Letter From Wooleen - Transcript

PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT: Monday, 24 November , 2014 

TAHMINA ANSARI, PRESENTER: Hello I'm Tahmina Ansari from ABC News and welcome to the season final Australian Story. Right now I'm helping behind the scenes to find stories for the program next year. I came to Australia as a refugee from Afghanistan and outback assignments in particular have opened my eyes to this vast amazing country. Tonight's program returns to another young woman who's crossed the continent to build a new life with a new love in one of the most remote regions of Western Australia. Here's an update from Wooleen Station.

FRANCES JONES: Hi, I'm Frances.

DAVID POLLOCK: And I'm David.

FRANCES JONES: It's been two and half years years now since you last saw us on Australian Story.

DAVID POLLOCK: And we thought that you might like a little bit of an update about what we've been doing for the last couple of years. Unfortunately it hasn't really rained and we're now officially in drought so there's not been much grass to watch.

FRANCES JONES: But on the upside we've had lots of wonderful people come to visit us at Wooleen and share a little bit of our life and our story. Ah... so I guess we're still here, still standing and looking forward to bringing you a bit of an update.

(Frances and David on a motorbike)

FRANCES JONES: I don't ever regret my decision to go to Wooleen, not at all. I just love it so much and everything that we do with the environmental rehabilitation and all the things that we get to achieve together and, I certainly don't ever wish to be anywhere else. When I think back to the 14-year-old girl that did her year eight speech on banning the live export trade (laughs) to the girl that now lives on a cattle station and has a far deeper understanding of the environment, of agriculture and how the whole system has to work together... yeah, it's very (laughs)... it's funny to look back on that. I suppose for me it was a very romantic idea to start with, being out there with David and he would just take me to some of the most breathtaking landscapes. So I just came out for a brief two week working holiday and ah... and I didn't leave.

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: We called her and said you know, you've got to move on, it was time to come back to Melbourne and start her studies. She said, 'Well I'm not coming home.'

DAVID POLLOCK: I don't think I would have made it through the first year if Frances hadn't come along. I guess I was going on a bit of a wing and a prayer and hoping that I would get through.

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: It was ambitious to think that he was going to be able to survive certainly to this point where we are now. The fact that he's achieved that I think is a credit to him because I certainly didn't see how I could have done it.

(Extract from Australian Story 2012)

DAVID POLLOCK: Wooleen's about 700 kilometres north of Perth. It's in the Mulga shrub lands of the Southern Rangelands in the oldest landscape on earth, 3.6 billion-years-old. Wooleen was settled in 1886 by the Sharpe family. It was like a small town. It had a lot of people working here, a lot of aboriginal people. But we also had a blacksmith shop and there was probably 60 or 70 people on Wooleen at any time during the early part of this century.

FRANCES JONES: It was a very affluent lifestyle. So they had beautiful, big, black-tie dinners right up until the 1960's. Sewing rooms, ironing rooms, kitchen cooks, big veggie gardens, fruit trees. Everything you can think of. Now really it's just David and I and a few backpackers at the homestead.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: Australia relied on properties like Wooleen to generate the wealth. There's an old saying that Australia rode on the sheep's back. Well, it's very true. The main exports that earned a lot of income for Australia was wool and that went on for many, many years, about 60, 70 years and that's what this country was founded on.

DAVID POLLOCK: It's gone downhill since the big drought in the 1930s when a lot of the sheep died and there was massive erosion and degradation in the countryside and really the countryside's never recovered from that. And we've had a few... a few droughts since then which have made it worse.

MARK HALLEEN, BOOLARDY STATION, NEIGHBOUR: The stories that my father's can tell of salt bush that was higher than a man on a horse and all the rest of it, people just totally stocked some of these places to the extent where they were running 40, 60, 70,000 sheep - not cattle - sheep, and they just totally devastated these property through greed.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: I've got really fond memories of going to Wooleen as a child. And then I jackarooed there. Then in 1989 I had the opportunity to buy the property and I flew across there and signed a contract that day for over a million dollars and that was pretty exciting, especially when my wife asked me how much we had in the bank and I only had $1300.

(Archival family video of Richard riding a pushbike)
RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: Let me show you a better one this time.
HELEN POLLOCK, MOTHER: Go!
(End of extract)

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: Certainly that Murchison Rangeland is something that I basically I think was born in to and have never truly separated myself from. And Wooleen is just one of those places that we grew up but it was more than just a home. It feels like that's where we belong.

DAVID POLLOCK: I think anybody that lives in that red dirt, sort of country, sort of gets it in their veins a little bit and learns to love it.

