it grow.”

Fortunately for him, there was work to tide him over the influence of the Fab Four. He was still a boy when his family moved to Beechworth from Albury in 1938. He still has his original leather-seated barber’s chair.

He’s a tobacconist, too, selling cigarettes and chewing gum along with Rapid Shave and Brillianteen.

PETER CADDY, 42, surveys the town from outside the 1853 post-office building on Beechworth’s main street, a scene he argues is more obviously Australian than Bourke Street mall, in Melbourne’s CBD.

“You find out very quickly coming from a city that there are certain rules that you have to adhere to,” he says. “For a start, you respect the valley patriarchs and matriarchs. You make sure that you are respectful to them and you call them Mr and Mrs before you are told that you can call them anything else. And you don’t underestimate their power in towns like this because it’s very real.

“You just learn that there’s a real pecking order in place … I’ve found that people who have come here recently and have stepped out of line or have gone too far with people that they shouldn’t, get slapped on the wrist well and truly.”

An artist and relative newcomer to Beechworth, he compares Australia’s enduring image as a rural society to America’s infatuation with the Wild West.

“I think it’s because we’re a young country,” he says.

“But also you’ve got to see that our greatest symbolic actions were about pioneering … our identity was such an intense and powerful thing that was set up last century. I think that’s so ingrained in people’s minds. They hang on to it.”

Bob Simpson is a short sturdy man with a bushy beard that gives him some resemblance to the profile of Ned Kelly that graces everything from fridge magnets to the spoons on the table behind him. “Give it a hundred years and he’ll be canonised,” he says of Ned.

His desk is in the entrance to the old court house in which Kelly three times stood at the dock and where Kelly’s mother was sentenced to jail.

Simpson, who manages the building, came up from Melbourne several years ago to research Australian connections with participants in the American Civil War.

Thirteen people were sentenced to death from the dock. The executioners, including Elijah Upjohn, the man who eventually would hang Kelly, doubled as public floggers.

Kelly’s mother was sentenced here to three years’ hard labor for wounding a constable with intention to kill.

Simpson is passionate about Australian history. “We could say: `This was the place where Isaac Isaacs started his law career, Australia’s first Australian-born Governor General’. And people would say, Big deal.

“You might mention that this is where the first woman in Victoria, Elisabeth Scott, was sentenced to death. Big deal.

“But when you say you can stand on the exact spot where Mr Kelly stood … they say, Wow. So, he’s a big part of the Australian psyche. So you pump Kelly.”

FUNERAL directors Mary and Allan Hawker were dairy farmers in Nathalia until they came to Beechworth. “We started from the ground up,” says Mary, 62.

“We had one vehicle and one coffin and our name, and in 15 years we’ve got a solid little business now.”

The corpses often remain overnight in a viewing room in their house. There’s pictures of family in the room in which they receive us; an image of the late Princess of Wales behind glass.

“We’re very close to the community,” Mary Hawker says. “They put a great trust in (us). We can’t go up the street and do our shopping. People always have something they wish to ask or talk about. We actually think it’s quite beautiful. It’s quite a privilege really.”

For much of the past decade, the Anglican rector of Beechworth, Father Ron Beattie, has ministered from the imposing, late 1850s Christchurch, high up on the main thoroughfare, Ford Street.

Beechworth, he says, has endured its share of missed opportunities. The town’s history would have been significantly different had it been on the main rail line between Wangaratta and Wodonga, for example, and not just a branch line through Yackandandah.

“Had they come up the hill and through here, bingo, we’d have been in business. But they didn’t. They stuck to the lowlands.”

He is not impressed with the recent clamor for tourist dollars. “The tourism is the froth and bubble on the top,” Beattie says.

“But underneath, there’s a real agony and a real sense of brokenness, because of all these potentials that we’ve had in the past that have all been lost …”

Beattie says there is grieving in the parish about the demise of May Day Hills and the downsizing of the Ovens & Murray Hospital for the Aged. Jobs were lost and frail, institutionalised members of the community sent elsewhere.

“This (tourism) is the new gold. And there is the same, if you like, cut-throat attitude…”

You drive down down from Beechworth, 580 metres above sea level, and on to the flatlands. There are two-way roads so narrow, you must move across into the dirt to let oncoming vehicles pass. A flour mill. Grain silos. A truck at the side of the road has spilled a load of clover hay.

Gold had brought prosperity. But the gold was soon gone. “Tourism will run out, too,” Beattie says,”I’m sure it will.”

You drive away from towns where the young long to get out and get on with their lives, away to somewhere else.

The Age, 09-Oct-1999