From I Can Jump Puddles (Alan Marshall, 1965) p41
Mr. Carruthers’s father, representing an English company, had landed in Melbourne in 1837 and made west from that town in bullock drays laden with stores. It was said there was rich volcanic land awaiting settlement in the open forest country a hundred miles or more away, though the Blacks were considered unfriendly and would have to be dealt with. The party had rifles for this purpose.
Mr. Carruthers eventually took up hundreds of square miles of rich land that, now divided into scores of farms all mortgaged to the estate, brought in a large income in interest alone.
The large bluestone mansion he had built on a picked site was eventually inherited by his son and on the son’s death it became the property of Mrs. Carruthers.
The enormous house stood in the centre of thirty acres of parkland, a large area of which was laid out in gardens designed in English style with ordered pathways and formal flowerbeds blooming under strict direction.
In the shade of elms and oaks, and sheltered by shrubs brought out from England, pheasants, peacocks, and strange coloured ducks from China peeked and scratched in the leaf mould left from autumn failings. A man in gaiters moved amongst them, his raised gun occasionally bursting into sharp reports as he shot at the rosellas and red lories that came in to eat the fruit on the orchard trees.
In the spring, snowdrops and daffodils flowered amidst the dark green of Australian bracken and gardeners wheeled laden barrows between the hollyhocks and phlox. Their sharp shovels, striking at the tufted grass and the heaped twigs and leaves rising to the base of the few remaining gums, severed the roots of surviving greenhoods and Early Nancies and they toppled and fell and were carried away in the barrows to be burnt.
And the thirty acres were clean and smooth and orderly.
“The Blacks would never know it now,” my father said to me when we were driving past the gate one day.
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