The Barnes family farm, Boronia Station sits in the rural lower south of Western Australia, in the broad agricultural belt that lies just east of the Darling Scarp. The Scarp itself is visible on clear days as a dark ridge of timber along the western horizon, marking the drop from the plateau down to the coastal plain. The country around the station is gently undulating, with red gravel roads connecting it to neighboring properties and the nearest town.
The bush that borders the farm is dry eucalypt woodland, dominated by wandoo and jarrah, and it runs unbroken for miles in the eastern direction. This bush is both a resource and a hazard: it provides shade and shelter for stock that drift to the fence lines, but in a dry summer it carries fire fast and without mercy.
The station, now run by Libby Barnes, has been in the Barnes family for several generations.
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| Libby Barnes |
The land shows the marks of that long occupation: old fence lines running at angles that no longer make obvious sense, a stand of pepper trees planted as a windbreak around the homestead, and a water trough near the yards that has been patched and re-patched over the decades.
Neighboring properties include the Edwards place, which shares a fence line to the north, the Johnson farm, and the Morris property, which lies within calling distance to the east. The nearest town provides a post office, a pub, and a small stock and station agent, and is reachable by a thirty-minute drive on sealed road. The station's position near the Scarp means it catches weather coming in from the coast, and the gullies along the property's southern edge run with water after heavy rain, draining toward the Arthur River system further south.
The smell of the station shifts with the season and the wind. On dry summer days, the air carries eucalyptus oil baked out of the surrounding bush, cattle dust from the yards, and the faint iron tang of bore water running into the stock troughs. In spring, the flowering boronia after which the property was named, releases its sweet perfume to waft from the nearby eucalypt forest. And after rain, the red gravel driveway steams and the paddocks release a deep, loamy smell that settles over the homestead veranda like a blanket.
The veranda itself is the farm's social nerve center: wide enough for a pair of chairs and a small table, it faces west toward the paddocks and catches the afternoon breeze off the Darling Scarp. From here, Libby can watch the tree line for smoke, check on cattle grazing near the fence line, and hear the distant clang of the yards without leaving her seat.
The homestead is a low, weatherboard building with a corrugated iron roof that pops and ticks in the heat. Inside, the kitchen is the warmest room, smelling of tea, laundry soap, and recent baking. The living room holds furniture that has not changed much in two generations: a worn couch, a sideboard with family photographs, and a clock on the mantelpiece that has marked time through drought, fire, and flood.
The hayshed stands a short walk from the house, its corrugated walls stained orange at the base from years of splashed mud. The cattle yards are timber and steel, smelling of livestock, manure, and hay, and they groan and rattle when a mob is being worked through them. The surrounding paddocks run to the edge of the bush, where wandoo and jarrah give way to denser scrub along the gullies.
Boronia Station is a working cattle property, but to Libby Barnes, it's also home.
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