An outsider embraces the Australian landscape

By Megan Backhouse August 6, 2021 â€" 4.00pm

There are more reasons than Covid for city-dwellers to move to the country and, for English-born social scientist Belinda Probert, it was to find a sense of belonging.

Probert was wrestling with feelings of disconnection from this “enormous continent” when, in late 2011, she decided the perfect tonic would be to buy a house with good bones, a large garden and plenty of paddocks in the Otway Ranges.

In her new book Imaginative Possession: Learning to live in the Antipodes, Probert examines how this rural purchase helped with her feelings of unease. She ruminates on the impact of geography on our consciousness, on what it means to make a garden and whether tending 28 acres just outside Deans Marsh could turn her into Fiona Brockhoff. No is her verdict on the Brockhoff matter, but over lunch in her son’s Westgarth restaurant, Probert says making a garden in the Otways did, nonetheless, shift something profound in her “gardening subconscious”.

Probert’s house in the Otways.Credit:Edward Blake

She learnt about local plants, animals and weather. She absorbed how people in the region farmed and about how they gardened. She acquainted herself with all that was happening on the land around her and, finally, she cancelled her membership of the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society.

“There’s a richness that comes from knowing what’s going on. In the country, in any country, I always think about what jobs the people who live there have, and about what sustains a town,” she says. “I feel that the more I know, the more engaged with a place I am. It’s not just a need to catalogue but about a feeling of connection. The learning and understanding is the belonging.”

When Probert first began fantasising about making a country garden, she was living in inner-city Melbourne where it’s hard to get a sense of the land around you. “The Indigenous history of the city is well hidden, and the garden state does a fine job disguising its underlying dryness,” she says.

Probert wanted somewhere outside Melbourne where she could value the landscape but she didn’t want a holiday home near the beach, nor a piece of native bush. “I wanted ‘a place in the country’ in the way a French or English woman might use the phrase.” By that she means “somewhere rural and preferably pretty, where the land is primarily used for agriculture of some kind, and where you might also feel yourself close to nature; in a landscape still shaped by its past and home to indigenous flora and fauna.”

The place she bought was owned by a nurserywoman and keen gardener who had planted “one (or sometimes two) of just about every exotic tree you might care to have â€" although perhaps not in the Otways”. Her plan was to initially split her time between there and Melbourne, gradually spending more time in the country. Over the following six years, Probert made her garden.

She gradually removed almost everything except the fruit trees and introduced dry stones walls and terracing. She created perennial borders and new vegetable beds, she planted eucalypt seedlings, experimented with grevilleas and kangaroo paws and put in some of the exotic trees and shrubs, like Viburnum plicatum ‘Mariesii’, for which she had never before had room.

Probert mowing the lawns at her Otways property.Credit:Edward Blake

She read widely â€" novels, memoirs, and environmental histories â€" and generally did all she could to avoid what she describes as a widespread “taken for grantedness about landscape”. By the end she knew the pleasures of watching blue banded bees and the difficulty of identifying eucalypts. She had also established a garden that, she says, was “good enough for me to feel the pleasure of the achievement”. “I could come in, drive down the driveway, turn off the engine and think, ‘I feel completely at ease here.’”

But gardeners are often their own worst critics and, in the book, Probert insists that if she were to start again she would make a garden that “looks and feels very different”. She thinks her country garden making “was a failure on as many fronts as it was a success”. “In particular, I failed to make a garden that was significantly different from one I might have made in England.”

But that wasn’t the reason she ultimately decided the Otways property had to go. Despite finding a close-knit community and a strong social network in the country, Probert says she found living there too isolatingfrom her children and close friends. Three years ago, she sold the place and commissioned architects to design a multi-generational “inner-urban compound” with one house for her, one for her son’s family and a shared garden in between. So now she’s tending a new round of fruit trees, vegetable beds and perennials.

Imaginative Possession: Learning to live in the Antipodes, Upswell, $26.99

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