By Victoria Stone-Meadows
“It’s sort of spiritual almost, a connectedness I feel to it. I know that sounds a bit wet, but it’s true”
Harkaway’s Judy Wallace has lived a life of firsts and has come a long way since her idyllic childhood on a sheep station. Her life has bought her to the first computers and on to nature reserves. VICTORIA STONE-MEADOWS met with Ms Wallace to hear about her life of hard work and deep passions.
Judy Wallace has lived in Harkaway for about 45 years but her story begins in a rugged and rural setting just outside the farming town of Glen Innes in NSW.
Her childhood home was 6000 acres of rugged bushland that inspired her to write her first book, Memories of a Country Childhood, in 1977.
Ms Wallace said she was very proud of the book and pleased to be able to share the wonderful stories of her youth.
“I had such a happy childhood and I felt impelled to write my memories of it as much for my own satisfaction as for a true chronicling,” she said.
“My sister said it was like a fairy tale, it was so lovely, and I suppose I love living in a fairly country area to this day.”
Her book was very successful and was used as alternative text for matriculation exams for entry into universities in Queensland and NSW and went onto be printed in four editions.
When Ms Wallace was 35 years old she moved away from the country to the bustling metropolis of Sydney.
She quickly picked up a job working at the University of Sydney as the first secretary and program librarian of SILLIAC, the first computer built by the university and one of the first computers in the country.
It was through this work she met her late husband Christopher Wallace who went on to be the first professor of computer science at Monash University.
When the couple were seeking to move from Sydney to Victoria, a friend of theirs suggested looking in the Harkaway area for property.
It was here that Judy was able to find again her love of caring for the bush and worked tirelessly to bring the land back from overgrown weeds and invasive plants.
“We had about 10 acres out here originally and kept a few calves and horses,” Ms Wallace said.
“Our 10 acres was very badly degraded with pine trees and pittosporum that I spent years removing.
“After some time the indigenous vegetation came back up and there was a little wood on our property full of wild flowers.”
Working hard to bring her own property back to its natural best inspired Ms Wallace to get involved in her adopted home and start up a few projects.
“I have a great love of the bush that I think I got from my parental home,” she said.
“My father, he was a conservationist and although he was a grazier he was very scrupulous about maintaining native pants so I think I learned the love from there.
“So I headed a group for the Friends of the Jessie Traill Reserve and Kurll Park Reserve in Harkaway.”
When the group first started working on the reserves in the early 1990s, Ms Wallace said they were so overgrown they were not even accessible.
“They were in appalling conditions, couldn’t have been worse,” she said.
“They were totally overrun with weeds and it took a team of about 15 people to even make a dent on them.”
Ms Wallace spent about 15 years working as part of the friends’ group and closely with other groups to manage the reserves and open them up to the community.
“David Westley from City of Casey got me involved in helping a group in Jessie Traill Reserve and what started there soon expanded to the Kurll Park Reserve,” she said.
“Before I knew it we had been working on them, maintaining and revegetating the reserves for 15 years.”
She said both the Jessie Traill Reserve and the Kurll Park Reserve needed a lot of work but in very different ways.
“In the Jessie Traill Reserve, there was very valuable indigenous vegetation we were able to preserve and save from being killed by invasive plant species,” she said.
“In Kurll Park there was no vegetation at all and we did a lot of revegetating with indigenous species.”
While Ms Wallace spent a sizable portion of her life rejuvenating the land around Harkaway, she doesn’t view the reserves as a legacy but more as places of peace.
“It hadn’t occurred to me to think of them as being like a legacy but they are something,” she said.
“I loved every minute of it and there was nothing I wanted more than to be out there planting and weeding and so on.
“It is nice to look back on Jessie Traill in particular but it is hard to describe the intense personal feeling I have when I’m there.
“It’s sort of spiritual almost, a connectedness I feel to it. I know that sounds a bit wet, but it’s true.”
Ms Wallace said she found a real passion for conservation and land care through her work in Harkaway, which was more intense than her other love of writing.
However, looking back on her life after celebrating her 85th birthday, she does regret not putting more words to paper.
“I always wanted to be a writer. I wish I had written more. I did write a couple of things that were not published,” she said.
“I used to write poetry at school and probably still have them around somewhere.”
Despite this, Ms Wallace said she was grateful for all the opportunities she had been given throughout her life to make a difference and be part of her communities.
“I have had a wonderful life and being asked to be involved in the Jessie Traill reserve was an important milestone, it was like a pivot point,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfied with my life if I hadn’t been involved in that.
“It was an enormous source of happiness and satisfaction.”
