Gregor Wallace reminisces – c 1968 – 1971.
The Wimmera Forest Nursery at Wail, near Dimboola, “phone number Wail # 5”, had been a significant showcase for the Forests Commission since 1946.
The nursery was within a large plantation of Sugar Gum (E. cladocalyx) which had been initially planted in about 1909 and was maturing in the 1960s. It was regionally valued as a source of fence posts, poles for shed building, and for CCA pressure preservation treatment materials.
The preservation plant was owned by Grif Perkins and operated for many years. He poached a valued employee, Leo McDonald, at weekends and as a full-time employee in later years.
The grounds surrounding the nursery was a popular to display its “Arid Lands Botanical Garden”.
The glasshouse was basic but did good work. Note the home-made wood trays which were hard to sterilise, and the nursery was on the cusp of plastic trays by the early 1970s. Growing tubes were rolled from water-soaked pine veneer and secured with a rubber band. The veneers were peeled by a plant in Richmond.
The nursey tested various paper tubes and “jiffy” pots too, but they proved to be of little use and were difficult to transport.
Stock could easily be consolidated as it was sold, and the concrete slab floor of the glasshouse was gently sloped for drainage.
The seed store adjoined the office and much of the seed was collected on excursions by the District Forester, Bill Middleton and his wife, Joan. While in the nursery grounds, the collection of Grevillea seed would involve visiting the bushes up to 4 times per day.
The shade house was built by a local design. Staff mixed the concrete and Cowley levels were used to set up for formwork. The reinforcing mesh, galvanised pipe and joining fittings hardware came often from either Horsham or Dimboola. The stakes for the walls were cut from a site near Halls Gap. The aluminium venetian blind slatting woven into the reinforcing mesh of the roof came from “somewhere in Melbourne”, and took ages to weave, but required no maintenance once in place. The overhead watering had only the relatively low head pressure from the tank, so staff made their own sprinklers and gradually worked out spacing to allow overlap and achieve a reasonably even water distribution. The open beds were set out with overhead sprinklers by cutting and threading galvanised iron water pipe.
Much of the original brush fencing was deteriorating badly and replacement happened while I was there. This labour-intensive work was mostly done in between high activity times in the nursery when everyone was tubing up the stock for the coming year, and when the car park and nursery were full of customers and the propagation area became a busy sales area. Me included, and among other tasks I grafted a few hundred Claret and Golden Ash with Jan each year.
After these major jobs were finished, we built a new pole framed multi-bay machinery shed, styled on one already recently built at Rennick. The CSIRO booklet on pole frame design was the technical and design reference, and I believe that the shed is still standing proudly. The whole place was well presented after all of this, even picnic facilities and a playground. Tiny, his nickname, Ross was a general driver and plant operator, here using the machine used at Perkin’s preservation plant and borrowed or hired for building the shed frame. The preservation plant was ‘just outside the back gate’. We provided basic picnic facilities and playground items. Kangaroos kept the grass mown.
Water supply was by channel, filled once a year so windblown detritus from paddock into dry channel was leached into our dams. Sometimes it took a while to lose the smell and be inviting to swim in, and from which storage it came I am not sure. Extra watering was occasionally required, especially over long weekends. Good job that; start the (diesel engine, crank start) pump to fill the tank, get the sprinkler system going, have a swim in the dam, the spring board was good, catch a few yabbies, perhaps a barbecue with the family, check that the taps and valves were turned off, and home refreshed to Dimboola. The weir at Dimboola held a pondage that served for the rowing club and many picnic sites with beaches and ‘safe’ swimming. In this image extra stop bars have just been installed, and the modest flow shows that we were on the end of the river.
My job was to drive the crew bus, picking them all up from their homes, and getting the nursery day started, and included taking them all home again at day’s end. The vehicle for this was a small Commer or Ford? sliding side door unit, often loaded with plants dispatched by rail from Dimboola. Being Forest Botanist at VSF for two years must have set me up as one who ‘was good at his specs’.
Coincidentally, as the site was being prepared for the pole-frame machinery shed, as some (I believe sheets of corrugated iron roofing, I did not see this) were lifted on 12 April 1968, a pair of Pygmy Possums was revealed. We were enchanted by these, and the shirt and hand are Barry Sutton’s, as the photographs were set up and taken while habitat was being found for their release. Foresters are ecologists working in the biggest native garden in the State. The twigs they are posing on is Banksia ornata, common in The Little Desert nearby.
We made a special effort to maintain a neat entrance way.
See also – https://victoriasforestsbushfireheritage.com/2023/04/16/wail-nursery/
Postscript – The Wail nursery, along with those at Creswick and Macedon, was privatised and sold in the early 1990s as part of a government review. It then had a chequered history of owners but is now operated as the Dalki Garringa Native Nursery and owned by Barengi Gadjin Land Council. It produces about 130,000 seedlings for the wholesale market. Sadly, the once magnificent arboretum has been abandoned but the sugar gum plantations surrounding the nursery are still managed as State forests.
