Local landcare Coordinator Joël Dunn caught up with Sue and Fred Featherston for this interview in May 2025.
Joël: Tell us a bit about your story in Landcare in general and Wootton in particular, and what got you started with this interest and passion
Sue: My Landcare started with growing up on the edge of bushland in Sydney, and dad used to go down there and do the Privet along the creeks, and I sort of continued that interest, and National Trust ran a Bush Regen course, a weekend thing, back then, so I had an interest in that. Then when I came to Newcastle, Mayfield had a little patch of bush, and Newcastle Council had a Greening Team at the time, doing these nice projects like a community garden and that, and they supported a Bushcare Group. It was an engagement with a little patch of Spotted Gum-Ironbark forest, and there was a lot of Aloe, Kalanchoe and other garden escapees. We liked going there and met different people.
Fred: And you did your Bushcare certificate
Sue: That’s right, I did the TAFE Bush regen certificate thing when it came out. Then I met Fred and life became a bit different…
Fred: Because we had the rural land, we started to spend more time out of Newcastle.
Joël: Where was your rural place back then?
Sue: Since he was a young engineer, Fred had a bush block out near Muswellbrook, McCullys Gap, and it’s a very dry old mountain, it had been overrun by rabbits and prickly pear, and it had come back from that, it wasn’t any good for grazing. There are two mountains out there, there’s Bells Mountain, and this one was called The Colonel. It was a very peaceful place, really hidden away. We just had a caravan there. We had some weed work to do…
Fred: It was mainly seed collecting, and exploring…
Sue: …and seeing “what’s out when”, because we lived in Newcastle and he would go up and check things on the block and what-not. It was really about – you bushwalk, and you see a different place every month, but when you keep going back to the same place, that was the experience there.
Joël: You’d see it in all the different seasons…
Sue: Yes, all the different seasons…
Fred: …the droughts and the floods
Sue: Especially the orchids, there were tree orchids and ground orchids, and they were very seasonal, so you’d always organize a friend to walk this way or that way and check if that was still there or what it was doing this year. There was a little patch of Cypress, and we’d check on all these things he’d found over the years on his explorations, how they were going. So it was engagement with Place really. We went through a big drought when we were out there. And then the great rise of excitement when you get enough rain for the creek to run. It had a cascade, and a waterfall when it ran well.
Fred: I had the bush block, and like Sue, had family involvement with wild places, our family holidays were always at the old Barrington Guest House outside Dungog, and my sister and I both got out of Sydney as soon as we had qualifications and could get jobs. She married a farmer out past Cowra, and I worked in the power station in the Upper Hunter. The bush block at McCullys Gap was about 10km’s out of town, but it’s so quiet you could have been anywhere, and we’d do bush walks, and started to connect with people. I always had an interest in growing things and in plants from my family, and the sheer abundance of fruit and seeds on all the different plants, and connecting with people who were into indigenous foods and that sort of stuff, and we started connecting with Noel Jupp at Riverdene Nursery, and so there’s lots and lots of plants you see around the highways, that we collected there years ago.
Joël: Ah nice
Sue: The Wattles…
Fred: Mainly Wattles and Lomandras and stuff
Sue: The Lomandras with the fine leaf, there were different kinds on The Colonel
Fred: I was always uncertain what was going to happen with my job, and where to go and what to be, but we loved the forestry, and Greening Australia were starting up initiatives for people to plant more trees on their farms, and they loosely described them as Farm Forestry Groups, and they started a thing called the Farm Forestry Network in about 2000. Joe Thompson was very involved in that, and anyway, we got involved in that, and we also ended up buying a very nice property right up on the Barrington Tops, just West of the Tops on the Woolooma side, and experimented with understanding the trees up there. Paul Melehan helped us out with a grant to do a bit of fencing, and seed collecting and stuff, and we had some field days up there with different people, with the Farm Forestry mainly, but also a Landcare one, and Carol Rose was up there then. Just living in the Upper Hunter, there were various connections we had, some of our friends were out of town, others were full time farming, and we’d see what they’d done with their plantings on their place – from the very early Landcare days of fence off a bit of creek as a windbreak or a stock shelter or something like that, and learning more about how to integrate it with what the properties needed.
That’s all over 20 years ago.
Joël: So, when did you find yourself here, what brought you to Wootton?
Fred: That was getting closer to thinking about what we’d do after our “paid work” lives, I was getting really sick, and even Sue was, from the pollution in the Upper Hunter, mainly the coal dust, and through the Farm Forestry Network we knew Craig Tate next door to here, that’s how we found out this place was for sale. We really liked it, the air was clean, the time was really good, I managed to get out of my job, and Sue could leave hers
Sue: The power stations were moving out of government
Fred: Yep, they privatised the power station
Sue: So there was a lot of change, it was different, we had to choose
Fred: We didn’t have kids, and it was like winning a lottery to get the redundancy out of the power station, and I’d worked myself out of the job, trained up plenty of other people to do the work, and the only other option was to move down to Melbourne, and so they were only too glad to pay me out, and that meant we could move here full time.
