I am Louise Freckelton and together with my husband David Bray we run Highfield Farm and
Woodland, which is in the, or near the Snowy Mountains.
We’ve been here for eight and a half years.
We had been living in Marrickville in Sydney but we’ve always wanted to live in the bush
and we finally got here.
We used to come bushwalking down in Kosciuszko, very very often, as often as we could.
And we’ve always thought around Adelong and Tumut was really beautiful.
We bought this place because two thirds of it is under conservation covenant protecting
critically endangered habitat.
But one third of it had been grazed before we came.
We decided to get some sheep of our own and it’s gone from there.
We’re just walking through the paddock, early in the morning just to check on any
new lambs that have been born.
The dogs often alert us too, to anything that is going on, so they’ll often show us the
new borns.
Yeah so the dogs have just gone up the slope here to check on some ewes with quite small
lambs up there.
They are a little bit nervous of the dogs but the dogs are just checking to see if there
are any new lambs.
That looks like a new born there.
So we raise grass fed Dorper lamb, so Dorpers are a meat only breed.
We raise them entirely on native grass pasture.
We use low stress stock handling with the animals so they have the calmest possible
life.
Our general aim for our lamb business was always to grow really beautiful lamb with
as low food miles and as low impact on land as possible.
And that includes selling our lamb as locally as possible.
There is so much food created in this area but it disappears up the highway.
It goes to Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra and local people don’t get to eat local
food.
We sell everything locally.
An important part of that is being part of a local co-operative of local makers and producers
in Tumut called Local at Learmonts.
We sell a lot of our lamb through this co-op.
This is our chook caravan, as you can see it’s a real caravan.
A converted caravan, we took the floor out of the bottom and made nesting boxes from
the floor.
We quite deliberately keep mixed breeds that don’t necessarily lay as often but have
longer lives and are fantastic chooks.
It also just looks nice in the paddock when you’ve got different varieties.
Initially our goal was really to protect the critically endangered habitat that we have
here, the box gum grassy woodland.
But very quickly, the aim also moved to looking at our farming land and seeing how we could
incorporate wildlife back into our farmland.
So when we came here, this area around here was one paddock and we’ve subsequently divided
it up into six paddocks and an area that protects the carex sedgelands.
What that allows us to do is control the grazing through the valley.
We’re able to divide it up and rotate the sheep through the paddock to control the grazing,
to save grass and to eat grass at different times so that there is always something growing
in this valley.
When we got here there was a very old ruined hut on the property.
As soon as we got here we knew we wanted to build some accommodation on the property that
honoured the original hut.
So we’ve built a place called kestrel nest and it’s made of tin and timber.
The floorboards and the rafters and the kitchen and the bunks have all been made out of timber
that was grown and milled on the property.
It’s offline and off grid.
It’s really cosy and warm yet its impact on the land is minimal.
So we’re hoping people will come and explore our conservation area and learn a little bit
about how we farm here by staying at the hut.
An inevitable part of living on the land is dealing with everything that nature throws
at you.
Well we had three years of drought followed by a pretty intense fire season that everyone
experienced in 2019 and 20.
But then, yeah, we burnt during the Dunns Road fires and lost half of our pasture and
almost all of the conservation area burnt.
So that was difficult and then it was followed by a massive flood.
What’s quite interesting is even though initially the repercussions of the fire were
really really awful, it has been really fantastic to watch the bush and the pasture change after
the fires.
So I think you have to find the bits that are fantastic outcomes out of drought and
fire.
This is our grass-fed Dorper lamb, and the cut is a back strap and we’re just cooking
it on these beautiful coals that Chris has made and we’ll just slice it and have it
with some salads.
What I’d really like to see, and this is something that everyone can do, is to be much
more conscious consumers, to know where their food comes from, to ask questions about how
their food is produced to think about eating locally and seasonally.
The natural consequence of that is that the nutrition of the food is better.
I think a greater awareness by consumers and a greater questioning of producers is one
of the things I’d love to see.