Greener Pastures
Rob & Sally McCreath won the battle against a mining company, then realised they were in a much bigger war. Photography: Ness Vanderburgh.
The road was a dark scribble disappearing into fog the morning Rob and Sally McCreath drove their rental car through the Meander Valley in northern Tasmania for the first time. "We were on a road that overlooked a block of land and I got out, and I thought, I think I could live here..." Sally laughs, but in a flash, there are tears and apologies. She looks over to her husband, who swallows the lump in his throat. "... and Rob thought the same thing."
They'd found their new home.
This isn't really the beginning of the story, rather the beginning of the end. But to understand the end, you have to go back to the very beginning, before Rob and Sally went searching for a farm 2,083 kilometres from their home in southern Queensland. Before they even moved to Australia and were living on a dairy farm in the far south west of Scotland.
"I had a two-year working holiday trip to the UK and I came from a wool and beef property in South Australia, so I wanted to do a lambing in Scotland," Sally says. She put an ad in the Scottish Farmer newspaper, and Rob answered.
"I'd hurt my knee in rugby training so I needed someone to look after my 160 sheep," he says. "It doesn't sound like very many - but in Scotland, we had them all inside a shed in the middle of winter and they were about to start lambing."
Sally spent most of the next six weeks with her arm up the back end of old, fat ewes on Rob's 600-acre farm Broughton Mains in Galloway. Somehow, the sparks of attraction ignited.
"I just loved Scotland. As soon as I went over the border I felt at home," Sally says. She and Rob kept in touch after she left, and two years later they were married in Australia, before moving to Scotland permanently. Or semi-permanently, to be more correct.
Rob assumed they'd marry and stay there on the family dairy farm - but as time passed, that seemed a less certain future. "Farming was very complicated in Scotland," he says. "It was very intensive with most of the animals inside sheds for about seven months of the year. There were lots of restrictions and regulations and there was a huge amount of office work making sure you complied.
"Australia seemed to be freer, and a more open place to be."
In 1994, Rob and Sally moved the family - which by this point included daughters Jessie, Millie and Hanna - to Felton, in the Darling Downs region of Queensland. "When we first got there, it was just a huge adventure," Sally says. "The sun shone every day; it was warm. They were in one of the worst droughts, but because we hadn't lived through it, we weren't emotionally suffering like everyone else.
"We were naïve and thought it would rain soon enough, but slowly it dawned on us, that the weather really dictated what we could and couldn't do." They'd swapped a reliably cold, wet climate for the opposite: usually hot, often in drought (except when it flooded).
The Felton valley - like most of the Darling Downs - is famously fertile country. Its rich black soil has a high clay content allowing it to absorb and store a lot of moisture, and the region as a whole grows most of the state's grain, pulses and oilseeds. Rob and Sally's 2,500-acre property Prestbury was no exception, and despite the dry conditions that stretched on and off, the pair managed to produce successful wheat, barley and chickpea crops and build a herd of Angus, Santa Gertrudis and Shorthorn cattle. They even took out The Australian Mungbean Championship title in the middle of deep drought, which they attribute to an isolated thunderstorm: "it rained a couple of inches on the mungbean paddock - hardly anyone else got it, it was freakish."
14 years went by, before a neighbour brought over a map detailing plans a coal company had for the valley: "About the dirtiest thing you could possibly imagine," Rob says to describe the $3.5 billion dollar open-cut mine and petro-chemical plant on a site five kilometres from their front gate.
"It's prime agricultural land, there's Aboriginal history, natural wildlife..." Sally adds. "It's ecologically just a beautiful place. So our initial shock was just: how can this be the story?"
Many of the valley's 270 residents gathered in a country hall hand-built by farmers with corrugated iron and local timber. Would they accept the proposal - or oppose it? "People went away to have a think about it," Sally says. "And they came back a few days later..." She chokes up, and looks to Rob, who continues for her: "And we decided we were going to fight."
That shabby hall with peeling off-white paint would hold hundreds of meetings over the next four and a half years. The community established 'Friends of Felton', a group of which Rob became president, supported by a local agronomist and retired school teacher as secretary and treasurer respectively.
"I always think that we were lucky it was such a high-impact project," Rob says. "The fact this was such a nasty project helped us to get more support."