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: It was everybody's home forever until basically, my mother passed away.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: My wife had died and I decided that I couldn't live on Wooleen permanently at that stage. Richard came up and gave up his job to look after the property.

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: With my then partner, now wife Heidi, we went back and took over the station and started running it the way we wanted to run it. We changed the station from being a predominantly sheep station, with some cattle, to all cattle. But it was still dad's asset and until dad decided what he wanted to do with it... ah, it was always an unknown.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: Succession planning in any agricultural business is very, very hard. Both boys wanted to take on the property and um, the two boys wrote a submission. Richard, he was married at the time, so he had some other financial commitments and the ability to go on and do other things, 'cause he had done other things away from the property. David on the other hand had been away at university and travelling, but only had one passion and that was to be on Wooleen.

DAVID POLLOCK: Richard and I - or maybe Richard more than me, decided that we weren't going to work together. Like I... I was willing to give it a try, but to be honest you know, he was probably right. We probably wouldn't have worked together very well, but um... so dad had, you know, a huge decision to make. I really wanted to try and do things differently. It's quite obvious to me that what's happening out here in the pastoral country is just not sustainable - not environmentally sustainable. And if it's not environmentally sustainable then it's not going to be economically sustainable either because everything we produce comes from the environment. And to my mind that meant destocking, but that's a big step because you make your money out of stock.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: Both boys had a different view as to how the property should be run and my elder son had a more traditional view, which I agreed with. David had the radical view which I came round to.

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: There was a certain element of shock and then it's how you recover from the shock that defines you as a person I think. Well I'm certainly am lucky enough to have a partner that was very supportive and we were able to move on and without having a huge setback to... to our lives. So when we initially were asked to leave the station, it was requested that we do a final muster and remove all the cattle from the place so that when David came home to take over he could basically start his regeneration of the rangelands. We felt that... well, what a waste. We've sort of... were just sort of getting the herd up and running, we've started from scratch, we're just starting to get the genetics coming through and some of the infrastructure was you know, where we wanted it to be. And now all of a sudden we were going to leave it and it was just going to basically go back to nature. And we put all the cattle on a truck and effectively when the cattle left, we followed them out. And the day we left, was the last day we were there.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: It was a big worry. There's a young man up in the bush, I spent quite a bit of time up there helping him.

FRANCES JONES: Dave had been on the station for six months at that point by himself when I arrived. So it was March 2008 when I got there. My main interest for going out to Wooleen was to experience the outback tourism. Um, the station itself was very interesting to me but it was more the tourism enterprise which was the attraction. It was never anything permanent. I always thought I'd just stay a little bit longer and a little bit longer. But I slowly fell in love with the station and the tourism and of course David. There's just so much wildlife, especially birds. Lots of beautiful landscapes, big granite outcrops, the most amazing sunsets and sunrises you'll... you'll probably see anywhere. Looking at the landscape, it still does look very pretty, but once you get somebody starting to point out the problems. You start to look at it with fresh eyes.

MARK HALLEEN, BOOLARDY STATION, NEIGHBOUR: What the other people thought when he radically destocked totally is where was the finance coming from, how he was actually going to keep afloat, because the debt level might have been fairly high. Totally destocking like he's done and I... I think that's.... that's not what pastoralism is about. Pastoralism is about livestock.

FRANCES JONES: To remove all of the cattle was a huge decision. Turning off all the windmills too was an extremely radical thing. Dave turned off all the watering points and the windmills on the station because of grazing pressure being inflicted by the kangaroos and goats. With access to permanent water they can continue to breed and their populations explode in areas that previously they would have perhaps died or moved off without the permanent water.

FRANCES JONES: Now I have an understanding of the land, it's certainly a passion I've taken on with Dave.

DAVID POLLOCK: We borrowed a concept called a ponding bank from a chap named Bob Purvis north of Alice Springs, and he's used these conservation earthworks to fix eroded gullies and trap water high up in the landscape and grow grass species, which then seed themselves down those gullies and start to heal the landscape again. We also invented wire mesh structures that we put in high flow river areas to try and slow down the water and spread it back over the floodplain.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: I was totally sceptical of the whole project in those days. Now if I could afford it, I'd be buying a lot more and doing it.

GREG BRENNAN, WA DEPT AGRICULTURE: David, he's determined and I'd say stubborn. He's not going to do anything in half measures. So he was so determined that this country had to be regenerated or he didn't want to be part of it. What they've done at Wooleen is drastic. To totally destock the property means cessation of income. How they keep bread on the table I don't know. You know I haven't seen their financial returns and how much money they make out of tourism, but I can imagine it's a big challenge.

