Corangamite Arts
Corangamite Arts has established the Corangamite Dry Stone Walls
Heritage Trail which takes in 10 sections of the most diverse
and significant walls in the district. Information boards at each
site provide valuable details on the walls.
Brochures for the self-drive Trail are available from Visitor
Information Centres in Colac, Camperdown, Terang, Port Campbell,
Mortlake and Warrnambool. They have also published with diagrams
and illustrations the research on the history, styles, functions,
building techniques and the builders of the walls
If these Walls Could Talk: the Report of the Corangamite Dry
Stone Walls Conservation Project, Corangamite Arts, 1995 is available
from the above Visitor Information Centres as well as Information
Victoria 356 Collins Street Melbourne and by mail order for $23
inclusive from Corangamite Arts PO Box 115 Terang 3264.
The Corangamite Dry Stone Walls Heritage Trail
The most impressive and extensive network of dry stone walls
in Australia is found in the Western District of Victoria. The
Corangamite Dry Stone Walls Heritage Trail established by Corangamite
Arts includes some of the most significant walls in the region,
at Pomborneit in the Stony Rises on the Princes Highway east of
Camperdown, at Derrinallum, in the shadow of Mount Elephant on
the Hamilton Highway and at Kolora to the west of Mount Noorat
on the Terang Mortlake Road and the Terang Darlington Road.
The western plains of Victoria are among the world’s greatest
basalt plains. The volcanic activity over millions of years has
shaped the landscape which is generally flat except for the volcanic
cones. These volcanic cones, some time in the past, spouted out
the lava which then formed the stones covering the plains. The
youngest eruption points are less than 10,000 years old. The volcanic
cones most visible in the Corangamite region are Mounts Porndon,
Elephant (the lighthouse of the Western District), Leura, Noorat
and Shadwell.
The natural landscape was given new form and function by
immigrants from the British Isles who began arriving in the middle
of the 19 th century. Realising the fertility of volcanic
plains, they set about clearing the land first of natural vegetation
and then of the surface stones in order to introduce stock and
grow crops. The stone cleared from the ground provided the earliest,
most convenient and practical building material. Although most
of the existing walls were built after the gold rush and after
the introduction of the rabbit, there is evidence of dry stone
walls in the western district from the late 1840s.These were carefully
built after the paddocks had been cleared of stone in order to
create enclosures, protect cultivated paddocks, livestock, homesteads,
crops and as barriers against fires. A greater need for fencing
arose when many shepherds and itinerant station hands fled to
the goldfields to seek their fortune.
From the 1870s many pastoralists began to rebuild earlier walls
in an attempt to make their properties rabbit-proof. Several construction
devices were used: overhanging copestones; wooden slats projecting
under the copestones; wire stretching out from the top of the
wall; trenches about a metre into the clay base (presumably impenetrable
for the rabbits), plugging of holes in the wall to prevent the
rabbits colonising the walls; and even asymmetrical walls with
stepping stones up one side and a sheer wall on the other with
overhanging copestones to prevent them coming back. The rabbit
wall built by the Manifold brothers at Purrumbete in the 1880s
is perhaps the most significant wall in the district standing
up to two metres high. It originally ran continuously from Lake
Corangamite to Lake Purrumbete.
Dry stone walling although slow and back-breaking work is a
skillful craft and in earlier times was handed down from one generation
to the next, creating stone walling families. Each wall is in
fact two walls because the craftsmen or cowans would lay two rows
of stone about a metre apart, filling in the centre with smaller
stones.
