bruce munday - Wakefield Press

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Chapter onestones in thebloodThe style of construction of the wall has provided us withan aesthetic form, as in country crafts, generally, that hasits roots in practicality: the wall as a functional work ofart. Inherent knowledge of how best to build, to withstandstorms, has dictated the manner in which stones arechosen, laid and the wall intermittently strengthened.G. D’Arcy, The Burren Wall5
Walls and fences mark and defend boundaries. Before white man arrived there was no needfor fences as there was little sense of property ownership among Aboriginal communities,although the very first stone walls were indeed built by Aboriginals as fish traps along the SouthAustralian coast, the Coorong and the Lower Lakes.As the early pastoralists pushed out into the unknown, stock never moved far from availablewater and was tended by shepherds. But when the vast pastoral runs were broken up for farming andshepherds saw a better life calling on the Victorian goldfields, the fence soon became a consuminginterest.Rural fences in the mid-nineteenth century were about function and cost. I have read nothingto suggest that there was any sense of aesthetic value attached to post-and-rail fences built fromhand-split and adzed posts, or stone walls meticulously assembled from odd-shaped rocks. Very fewpost-and-rail fences have survived 150 or so years of fire, termites and rot, but we still have hundredsof kilometres of stone walling for various purposes and in various styles and materials. Many arebeautiful, most are heroic, and all tell us something about lives lived before ours.And yet not all find a stone wall compelling. It was about 1976 that my then neighbour with hisfront-end loader pushed down the stone wall that had fenced the eastern side of his property. WhenI asked him why, he explained to me something that I had already noticed: ‘It is old.’ But that is oneof the few sad stories in this adventure. Most of the tales are warm and uplifting. Sure, you see somewalls tumbling down through neglect, but that is just the Law of Entropy at work – there is in naturean inevitable and overwhelming tendency towards disorder.And talking of nature, it short-changed South Australia in terms of forests for building timber andat the same time over endowed us with white ants. But we are blessed with beautiful stone. * Stonewith colour, texture and light. We have a wonderful heritage of stone buildings from the simplestshepherds’ huts to grand churches and halls. † At the 1911 census sixty-two per cent of SA homeswere of stone compared with eight per cent nationally. About the only conventional stone buildinglacking was a fortress.But what of the stories behind those walls? Even the simplest man-made forms give us a glimpseof early European settlement here, while their durability states the obvious about the material andunderlines the skill and toil of our forebears. Yet there is seldom mention of South Australian stonewalls in the national conversation – further evidence that the history of Australia was largely writtenin the Eastern States.Even in SA, it is hard to come by historical mentions of dry-stone walls. ‡ Reading about earlysettlement, even where miles and miles of walls were being built, you get the impression that thiswas pretty hum-drum stuff – just putting up fences, hardly worth mentioning. At Kanyaka Station* A summary of South Australian building stone is available on CD-ROM from PIRSA: Hough J. (2006) South Australian Dimension Stone,Primary Industries and Resources SA.† The SA Government’s SAmemory website is being a bit coy when it can only claim that ‘South Australia is noted for the use of corrugatediron, for underground houses at Coober Pedy, and for Adelaide lace decorative cast iron on verandas’.‡ The encyclopaedic Pastoral Pioneers of South Australia by Rodney Cockburn published in 1926 provides comprehensive biographicalaccounts of 230 significant figures of the era. Despite numerous indexed references to fences and fencing there is nothing but the briefestreference to stone walls, walling or wallers.6 THOSE DRY-STONE WALLS
Page 1 and 2: stories from south australia’s st
Page 3 and 4: Netherford, Pine Hut RoadFor Kim Mi
Page 5 and 6: Wakefield Press1 The Parade WestKen
Page 7 and 8: AcknowledgementsWe could fill chapt
Page 9 and 10: Old sheep dipping yards, Rosebank,
Page 11 and 12: prefaceMy affair with stone walls s
Page 13: 4Once reached the end of the rainbo
Page 17 and 18: ‘No you won’t!’ she said. ‘
Page 19: Before fences - shepherdsAny party

bruce munday - Wakefield Press

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