Uninvited House Guests
We did hear quite a few stories about Ercildoune having some uninvited house guests. One person said that it was a journey down memory lane for him when he visited our website. He apparently used to shoot rabbits and ended up knowing ‘the caretakers’ quite well. He then did some work on the property and assisted with restoration inside and out. He said that whilst he was painting in the ‘Duke’s bedroom’, he had a scary experience that still haunts him: a ghostly image that makes him shiver. Dianne had told us that she’d heard footsteps upstairs when she’d had to visit an empty Homestead, and no-one was apparently there when she went looking, and one day we were sitting in the kitchen area and thought that we heard children giggling, and when we went to look for them, of course there was no-one to be found.
The antique dealer who delivered the half-tester bed even wrote us a letter stating that when he left, a little girl with plaits in her hair and about ten years old, rode in the passenger seat of his van down to the front gate and then promptly disappeared. It was in this half-tester bed that I had my first nightmare of sorts too. I woke up but couldn’t speak, and it took a little while to find my voice. A friend was staying in the room opposite, and I told her I hoped I hadn’t scared her with my strange noises. She said she thought she’d heard people arguing outside her window too. And the stories keep coming, as one of the painters also saw a little girl standing outside the Gatehouse when he arrived in the wee hours of the morning, similar to the Antique Dealer’s vision.
Other people saw a vision in the drawing room of a woman sitting in a chair, and another friend saw a vision of the young girl up in a tree. Our dog locked himself in the car with the keys in the ignition when we’d parked outside the Gatehouse and we didn’t have a spare key, so we called for the RACV who also had trouble opening the driver’s side door and was in the process of phoning someone else for some advice on how to go about it when his mobile rang and the door locks mysteriously released and out jumped one very relieved dog. Other people who shot rabbits before we owned the property said they felt as if someone was pushing them.
The younger people in the district held the occasional séance in the Homestead, and the story goes that even though the power was not connected, a light kept arcing in the drawing room and the pipe organ even started moving by itself. Many of the photos we took seemed to have orbs or weird-shaped images that were probably just dust particles or a chemical reaction during processing, but who knows for sure.
The Cemetery and Its Graves
The Ercildoune Conservation Plan states that the graves are also significant for their associations with the estate’s staff. The existence of a cemetery on the estate is a further indication of the property’s large scale and importance, as it was home to a community large enough to justify the provision of a private graveyard. There are six children and two workmen buried there, and it is believed that some of the causes of their sad deaths were drowning, acute bronchitis in a male infant, dental diarrhoea in a male infant, a 16-year-old dying from general atrophy, heart disease, pneumonia, premature birth and even a suicide. In 1890, the Health Commission stated that no further interments were to take place at the cemetery.
The grave of the infant Learmonth daughter remains intact, probably because it is surrounded by an iron railing fence that has prevented any animals from disturbing it. The graves used to have headstones but now appear to be marked by Cherry Laurel trees, and the area was said to have been surrounded by a stone wall.
Water, Dams and Droughts
Water is always a topic of conversation with many farmers in Australia due to the history of droughts, and not many people can have the luxury of living in areas with consistent rainfall. The Learmonths had to choose somewhere that had a reliable supply that included underground springs, in order to be able to breed sheep in such large numbers and created four large lakes and dams that wound their way down the granite boulder-lined valley from Lake Ercildoune, which had originally been a swamp. This lake is no longer on the Title and had to be banked up on two sides to create a good water-holding area that they could release down to the Homestead through the narrow valley.
There is mention of the Learmonths laying “pitch and paper” pipes possibly partially made in England, over a fairly long distance in order to convey water from the spring half a mile away for the use of the Homestead (Leader 6 July 1918). After Major Currie had the channel built for hydroelectricity, dinner guests would occasionally be plunged into darkness when a hapless sheep became stuck in the channel, and a poor employee would have to try to find the sheep and remove it so that the electricity supply could be restored. As the waterways were now all connected and the area was downhill, there were major floods when the rains were heavy, and the springs filled the waterways to the point that they broke their banks.
We learnt the hard way that it’s not ideal living at the lower end of a valley, especially when too much rainfall savagely creates such an uncontrollable force and it was a surreal experience waking up to the sound of a rushing river that decimated much of the garden and found its way into the back rooms of the Homestead, but luckily it seemed to disappear down the gaps in the floorboards. John went out at midnight on the excavator to dig more channels to avert the water, and our neighbours helped us with flood control and we undertook three massive clean ups, as we were flooded in September 2010, December 2011 (215mls) and February 2011 (110mls).
It was soul destroying to have to re-do nearly all of the roads including the driveways again, and have expensive earthworks carried out below Lake Ercildoune in order to try and contain the water and redirect it away from the Homestead in order to alleviate any further epic disasters. Quite ironic too after the years and years of hand watering. The new plantings on the bank of the dam wall didn’t fare too well, the newly planted Wollemi Pine lost its will to live and we never did find one of the quite heavy garden ornaments that had been washed into the front lake.
It was just part of the rollercoaster ride, but we still managed to hold an Open Garden Day on the 20th November and donated $3,000 to the CFA and Soldiers Hall, Burrumbeet.
We once had a cormorant get stuck in the pump-up at Bishop’s Dam, and an eel that Robin and Steve extricated. Apparently eels used these waterways as part of their migration route. The warmest lake was called Lake Rhymer by the Learmonth brothers and was apparently favoured for swimming, being a few degrees warmer than similar bodies of water in Ballarat, some state due to its geographical location near an offshoot from the Great Dividing Range. Some charred stumps remained visible in the section of sand beside the water, of what had been a changing room, built onto a small jetty that had burnt down in the 1976 bushfires.
We spent around $40,000 just having the two lakes nearest to the Homestead emptied and cleaned out as they had silted up over the years and had become choked with bulrushes and swamp grass. We even bought some trout fingerlings to place in them, hoping that they wouldn’t all be eaten by the voracious cormorants.
The Willows by the Waterways
It is interesting to note that some of the huge willows growing around the waterways on the property were apparently grown from cuttings “as big as walking sticks” that were taken during a visit by the brothers from the willow planted at Napoleon’s grave on the British-owned island St. Helena that was once an important stopover for ships. Most of the pathways around the lakes were scraped, as they had accumulated a deep layer of soggy, decaying matter from years of falling leaves. At Burnley, we learnt about desire lines that people create when trying to get from A to B, so it wouldn’t have been long before there was a network of pathways going in all directions, and there ended up being around 11 kilometres of them.
There was even a walk on a 4’ wide path that wound its way up to Bishop’s Dam on two sides of the valley (described by one writer “as tortuous as a lawyer’s cross-questioning”). It meandered through a forest of towering trees, many of them festooned with creepers and nestling amongst huge granite outcrops, and then dropped down to a creek with huge boulders creating fascinating formations, including a water hole large enough for a dip. I wouldn’t have wanted to be wandering around there when the venomous snakes were out and about, though. Tree ferns, palms, camellias, an Agave Americana that has a flower stalk so large that it is capable of growing six inches a day, and other exotics were planted here.
Halfway up the valley was evidence of some of the famous fish breeding ponds, and according to Salmon at the Antipodes, trout were left in various fish breeding ponds when the Learmonth’s vacated the property, as they’d raised them on behalf of the Ballarat Fish Acclimatisation Society between 1870 and 1873. At one stage there had even been a thatched structure used as a fish hatchery, but that had been lost forever after being engulfed by blackberry bushes.