Sue: You really wanted to grow some trees…
Fred: That’s right
Sue: I think with the Master Tree Grower course that he did, he was very keen to grow some trees, but in the Upper Hunter things grow very slowly…
Fred: We did plant a lot, and grow things, we had a vineyard for a while…
Sue: We’d always been putting in seeds and growing things, but we thought it was a bit remote up there, and could you see us staying there as a retirement place, it was too much, we had a big fire, we experienced a fire…
Fred: Yes there was a “Section 44” on our place in 2009, so we lived and breathed all that, but one really big issue was, so many of the traditional farmers were getting older and they were selling up, and their properties were getting subdivided or getting bought up by people who were just weekenders, just escape places, not active engagement farming places. We were always interested in actually doing something with the place, did the extra fencing, and worked out the logging plans and stuff like that
Sue: did a lot of measuring trees…
Fred: Anyway, it was the forestry connection and knowing Pat and Craig next door
Sue: Craig had already put in his planting there
Fred: We had the bush block, but there wasn’t much you could do with it – enjoy it and share it around, but it sort of stifled the creativity of being able to plant more trees and getting them growing quickly. We did a fair bit, and enjoyed planting trees on other people’s places, and learning different ways to do it.
Sue: There was a lot of change in the community up there, when people retired they’d move away, and our friends had land bordering the mines.
Fred: It had been totally politicised, that was the other thing – as well as the physical sickness, the whole community was affected by the mines. We thought we could have stopped Anvil Hill, but it just ploughed on, and they just totally smashed the communities. So we didn’t have enough roots there to sustain us.
Wootton had this Wootton Community Network, and Brush Turkey Café and Community Centre, a really thriving little base of activity.
Joël: When was that, what year?
Fred: We bought the place in 2015, and we moved here full time in 2017. It was really good timing, because the LLS had the last bit of money from their Biodiversity Grants, and we put in with neighbours, us and Carole Robinson and Adam Garnett, they helped us put in for that together and it looked a really good package, so we got the grant to do that planting. So that started in 2015, with trees going in the ground in September 2016. Absolutely typical grant project – doesn’t matter if it’s dry, or good weather for putting trees in, doesn’t matter if you’ve had time to order them and grow them on and get them ready, or prepare the soil, the money’s got to be spent on time…but we did what we could
Joël: in ten years of being here, you seem to have done a lot!
Fred: We haven’t talked about the stuff since that first planting, but yeah, we have. And you know, the KGLL [Karuah & Great Lakes Landcare] and everything, it was all great inspiration, and support, and challenges and ideas and stuff.
Sue: Yes, we were very lucky to have that
Fred: We were free too, because, there were probably things we should have been doing, but we had a house that we could live in, and kept it repaired, we had our savings to keep us going, and we could just live here and be part of things, and still reasonably young enough to be active and do stuff, and pick up what worked.
Sue: Yes, there’s plenty to do…there’s some lovely patches on the block
Fred: It’s a lovely mix, because it goes from the Coolongolook River right across to the ridge of Wattley Hill Road, with another creek in between, and about a third of the place has never been entirely cleared – it’s been logged and knocked around but there’s a lot of original vegetation types in there…
Sue: and a mixture
Fred: We couldn’t have moved to a place that was just bare farmland, even if we were doing planting. So that was the connectivity theme, to be able to connect up to the Coolongolook River, and connect in with the neighbours as well.
Sue: That theme emerged from the Upper Hunter, they had this “Stepping Stones” project, and the idea that even if you can’t connect it up, if you have patches of vegetation through the landscape it’s all going to help. We like that idea. And I did the Holistic Management course they did over there at the Community Centre, and we did all this mapping, and we’ve got all these dreams, you have an ideal, a statement of context that develops, so that was good. The intention was to keep the cattle out of the water and the gullies, and then revegetate, and we’re only part-way through that. That course helped a lot with our planning.
Joël: Have you been running some cattle most of the time?
Fred: Yes, but for sort of a few reasons, one was – it’s kind of like an entry card to a lot of conversations, and credibility, or just engagement with people in the area, because even though we’re not as interested in running it for the money or the usual reasons that people have for cattle, having cattle you seem “less weird” to people in the area (laughs), and you can talk to them about things that are going on. And we could learn a lot through the cattle about what was going on, and engage with that, everything from dung beetles to parasites, to pasture management, how to work with weeds, and tick resistant cattle and heat-resistant cattle. Because we weren’t pressured to be trying to just find something that everyone else had, and we could look at how they worked for us on the place, provide as much cow dung as we wanted for the garden, and because we wanted to keep it a bit clear and open for fire control, and future people, you know, the next people on the block, we didn’t want to put trees all the way up to the house.