They reached out to other communities besieged by mining activity - Acland, Bulga and Lithgow - to learn of dust plumes, house-rattling explosions and floodlights that turned night into day. They wrote thousands of media releases and letters to newspapers, ambushed political press events, and held protests involving lettuces and wheelbarrows.
"That was our priority - stop the mine," Sally says. "Rob was really spending every minute of the day on the campaign, doing media, researching and things on the farm were not getting done.
"So I stopped work to feed the cattle in the drought. Things were just ticking over on the farm, as was the same on farms everywhere because everyone was just consumed with this fight."
The valley was in a stasis. Improvements and investments ground to a halt, and stress seeped into households.
"Sally gets emotional and that's the effect that this sort of thing has on you," Rob says. "Because it runs your life. And it's had that same effect on hundreds of people, if you go to Felton and ask around.
"At times it could be exciting, and at other times you realise you're not just fighting the mining company... you're up against the government as well."
So no one was more surprised than Rob and Sally, when in 2012 their saviour arrived in the form of Campbell Newman, the then newly-minted Premier of Queensland, who they pressed to uphold his party's election promise to block mining in their valley.
"We got a response, it was a very very thin envelope," Sally's voice wobbles, "and we thought it'll be their usual blah, blah. Opened it up and it said... there'll be no mining.
And that was that.
David beat Goliath in the Felton valley, but was deeply wounded in the battle.
"I think you can see what it's like for us talking about it," Rob says, his words thick with emotion. "There's hundreds of people in that community we fought so closely with, it's hard to... well, you want to get on with your life."
The mining fight hung over Rob and Sally, even as they tackled an arguably bigger adversary. "The thing about droughts in Queensland is you never know when they're going to end," Rob says. "As part of our campaign against the coal mine, we did a lot of study of climate change. And the more I looked at the science of it, the more worried I was getting about staying where we were in Queensland and what the future was going to be like."
After a visit to friends on King Island in the Bass Straight, it became clear what they needed to do. "There was green grass, and fat cattle that didn't yell when the ute drove by," Sally recalls." I was sitting in the back of the ute thinking, there is an alternative for us." They decided to search for greener pastures of their own, and figured Tasmania was as green as they come.
It's been five years since that foggy morning overlooking their new farm near Deloraine, 50 kilometres from Launceston in northern Tasmania, and Rob and Sally have been flat out since transforming what was a rundown former blue gum forestry block. They've replaced the pastures with rye grass, cocksfoot and red and white clover, and planted 1200 native trees - blackwoods, wattles, peppermint gums ("trees grow so fast here - it's incredible," Rob says). They've built a beautiful house, and established a herd of 150 mostly-Angus breeding cows, whose progeny they sell at 18-months.
"You wouldn't believe how much they can eat," Rob smiles. "Because the feed's such good quality - it's like having chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. " He rotates his herd according to the leaf stage of rye grass, ensuring maximum nutrition for the animal, while maintaining the health of the plant.
He's more relaxed now, he says, even if he hasn't escaped mooing cows (but at least it's not because they're hungry). "They yell at you the whole time because they think they're going to get shifted."
Sally's been able to take a step back from farm work, leaving her more time to explore her own interests. In Queensland, she started the wildly-popular Felton Food Festival, and now, she's dived back into the foodie scene with Shelduck Farm Oatcakes, her brand of Scottish staple biscuits often paired with cheese: "I go to markets, and sell quite widely throughout Tasmania."
The Meander valley is known for its cheese, wine and truffles - and Sally's toyed with the idea of hosting pop-up restaurants on the farm, "but it would be difficult to pick a date and know that it was going to be dry." She has plenty to keep her busy otherwise, including running their farm stay.
"The impact of the drought didn't dawn on me until I was down here," she says.
"In Queensland, you're always asking, when's it going to rain? And we'd have 30-second showers and save the water for the garden. Down here, there's water everywhere but it took me a long time to relax with it. I was having a bath and Rob said: you know you can have more than two inches of water in it."
Under an annual average rainfall of one metre, everything thrives, including Rob and Sally McCreath.
Find out more about Shelduck Farm on Instagram @shelduckfarm | shelduckfarm.com
This is a story from Vol.05 of Bush Journal, available now.