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Dr Susan Downes, 76, bought a 200-hectare farm near York, Western Australia, 11 years ago as a retirement plan and is now restoring it to the bushland explorer Ensign Robert Dale saw in 1830. She aims to see a fully restored landscape from Mount Mackie's summit in 2030.
A retired obstetrician who spent decades delivering babies in remote desert communities is now leading an ambitious conservation project on her 200-hectare farm in Western Australia's wheatbelt.
Dr Susan Downes, 76, bought the property 20 kilometres north of York 11 years ago as a vague retirement plan to spend time in nature, as she had as a child. She has since turned most of it over to nature. The farm centres on Mount Mackie, a 300-metre-high hill named after William Henry Mackie, an early settler in the Swan River Colony.
History Of Mount Mackie Discovery
From its summit in 1830, European explorer Ensign Robert Dale had his first sighting of the fertile Avon Valley, which he hoped might one day be farmed to feed Perth's colonists, who were starving through their first year. A plaque on the road to Downes' property was installed by the York Historical Society to commemorate Dale's discovery. She only noticed it after buying the farm.
She said: It wasn't until I'd bought the farm that I noticed this old rusty sign saying Historic site, 500 metres. It said, You are looking at Mt Mackie and then it gave the history of it. I thought, The agent didn't tell me that. It made it even more important that I should be a custodian of this place.
When Downes stood on the summit, she saw what the colonists had envisioned: a mosaic of fields and healthy crops stretching to the horizon, vivid green with barley and wheat and fluorescent yellow in canola harvest time. But her intention is to take her land back to the colonial vista of Dale's era and the intact landscape he saw, covered with bushland of incredible diversity that sustained unique birds and animals.
The former GP obstetrician has become a full-time conservationist in her small corner of a district that, over a century, was almost entirely cleared for agriculture. She has joined a network of bush carers and organisations including Landcare, BirdLife and the WA Wildflower Society. She has grown to admire this mass movement of people caring for nature, seeing herself as a foot soldier in a growing army.
Childhood Roots In Wheatbelt Region
At 76, she knows she has limited time to make her contribution, but it feels right to have come full circle, back to the WA wheatbelt where she spent many summers as a child on relatives' farms. Downes said: My uncle Athol was a glorious man who taught me about animals. He would kill a sheep and dissect it for me, show me all the organs.
And down at my uncle Jack's farm they had a dairy stud; the vet would come out for a tricky delivery of a calf and I used to help out. When her brother noticed a farm for sale in the Avon Valley, she went to look. The clincher was the hill behind the homestead that her Indigenous friends told her was a spiritual place. She said: It's very significant for them as Ballardong country.
They all say it's spiritual healing land, which plays into my own life theme as a doctor. So the land became an even bigger draw to me than the house, even though it's rocky and degraded from being grazed for 150 years. Downes is quietly nurturing an ambitious dream. In 2030, exactly 200 years after Dale's first sighting, she hopes to stand on the summit of Mount Mackie and see a restored landscape from fence-line to fence-line.
Downes was busily dividing her time between an emergency department role and flying to remote desert communities for women's clinics when she thought: I want to live rurally, I want an old house with a little bit of land, maybe an acre. But I didn't realise my farm had 500 acres, or 200 hectares, attached to it. I thought, I can't possibly deal with all that! What am I going to do with it?
For several years, she found herself restoring the old stockyards, repairing the historic shearing shed and successfully running a flock of 500 sheep, including up to 300 lambs. Mostly, I did a lot of sheep obstetrics, she says, laughing at the irony. I only sold the sheep last year. The barley crop in the lower paddocks is sharecropped by a neighbour, so that works out well.
Restoring Denuded Paddock Landscapes
That has left Downes with time to tackle the tougher job of restoring the farm's denuded paddocks. It is challenging terrain, which she drives around in a 4WD utility that strains up steep slopes and around rock outcrops. As she jolts past, she points out stands of vegetation. She said: This is remnant York gum bushland, with jam wattle and wandoo eucalypt growing on the upper parts.
Gradually, we'll fill it all in. She started out alone in her tractor, spraying and then ripping the soil in order to hand-plant seedlings in the furrows. She said: You can only do that in little pockets, little mosaics, because higher up it's just too rocky. Otherwise, it's pickaxe stuff.
Volunteer Army Supports Restoration
There's a lot of people who think I'm stupid, she adds, with an expression that suggests she doesn't much mind. Downes has grown to rely on a small army of volunteers, aged eight to 80, who have assembled around the restoration project. She said: We've got about 80 on our Friends of Mount Mackie list. I'm grateful.
I couldn't do this without them. She said: We've planted about 45,000 trees already, over five planting seasons. I would say survival is more than 40 per cent. It's daunting at times, but I believe if we concentrate on small areas at a time, eventually we'll fill it all in with York gum and jam wattle and two or three types of m.
Before her conservation work, Downes won accolades for decades of delivering babies and tending to women's gynaecological needs in desert communities and on remote islands. She raised two sons and a stepson and nursed her husband with lymphoma, then her mother, then her late partner, who developed sudden-onset dementia. She also has four grandchildren.
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theage:Susan bought a rural property as a ‘vague retirement plan’. Now she’s using it to reverse historyThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Mount Mackie Western Australia Wheatbelt Land Conservation Revegetation
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