Joël: I imagine some income here and there would have come in handy…
Fred: Yes, the income potential is there, but it’s not the most rewarding use of our time – I could get a lot more money quicker and easier by hiring myself out to do farm work using the equipment we had. This is one of the things I go on about, the way the places have been subdivided, you end up with so many people trying to do everything on their place, that’s too small, over-capitalised, not enough people. It can work so much better if you’ve got one person doing cows across lots of properties, and they can actually make a return out of it and do it well, and someone else might do all the machinery work and someone else might do all the logging work, someone else might do all the bushcare work.
Sue: If you could have specialities it would be nice, but you have to work with what you’ve got…
Fred: If you work out the amount of, depending on the size of the animal you’re trying to run, you work out how many grazing days they’ve got in each spot and the mob size that you need, you need at least three or four hundred acres minimum to manage, to really productively run cattle on this sort of country – most of it was never grassland, it was all forest land, and not really set up to graze with large grazing animals. It was dairy country for so long, after the war and that, because it had the higher rainfall, and they settled people here, but it’s OK for breeding animals and things like that, but you need to work with a much smaller animal if you’ve got a smaller property. And really, the more that you can engage with your animals, real husbandry, not just plonking them in paddocks.
Sue: Every season’s different, you know, not every season, but we went through some quite dry times, and I was glad of the planned grazing from the Holistic Management, you plan your grazing for a year, and you can adjust it with the seasonal changes and whatnot like that. We did go for these Nadudana cows, we haven’t had to do much veterinary intervention
Fred: but we’re talking to them every day and moving them, making sure they have good food, and they’re healthy
Joël: What was the name of the breed again?
Fred: Nadudana, miniature Zebu
Sue: If you look up the websites, people up in Queensland, they’re cuddling their cows, and they’ll use them for the rodeo for young kids. They do like to, you know, you come home and they come up the paddock, they like to know you’re around. And they work nicely as a herd, so they have been nice like that. We wanted to keep the cattle because we bought the mixed type of farm, not just a bush block, we wanted to keep the capability of grazing zones, so when you hand it on, you’ve kept that.
Fred: and build the soil up
Sue: Yes, and we had it in smaller sections, but once you’ve worked out how it works, it’s good to have the long runs as solid fences. We’ve kept it mostly flexible, like that one you see there, which means a lot of walking. It keeps you in touch with your pasture yes, but it takes quite a bit of time. The advantage is, that’s part of our system, they don’t eat it all down, it gives you flexibility.
Fred: It’s got that silly Setaria, and the biggest issue aside from the property size is that there’s lots of wallabies, and unless you’re going to do something about the wallaby impact, you can’t fully manage your pasture the way that you need to, because can’t entirely rest an area
Sue: and getting legumes in, you can’t keep the wallabies out
Fred: the winter legumes, winter pasture trial, because it’s dry and cold, not much grows, and we did that trial with the other groups to find those things that would easily establish – they do OK, but because food’s short in winter, you’ve got wallabies, they love it, and they’ll graze it to death, so if you’re trying to maintain it for your stock you’ve got to have a way of either excluding them or culling them, maybe we should be farming them!
Joël: Some of the tree plantations have wallaby-proof fencing, don’t they?
Sue: They did for the establishment phase, but the wallabies find their way in now. That did help with establishment, because we didn’t have to protect each individual tree, and we did get wattles up and everything like that.
Fred: We didn’t mention all our objectives, but I touched on improving the soil, but one big thing was we want the water leaving the place to be cleaner than it is when it comes onto our place.
