HSSA MONTHLY TALK – FRIDAY, JUNE 7

Burnside Uniting Church, Fisher Rd, Burnside, 7.30pm

THOSE DRY STONE WALLS – Bruce Munday

Walls and fences mark and defend boundaries. As the early pastoralists pushed out into the unknown, stock never moved far from available water and were tended by shepherds. But when the vast pastoral runs were broken up for farming and shepherds saw a better life calling on the Victorian goldfields, the fence soon became a consuming interest.

Rural fences in the mid-nineteenth century were about function and cost. Very few post-and-rail fences have survived 150 or so years of fire, termites and rot, but we still have hundreds of kilometres of stone walling for various purposes and in various styles and materials. All built without mortar. Many are beautiful, most are heroic, and all tell us something about lives lived before ours.

Even the simplest man-made forms give us a glimpse of early European settlement here, while their durability states the obvious about the material and underlines the skill and toil of our forebears.                                       

Bruce Munday’s talk will use dry stone walls as a framework for understanding aspects of early settlement in South Australia, and also the importance of sustaining this old craft.

Bruce’s new book, Those Dry Stone Walls Revisited, was published by Wakefield Press in April this year. It takes the reader further into the pastoral country and deeper into territory explored in his earlier edition.

About the speaker –

Bruce grew up in Geelong with a burning ambition to play football for his beloved Cats. When that was not going to happen, he completed a PhD in physics and then spent four years researching the magnetoelastic properties of antiferromagnetic materials. Alas, he found that his penchant for the esoteric cut him off from many of his friends. So he moved into teaching where he had a captive audience.

In 1974 he and Kristin bought a farm in the Adelaide Hills. There they raised sheep, cattle and three children, and planted many trees. When the kids left home Bruce established his own business as a communications consultant in natural resource management and discovered how much he enjoyed sharing stories with people living on the land – particularly those who love the land and want to conserve it. He also learned a lot about stone walls built without mortar, so much so that he wrote two books about them.

In 2017 Bruce moved to the Aldinga Arts-eco Village where he has continued to arrange stones.