Dry, windswept, a landscape where the occasional rabbit has largely replaced the roos and the sheep, Mt Hope Station is slowly, patiently and, at times, painstakingly being coaxed back into life.
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Because, in its heyday, this forgotten corner of regional Victoria sat at the crossroads of colonial history.
Today Cohuna doctor Peter Barker owns Mt Hope and says he is responsible for the next chapter in this distinctly Australian story.
And occasionally he lets friends, and the odd paying customers, immerse themselves in an experience right out of the history books.
Such as Burke and Wills staying in the homestead on their way to legendary disaster — and leaving behind a bullet-shattered window as a memento of the visit. The bullet hole is still there, and you can sleep in the same room they used.
“Apparently some of the camels Burke and Wills brought with them scared the horses, which fled into the wilderness, and they offered local shepherds some rum to round them up,” Peter says.
“Which they duly did, at some effort, and then decided they didn’t want a bit of rum, they wanted a whole keg.
“The ensuing debate ended up with a shot being fired — the one which legend says went through the window, before the dispute was settled, and no-one was harmed.”
Bushranger Ned Kelly and Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who would sentence him to death, were both at the property at the same time, but would not meet until that fateful trial in Melbourne.
High-level talks surrounding the discovery of gold and the introduction of miners’ licences, leading to the Eureka Rebellion, took place there behind closed doors, with luminaries such as Sir William Stawell — the first attorney-general of Victoria — and Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe both regulars at Mt Hope.
Rolf Boldrewood, author of Robbery Under Arms, married the owner’s sister and may well have drawn inspiration for his writing from his time in the area as the station was also on the Cobb & Co coach run. Boldrewood eventually purchased a station of his own, called Murrabit Run, closer to Lake Boga.
Henry Lawson, on viewing a series of paintings of Mt Hope Station, would refer to them as “portraits of wealth”. And while there is no record of Banjo Paterson ever visiting, local wits suggest his Man from Snowy River could well have been based on the great kangaroo hunt there, staged for Governor George Bowen in the 1870s.
According to the Pyramid Hill Historical Society, a Robert Irvine recorded the hunt, and its story was first published in the Inglewood Advertiser.
“All the bosses from the adjoining stations, as well as their boundary riders, turned up. What a splendid class of men they were. Richard Goldsborough, a giant of a man, some six feet four inches tall, James Booth, over six feet, and a powerful man; McCormack of Gannawarra, another giant well over six feet with tremendous shoulders; Walsh of Torrumbarry, a man over six feet also; McPherson of Gunbower, a very tall man with a magnificent beard, which parted in the middle and streamed over each shoulder like a horse’s mane when he rode against the wind. Another big man I must mention was big Bill Dunn, a Mt Hope boundary rider, and an old English gamekeeper, who had spent much time hunting roos with five or six dogs. He used to ride a brown pony, and his feet nearly touched the ground. He was all legs, like a Queensland cornstalk.”
It could be straight from Paterson’s own pen.
Irvine recorded there were about 100,000 sheep on the Mt Hope run — and an estimated 200,000 kangaroos.
“We started to cut the timber for the yard and fence, and with the aid of a good bullock team we had them finished in a week. The yard, made from treetops, was about 12 feet high, and the wings five or six feet high and a quarter of a mile long, the fence forming the other side,” he recounted.
“Some 20 men and boys turned up and on Saturday we were called by the cook at daylight, horses were saddled … breakfast was swallowed hurriedly, and all was in readiness when the final orders were issued. [We were] instructed to go west and after travelling a certain distance to turn in towards the swamp. All went well for a while and the roos we saw hopped in the right direction. As we neared the scrub, they became more numerous, and we began to crack our whips and yell. We had ridden into the roo camping ground, and they were there in the thousands. We all went stark mad, yelling and shouting, and the further we went the more roos we could see ahead of us.”
“At last we left the scrub, and what a sight met our eyes! Thousands of hopping creatures, all sizes, all ages. It seemed good progress was being made but our hopes were doomed to failure as presently a solid mass of kangaroos on a front a mile wide swerved away from the yard and raced straight for the other side where the boss and his men were stationed. The roos were maddened with excitement and resembled a tornado. Nothing but a 20-foot wall would have stopped them, and presently the order was given to get out of their path. Some of those who tried to stop the breakaway, including the boss, estimated their number at 50,000, consequently the impossibility of dealing them will be realised.
“Thus ended one of the greatest kangaroo drives the world has ever witnessed. Not one went near the yard. Things done in too great a hurry are rarely successful; we should have had a drive before we built the yard, and the boss agreed it should have been built in the scrub on the edge of the swamp where it could not be seen.”
Peter Barker smiles at all the stories, even points out some of the first structures on the station, where thick wooden doors had holes cut in them for guns to shoot from in case of attacks by local Aboriginal people — which never happened.
He is not just dedicated to the task of restoration; he is committed to the whole concept — and context — of Mt Hope.
The story goes, he says, Mt Hope (which squats in its setting, a soaring 202m above sea level) was once the headquarters of one of the most successful and long-lasting of the sheep and cattle stations that sprawled across south-eastern Australia during the squatting era.
“Major Mitchell, then surveyor-general of NSW, named the first hill he had seen for many a mile, Mt Hope, because of the spirit of optimism engendered by the view from its summit,” Peter explains.
“Having climbed to the top of nearby Pyramid Hill on a sunny morning in June, 1836, his optimism seemed to grow to certainty as he eulogised in his journal on the riches stretched out before him, and he coined the term Australia Felix — happy Australia,
“The first ‘home’ was built on the northern slope of Mt Hope 180 years ago — and was made of slabs of wood as building materials were scarce, not just at Mt Hope but as far away as Melbourne.
“In 1858 a serious homestead was constructed over the rise to the south, with red bricks made on the property.
“The kitchen and scullery were separate from the main building, as they did in those days, fearing kitchen fires spreading, and the remains of the old cooking range, believed to be from a ship’s galley, still sit there.”
The original roof was shingles, which were left in place when a galvanised iron roof was installed, as a form of insulation.
Eventually gas lighting was provided from elaborate gasoliers, with some wall brackets still in place.
The Goldsbrough family, with a fortune built on wool buying, brought in Italian stonemasons to extend the Mt Hope homestead with the addition of a wing of granite blocks, quarried on site, at a cost of 2000 pounds, enough to provide luxuries such as a marble-surrounded fireplace in every room, complete with china bell pulls to summon servants.
A feature is the two-room cellar, reached by 11 granite steps where a minor feat of engineering caused a stream of water from an external spring to flow in a channel around the cellar to provide cooling — although it no longer flows today.
Peter has even gone to the significant expense of having the powerlines buried to better recreate the period setting.
What was once 200,000 acres is now a humble 800; with 360 of those around the house signed into a Trust for Nature covenant protecting native grasslands and fauna — except for the rabbits.
While not stretching back anywhere near as far, Peter’s life story is invested in and around Cohuna after first moving there more than 50 years ago to get a little bit of obstetric and anaesthesia training to improve his new medical qualifications.
And he’s still there.
Along with his dreams where, step by step, room by room, he is breathing sympathetic life back into long-faded bush glories.