Leslie Scott - Once Were Wild

Leslie Scotts love for horses and the bush began when she received her first pony at the age of six. Her father, an experienced bushman, taught her to listen to, appreciate and be able to read the bush. When Leslie cant get to the High Country, she immerses herself in the rugged terrain of Mount Beckworth, a nature reserve seven minutes from her front gate. Leslie lives on a small property with her husband in historic Clunes, rural Victoria. They have a menagerie of animals. In her spare time, shes either riding her horses in the bush or hiking through it with her dog. For Leslie the bush is not just a place to visitits her home.

First published in 2022

Copyright Leslie Scott 2022

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Allen & Unwin

Cammeraygal Country

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

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Web:www.allenandunwin.com

Allen & Unwin acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which we live and work. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past and present.

ISBN 978 1 76106 714 3

eISBN 978 1 76106 489 0

Map by Mika Tabata

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design: Alex Ross Creative

Cover photograph: Leslie Scott Photography

For my dad Syd Tancredi,

who inspired my love for horses and the great outdoors, and

who taught me to be at one with nature.

Mount Beckworth has always felt like magic to me, trans-formative. Mountains had called to me since I was a child hiking through the Victorian High Countrysomething about them always made me feel grounded, at peace.

In the second half of 2020, this became truer than ever. The pandemic had wound its way from the cities, through the countryside and to my small historic hometown of Clunes. Working as a part of the leadership team in a rural general practice clinic, a lot of the time in full PPE, had run me into the ground and left me feeling powerless and empty, and so Id left my job in late June and found myself filling the free time that Id never had before wandering up to the mount.

A large pine is the first sign of Mount Beckworth, visible from kilometres away. It stands proudly on the mountains summit, a lone sentinel, its distinctive roundness and tall, bare trunk giving it its local nickname of the Lollipop Tree.

The walk up the mount is steep and rugged. Granite stones speckle the landscape, and serpentine eucalypts curve and bend and twist like gnarled hands from the ground and around boulders.

Bark and twigs crackle underfoot and in the cold morning air birdsong is both a comfort and unsettling. Rarely populated walking tracks weave their way through the tall grasses and underbrush, and somehow this indication of human presence emphasises the wildness rather than making the mountain feel tame.

The landscape is sanctuary to a rich variety of native mammals and birds. My dog Giz and I head up to the mount almost every day to watch the bush tell us how the Earth changes, listen for the sweet song of a fantail, or check the tracks the wallabies made as they went searching for waterbut of most interest to me that July were the rumours of horses on the mount.

The rumours had begun months before, at the start of the pandemic, but I had yet to meet anyone who had actually seen the horses. This gossip made its way to me quickly through my fellow horse-lover, Helen. Having lived in Clunes since she was a child, Helen knew the mount better than anyone, so when she told me that shed noticed more horse tracks than normal I trusted that she was right and that these were more than just the usual tracks from locals and their horses.

In those early months of the pandemic the pressures of working in a large health clinic had been immense, trying to work with health regulations that changed by the day and waiting for PPE that never seemed to arrive, so while Id been captivated by the idea, imagining different scenarios for how horses would have found their way to the mountbrumbies are common in the Victorian High Country, but Mount Beckworth was almost 300 kilometres away and wild horses were unheard ofI had not had the time to go investigate for myself. Instead, I was stuck at work and feeling claustrophobic and trapped by my small town for the first time ever.

Clunes, 36 kilometres north of Ballarat, in the shire of Hepburn, was the site of Victorias first gold strike in 1851. Walking down our Main Street can feel like stepping back into the past. With historic shopfronts and the stunning architecture of our post office, town hall and courthouse, you can almost imagine horses pulling carriages down the cobblestoned road.

And its not only the locals who feel this way. Our beautifully preserved heritage buildings and Clunes streetscape has often captured the eyes of film and television producers, and its not unusual to find parts of the Main Street blocked off for a film crew. Everything from ads to Hollywood thrillers have been filmed hereMel Gibson was once in town filming Mad Max, and Mum and I were extras on set when Justin Theroux came to Clunes to shoot HBOs The Leftovers.

With a population just nudging 2000, Clunes is a close-knit community made up of two kinds of people: locals and blow-ins. Its an unspoken law that dictates that youre not a true local until you have someone in the cemetery. Most locals can trace their ancestry back to the original European settlers of the town, with their family names on the war cenotaph and photographs in the local museum. Blow-ins are people like me, those who have been charmed by Clunes wide streets, breathtaking countryside and idyllic cottages, and decided to stay.

But whether a local or a blow-in, guaranteed everyone and their dog in Clunes knows your business. Every event in town is a whole town affair: at Christmas time every street has a Christmas party and everyone in town goes to every streetwhether its yours or not. This means everyone truly knows everyone. I dont go down the Main Street with less than a half-hour to spare, as I know that Ill bump into at least four or five friends or neighbours and get caught up in some good old chit-chat.

You can imagine, then, that gossip and rumours are one of our favourite past-timesparticularly in the locked-down world we were then living in.

And thus, the rumours of the horses on the mount continued for months until they began to feel almost mythicala new chapter of Clunes folklore. So that winter, newly jobless for the first time in my life and unsure of my place in the world, Giz and I hiked, eyes peeled for tracks or manure, my breath curled into mist on the whistling wind that felt haunted by the whispers of wild horses.