Sue: That was one of the things, for our Holistic Context. Getting things established in the riparian area is a challenge, it would be good to get rid of all the Privet
Fred: It might look like we were running off doing all sorts of fancy projects or this or that, but they were always only things that pointed towards those objectives. Two jobs we paid people to do fairly early one were fixing the driveway to the house so that it stopped getting rutted out, and drains properly and puts water where we want it to, and doesn’t cause any more problems; and fixing the big dam down the bottom, which like nearly every dam in the district was built – crappy, with a faulty overflow system, there was probably only one or two more seasons in it before the wall completely washed out, like one a couple of gullies away, creating all sorts of problems for them. It’s simple enough, all this stuff’s been worked out by the Soil Conservation people, some of them still there in the department, talk to the people that did the good work in the old days, and out west and stuff, and look at Yeomans’ principles and all this stuff – be conservative, you know what the rainfall history has been, and going forward everything’s getting more severe, so we planned a spillway 30-50% larger than that recommended in the old guidelines
Sue: and it needed all of this with this recent heavy rain, never seen that happen before
Fred: The Lomandra we planted all around the edge of the spillway, they’re setting seed now. Everything takes time, that’s the other thing, do just little steps, try and work out what the natural forces are going to do, and work with them and get them to work with you. For example, we’d notice “oh there’s a spot where a tree would make a difference” and put one there, even if its one or two trees, even if you get Privet coming up around it well…
Sue: well at least it’s holding the soil in that spot. You’d see a spring appearing and realise “that’s tunnel erosion, not a spring” and plant a tree with fibrous roots
Fred: We’ve been using a lot of Hoop Pines to try and do that. Wootton was only deforested in the early 1900s, so we’re sort of 60 years behind a lot of other places in terms of the soil problems and other things, but we can see them starting. You look at the erosion problems in other places like the back of Gloucester and places like that, places that were cleared and farmed much earlier, they’ve got huge problems, and we’ve got them in their early stages, so it’s a really good chance to intervene and catch it early. It’s very dispersible soil, all this coastal stuff, lots of sodic stuff, it has to be respected and looked after
Joël: There’s a whole lot of trees up, obviously you got a lot in with that first stage with the grant funding, which areas did that involve, and have more areas been planted out since?
Fred: So that was just over 12ha that we mapped of the most erosion-prone, over-abused gully, that people before us for decades, you know, they had to survive, that was their income, and they pushed the dairy cattle to make a living and survive, and then after that it’s been weekenders with set-stocking, and minimal income off it, but putting a tree crop on it has turned it around, we’ve got all the wildlife coming through, all the water and stuff under control and lots of potential timber products off it in the long run. The main products though are just clean air and water, from a marginal gully, and that gully is the catchment for our main dam, so the better water quality off it, and the more drought-proof, the more resilient the rest of the property is.
The other bit that we tried was enrichment planting, because the bush that’s left on the place is an accident of what’s left over after many years of logging, so where we could find gaps where we could have a go with different things in the bush, we put in heavily targeted species like Red Cedars and White Beeches, things like that, a few Eucalypts that had become uncommon. Also we tried things like Christmas Bush, something to add to the mix and maybe be another potential income going forward. Things like Bunya Pines and Lilly Pillies. You can’t underestimate the potential of future food and seed income, but it was hard to do those enrichment plantings because you’ve got individual trees that really need protection from the wallabies! We’ve had some really good successes, but we’ve had a lot of ones that didn’t make it because of drought or the browsing. If you’re going to do infill plantings, don’t muck about, you’ve got to have a really good cage like that one over there, one and a half metres high of lightweight steel mesh that you can leave around it for a few years, and so ten years later we’ve got some really nice things like some good sized White Beech trees and things like that, nice Red Cedars that are coming on.
So there’s the enrichment planting and then there’s the rewilding program with the epiphytic orchids I’ve been putting back, because without the big old host trees and without pollinators they’ve disappeared, so we’ve tried putting epiphytic orchids back into different spots.
What’s worked really well is, rather than just planting tubestock, once our trees, particularly the Wattles, start setting seed, if you get the seed out there, the trees will grow! The livestock over the years have browsed out the Wattles and the Casuarinas and stuff, so as we’ve been able to collect seed from the ones we’ve planted, we’ve been scattering those seeds around in the margins, or in areas where that species is missing from the vegetation, and they’re coming up nicely. The concept of that biodiverse plantation of over 30 different species in it with Craig’s help, every second tree or so was a wattle of various species, and we can get the same effect by reintroducing those wattles into the remnant areas.
Sue: in the gullies that don’t have much variety
Fred: That diversity gets the soil flora active again
Joël: Now you’re at the stage of moving to the next chapter, how do you feel looking back on how it’s all gone, and what the future is for the property?
Fred: We’re still getting that feeling as we walk around of “Oh there’s something I still really want to finish that bit off” because it’s all stuff that we really love doing. I’m really, really satisfied with seeing how things have come on and grown. We feel really happy about how so much regen has come up. We’re the kind of people, we’d always love to have done more, but we’re really happy with how things have taken root. As Sue said, we were careful to leave space for other people to do what they want to do with the place going forward. There’s still plenty of room for the cattle, and they like the windbreaks and shade.
Sue: It really made sense to us to think in terms of succession
Joël: It must be very satisfying to see all those trees coming on
Sue: Yes. It’s not bush, but it’s the start of a forest. There’s still a lot of grass under it, but there’s some great trees, and definitely more birds and wildlife.
Fred: It’s great hearing all the birds. Especially in 2019 with the fires, Wootton became a little refuge. Ever since then, the black cockatoos have become regular visitors, we’ve seen regent bower birds…
Sue: It does feel more lively
Fred: A lot more alive, definitely everything’s a lot more alive than it was.