FRANCES JONES: It doesn't get to us that often. I suppose it's most likely to become a bit tough for us over summer. More towards the end of summer I suppose when we haven't had an income from stock or tourism and it's sort of those last couple of months that we're just trying to get by.

DAVID POLLOCK: We close over summer because it's just too hot and our power system can't handle the... the air conditioners.

FRANCES JONES: That's when it's yeah... at its most, most difficult, and you've sort of got to wonder whether... whether it's worth it (laughs).

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: Frances has had to learn to... live by a new way of life in a way. I mean all the luxuries and things that she took for granted here, they're not out there at Wooleen. It's quite different. And we couldn't understand why our daughter (laughs) would want to leave what we've got here and go out into the middle of the outback you know, to nowhere.

BERNADINE JONES, MOTHER: It's a beautiful place though isn't it?

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: It is a beautiful place. Yeah.

BERNADINE JONES, MOTHER: Yeah, and I do see why she fell in love with it, apart from falling in love with David, but yeah... she just fell in love with what was out there as well.

GREG BRENNAN, WA DEPT AGRICULTURE: They really are exemplars. But people would say foolish exemplars. But who cares? They are actually going to give us the data that can help us understand how to meet that challenge of regenerating the landscape.

FRANCES JONES: We do a lot of monitoring together. We take our laptop and photos from previous years that we've taken out to sites. We then look at old photos and take a new photo of that particular site.

DAVID POLLOCK: The recovery has really been amazing and much greater than I thought and much quicker than I thought. And a lot of these species I'd never seen before. I'd heard about them and I guess I knew what some of them were but just to see them recover and come back is just amazing - phenomenal. Initially with the destocking we wanted to concentrate on the Wooleen Lake system. It's normally a dry lake and only fills once every nine years. It's a nationally important wetland and it's a freshwater lake unlike a lot of the inland salt lakes. It should have a grass that grows all over the lake bed but that grass had been receding over many years. Initially we wanted to try and get that grass back onto the landscape, back onto the lake bed and the recovery that we've seen on the lake just in four years has just been phenomenal and well worth the investment of not putting the stock on for those few years.

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: And the best thing about this is the country. The country is just bloody magic, after 140 years of sheep attacking it every day and tens of thousands of 'em, plus tens of thousands of kangaroos and goats and other vermin and yet the country can still come back relatively on its own. if it's nurtured. It's pretty special.

MARK HALLEEN, BOOLARDY STATION, NEIGHBOUR: I am actually impressed with the... with the way he's actually worked it, but there's still a long way to go. And to actually see the results is years down the track.

DAVID POLLOCK: It will probably be quite a long time. Like it might be sort of 15 years before it really starts to pay itself off and I guess that's a big part of why a lot of pastoralists are not doing it.

FRANCES JONES: The idea isn't just to make Wooleen a nice little oasis for us. Dave once said you know, he's trying to find a sustainable way of ah, to graze cattle in the Southern Rangelands. It's not just about Wooleen, it's about the whole picture.

RICHARD POLLOCK, BROTHER: If the station for whatever reason doesn't succeed under the regime that David's implemented, everyone will know that he's given it his best shot and no-one's going to live with the "what if". I think the "what if" is if Heidi and I had stayed there, the "what if" would have been that alright the station was still running, but was it running as productive as it should be in say 50 years time. We haven't been back because I'm very fond of the memories that I have and I'm nervous that if I should go back and things have changed, then my memory and perception of things may be altered and perhaps not necessarily the way I want them to be.

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: I don't harbour any regrets about what Frances has done. For all the different things that have happened to Frances and the experiences that she's had, you can't have any regrets. I mean she's a confident young woman now who really knows what she wants in life and you know she got that experience by going out to Wooleen.

(Footage from WA Tourism Council Awards 2010 ceremony)
PRESENTER: The winner of the Sir David Brand Young Achiever Award is Frances Jones.
(Sound of applause)
AWARDS VOICEOVER: In 2009 Frances started a degree in eco-tourism through Murdoch University and studies externally at the station. In late 2009 she took the position as chair for the Gascoyne and Murchison Tourism Incorporated and in mid-2010 was elected to the board of Australia's Golden Outback.
(End of footage)

BRETT POLLOCK, FATHER: The prospects for Wooleen are exciting but because of the finances and the debts, it still hangs on a knife edge as to whether we can continue the project. But it's a very, very tough call. And it's a very tough call on a young couple to try and achieve this within the next 10 years.
(End of Australian Story 2012 extract)

(Macedon Ranges, Victoria – October 2014)

FRANCES JONES: Coming back to Mount Macedon is always a really... it's a really lovely feeling to be home because it's so different to Wooleen.

