Joan and George McGillivray, from Gunbower, talk to Robyn Ballinger about cropping on the Patho Plains.

Like other Victorian rural areas, the rural population of the Patho Plains is decreasing. When landowners move out of the district, they take a wealth of historical knowledge and experience with them.

The Patho Plains Oral History Project was developed to capture the historical knowledge of farmers and landowners to better understand the changing landscape. These interviews and photographs form part of that project.

Further Information

Patho Plains Oral History interview excerpt 10: Joan and George McGillivray

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

GEORGE MCGILLIVRAY: After the drought - the big drought that Joan was talking about before...

ROBYN: The '40s drought.

GEORGE: Yes, the '40s. A lot of the land out there - I was trying to think about it the other day - but I'd say that most paddocks would've had about 5% of their... ..would've been claypan, which the claypan in the bare areas was generally on a rise in a paddock somewhere - it would be the one that would get windswept, not the depression. Now, you'll always generally use them then for your run-offs, for your dams. You would put little spur channels in off your claypans, but, yeah, probably would've been 5% of the paddocks out there were claypans. Bad paddocks, like that one that I now own of Domain's over there.

JOAN MCGILLIVRAY: Domain's, yeah.

GEORGE: There probably would've been 15% of that, which were windswept.

JOAN: Some of them had natural runoffs…

ROBYN: Because they'd been overgrazed?

GEORGE; Well, no, during the drought, it just blew. It just blew and just left hard, bare surfaces on any of the rises.

ROBYN: What are they like now with this ongoing drought?

GEORGE: No, well, believe it or not, controversial again, cropping, the moment they got out there in about the '60s, late '60s, when Frank Miller, Jimmy Tracy, John Osborne there was another couple out there, they decided... that it sort of went through a cropping phase, and everybody decided to crop the plains. Well, by cropping, it did do one thing - it got rid of them claypans. When they ploughed them claypans, they found that, I don't know, must have turned up some nutrient down below and I suppose the fertiliser that they also put on there, and generally when you crop a paddock out there, you'll always get rye-grass, natural rye-grasses, to grow. And, actually...

ROBYN: You mean indigenous native grasses?

GEORGE: No, just your Wimmera rye. What we refer to as your Wimmera rye, and that, it seemed to come naturally in cropping paddocks - fertiliser seems to bring it. And, yeah, it's one thing that did actually improve the plains.

ROBYN: That's amazing, OK.

GEORGE: By ripping up them bare bits. You could drive from Rays across to Potters across to our place, in those days, people used to take short cuts across other people's paddocks, well, we used to take our cattle across there, instead of going right out and around.

JOAN: Saved about three miles.

GEORGE: And you could go... and because the claypans were so nice to drive on in vehicles, you could go from claypan to claypan to claypan without virtually going on a track - stick to the claypans.

ROBYN: But not anymore.

GEORGE: No, there's no claypans. The claypans are all gone.