Run rabbit, run

Even in John Perriam’s wildest dreams 30 years ago he would never have contemplated that the vast semi-arid Bendigo Station could offer so many diverse opportunities as it does today. Words: Kate Coughlan. Photos: Stephen Jaquiery & Guy Frederick.

AS A YOUNG MAN from a river-flat farm near Lowburn, John Perriam often looked across the Clutha River to the great shoulders of the Dunstan Mountains which are part of Bendigo Station and wondered what lay behind. Years later, when the impossible dream became a reality and the opportunity to purchase the station was on the table, a respected neighbour, Harrison Holloway of Cairnmuir Station, offered this advice: “Don’t do it, lad – the rabbits will ruin you”. “I think it made me more determined,” says John and today he takes the greatest pleasure in seeing Bendigo rabbit being eaten in upmarket restaurants alongside quality wine from Bendigo.

It was merciless country, he knew that much, where the aristocratic mountain sheep, the merino, competed with the rapacious rabbit for what little spring growth occurred in the alpine grasses. However, the flooding of the Clutha valley from Clyde to Queensbury for a hydro dam had drowned the third-generation Perriam family land and left no choice for John, his wife Heather and their three young children but to seek elsewhere to farm. He’d fought as hard as he knew how to stop the dam project but he’d lost. The building of the Clyde High Dam was crucial to then-prime minister Sir Robert Muldoon’s dream for energy self-sufficiency and pivotal to the construction of a second aluminum smelting pot-line at Bluff’s Tiwai Point. (A pot-line that is closed today as it is more profitable for the company to sell electricity than to smelt bauxite. But that’s another story.)

The Bendigo terraces were stony and pocked with schist outcrops. Some days all that moved were the rabbits. The high pastures were sweet only in the flush of the spring growth and the river flats were semi-arid and grassless. These flats became so dry in the worst days of the rabbit infestation that in big blows, Bendigo dust swirled into Cromwell township 10km away and turned the day dark. (Seventeen and a half thousand rabbits were shot in one month on Bendigo in the 1980s.) The views from the kanuka-clad terraces down over the rocky outcrops, across the narrow river-bed and dry flats to distant Mt Aspiring were grand, no doubt about it, and they’d never change. But change they have – and miraculously so. 

The river is now the headwaters of Lake Dunstan and a wildlife sanctuary, created by the very same high dam that drove the Perriams on to Bendigo. The flats are thick with lush grass fed by pivot irrigators that sprouted like weeds after a water diviner’s rod went berserk above hitherto-unknown underground streams. The formerly barren terraces are a busy sight with row upon row of vines marching, like stiff green soldiers, up the hills in formation.

These are the vineyards of the Bendigo appellation. It is a foolhardy four-legged creature which breeches the rabbit-proof fence today. Farmers might have detested rabbits enough to welcome the arrival of rabbit calicivirus (RCD) in the late 1990s but, boy, their ferocity is benign compared to the wrath of investors whose grapes produce sought-after pinot noir, sparkling and riesling wines. 

Tucked into the schist tors of the terraces are houses – not the rabbiters’ huts or abandoned gold-miners’ shacks of old but secluded mansions with every luxury. The kanuka is a thickening belt across the hills, under protection as a conservation reserve. And even the access road to the old Bendigo township, the original gold-mining settlement from which Bendigo takes its name, no longer threatens cars’ mufflers and passengers’ bones. Walking tracks snake among the falling stone remains and long-abandoned stamper batteries. The plummeting deepness of the mine shafts is safety-fenced and signs point visitors to the most interesting remains.

It is an astonishing fact that this station, once a raw-commodity producer of merino wool supporting one family and several shepherds and under threat from rabbits, is today, 30 years later, home to a broad variety of businesses growing and creating a range of products for export and home consumption and providing a livelihood for about 100 people.

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