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: It's wonderful having Frances back it's always great seeing her and David too, to have them come home.

DAVID POLLOCK: We probably get to Mount Macedon every 18 months or so. Sometimes you wonder what... what it's like on the outside a bit.

ANDREW JONES, FATHER: It took probably a period of a couple of years of us going there, them coming back to understand him and his sense of humour.

BERNADINE JONES, MOTHER: He loves Frances you can just see that, and well we just love him, so it all just sort of works.

FRANCES JONES: The last two and a half years have been - yeah I'd say they've been a bit of a roller coaster in one sense, and we've had some... more highs than lows but yeah there's always a couple of lows in there just can't avoid them. Unfortunately we had two years where the rainfall has been well below average.

DAVID POLLOCK: It hasn't really rained since the last Australian Story. We're not getting the winter rains which we used to do and which for the area really relies on. The drought puts a hold to all the land regeneration sort of stuff.

FRANCES JONES: I think the regeneration work certainly risk-proofs the station against the highs and the lows. Certainly the situation's not getting worse which is sometimes what can happen in a drought, um, it's nice to know that we're just holding our own as it is.

DAVID POLLOCK: The plants that we're trying to re-establish are essentially preparing us for when the drought breaks and those first rains come. The bank's not knocking on the door like it was two years ago and that's a product of the... of the fantastic tourism sort of seasons that we've had. We're still nowhere near out of the woods but it certainly is a lot better than it was a couple of years ago.

FRANCES JONES: I do think in the future Dave and I will be able to knock down the debt we just have to work really really hard towards what we're doing. I never thought that you know at my age I'd be dealing with such a huge debt (laughs) and it's not really one that I necessarily created myself but walked into as a... you know, as a business. For the last two years Dave and I have had about 200 head of cows on Wooleen. Our lease conditions state that we must run cows. It's certainly not tempting to just run cows full time. To have a full herd of cows out there knowing that yes maybe we could address our debt issues much quicker um, but watching what it might do to the landscape it wouldn't be worth it.

DAVID POLLOCK: What's been really disappointing is the government's response to the new leases coming up, they're effectively trying to make us sign a lease that you know traps us in the same sort of problems that we've got for another 50 years. Two things need to happen. We need a stewardship payment to pay to pastoralists so that we can destock and start to heal the land, but a problem that we need to start working on now is that of land tenure.

FRANCES JONES: They need to be moving away from purely a pastoral lease to perhaps a rangelands lease that allows traditional pastoralism to continue but it can allow for conservation, for tourism. And it would certainly reduce the grazing pressure that the land is under if we were more able to do different things.

DAVID POLLOCK: My relationship with my brother Richard is definitely well on the mend. He's my stock agent as well, so whenever we sell cows we sell them... sell them through him.

FRANCES JONES: Yeah, that's really lovely, you know, if ever we've got questions about the market, what's going on you know David can just call Richard up and they have a bit of a chat.

DAVID POLLOCK: I feel the responsibility to manage Wooleen very strongly and I do wonder if I don't succeed and we go broke and we have to move you know what will the next person be like, like how will they treat Wooleen? That in part is what sort of drives me on because I'm not sure that anybody else is going to put the same passion into the landscape rehabilitation anyway - that I have.

FRANCES JONES: Even if the change is slow, we can't walk away from, you know the environmental impacts of what's happening in the rangelands. We stay because we want to.

DAVID POLLOCK: I think in a lot of respects you know, Frances has made my life worthwhile and also made what I do worthwhile.

FRANCES JONES: My and David's relationship is ah, going along strongly um.

DAVID POLLOCK: She hasn't asked me to marry her yet! It seems like we don't really have the time or the money to get married at the moment but I'm sure that we will... we'll get married eventually.

FRANCES JONES: I think Wooleen would be an amazing, probably, environment for kids to grow up. Wooleen is what makes us happiest so that's where I see us.

End Captions:
Frances Jones has now been at Wooleen for seven years and has just celebrated her 25th birthday. In June Richard Pollock visited for the first time and said he was 'very happy to be back'.

The WA Lands Minister, Terry Redman says the Government is embarking on land tenure reform and hopes to amend legislation to allow a new form of lease 'which would give pastoralists more secure tenure and a chance to diversify beyond just grazing of stock'.