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When conservation of our natural environment seems like a mammoth task, it\u2019s easy to forget that it begins with a single effort: a decision to revegetate a creek line, a campaign to protect a swamp in a migratory bird\u2019s flight path, or a commitment to conserve a patch of bush.<\/p>\n
Dr Susan Downes doesn\u2019t consider herself unusual or heroic in the decision she made 11 years ago to buy a rural property and turn most of it over to nature. It simply started out as a vague retirement plan to spend time in nature, as she had as a child.<\/p>\n
For decades, she\u2019d won accolades for delivering babies and tending to women\u2019s gynaecological needs in desert communities and on remote islands. She\u2019d raised two sons and a stepson, nursed her husband with lymphoma, then her mother, then her late partner, who developed sudden-onset dementia. In between, there was the arrival of four grandchildren.<\/p>\n
A busy life, but her new property, 20 kilometres north of York, in Western Australia\u2019s wheat-belt, would host the birth of a new vocation. She felt especially drawn to a 300-metre-high hill at the back of her 200-hectare farm. It was called Mount Mackie [named after William Henry Mackie, an early settler in the Swan River Colony], and from its summit in 1830 a European explorer, Ensign Robert Dale had his first sighting of the fertile Avon Valley, which he hoped might one day be farmed to feed Perth\u2019s colonists, who were starving through their first year.<\/p>\n
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From the summit of Mt Mackie, Downes first saw what colonists envisioned \u2013 a mosaic of fields and healthy crops \u2013 but she intends to take her land back to the intact landscape from before settlement.Tony McDonough<\/p>\n
A plaque on the road to Downes\u2019 property was installed by the York Historical Society to commemorate Dale\u2019s \u201cdiscovery\u201d. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I\u2019d bought the farm that I noticed this old rusty sign saying \u2018Historic site, 500 metres\u2019. It said, \u2018You are looking at Mt Mackie\u2019 and then it gave the history of it. I thought, \u2018The agent didn\u2019t tell me that.\u2019 It made it even more important that I should be a custodian of this place.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Downes stood on the summit, she saw what the colonists had envisioned \u2013 a mosaic of fields and healthy crops stretching to the horizon, vivid green with barley and wheat and fluorescent yellow in canola harvest time.<\/p>\n
But Downes\u2019 intention is to take her land back to the colonial vista of Dale\u2019s era and the intact landscape he saw, covered with bushland of incredible diversity that sustained unique birds and animals. The former GP obstetrician has become a full-time conservationist in her small corner of a district that, over a century, was almost entirely cleared for agriculture. She\u2019s joined a network of bush carers and organisations \u2013 Landcare<\/a>, BirdLife, the WA Wildflower Society. She\u2019s grown to admire this mass movement of people caring for nature, seeing herself as a foot soldier in a growing army.<\/p>\n At 76, she knows she has limited time to make her contribution. But it feels right to have come full circle, back to the WA wheatbelt where she spent many summers as a child on relatives\u2019 farms. \u201cMy uncle Athol was a glorious man who taught me about animals,\u201d Downes says. \u201cHe would kill a sheep and dissect it for me, show me all the organs. And down at my uncle Jack\u2019s farm they had a dairy stud; the vet would come out for a tricky delivery of a calf and I used to help out.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article When her brother noticed a farm for sale in the Avon Valley, she went to look. The clincher was that hill behind the homestead that her Indigenous friends told her was a spiritual place. \u201cIt\u2019s very significant for them as Ballardong country \u2013 they all say it\u2019s spiritual healing land, which plays into my own life theme as a doctor. So the land became an even bigger draw to me than the house, even though it\u2019s rocky and degraded from being grazed for 150 years.\u201d<\/p>\n Downes is quietly nurturing an ambitious dream. In 2030, exactly 200 years after Dale\u2019s first sighting, she hopes to stand on the summit of Mount Mackie and see a restored landscape from fence-line to fence-line.<\/p>\n Downes was busily dividing her time between an emergency department role and flying to remote desert communities for women\u2019s clinics when she thought: \u201c\u2018I want to live rurally, I want an old house with a little bit of land, maybe an acre.\u2019 But I didn\u2019t realise my farm had 500 acres [200 hectares] attached to it \u2013 I thought, \u2018I can\u2019t possibly deal with all that! What am I going to do with it?\u2019\u2006\u201d<\/p>\n For several years, she found herself restoring the old stockyards, repairing the historic shearing shed and successfully running a flock of 500 sheep, including up to 300 lambs. \u201cMostly, I did a lot of sheep obstetrics,\u201d she says, laughing at the irony. \u201cI only sold the sheep last year. The barley crop in the lower paddocks is sharecropped by a neighbour, so that works out well.\u201d<\/p>\n It has left Downes with time to tackle the tougher job of restoring the farm\u2019s denuded paddocks. It\u2019s challenging terrain, which we drive around in a 4WD utility that strains its way up steep slopes and around rock outcrops. As we jolt past, she points out stands of vegetation. \u201cThis is remnant York gum bushland, with jam wattle and wandoo eucalypt growing on the upper parts \u2013 gradually, we\u2019ll fill it all in.\u201d<\/p>\n She started out alone in her tractor, spraying and then ripping the soil in order to hand-plant seedlings in the furrows. \u201cYou can only do that in little pockets, little mosaics, because higher up it\u2019s just too rocky. Otherwise, it\u2019s pickaxe stuff. There\u2019s a lot of people who think I\u2019m stupid,\u201d she adds, with an expression that suggests she doesn\u2019t much mind.<\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m not advocating that [all agricultural land] goes back to bush. I\u2019ve just realised that you can treat the land differently.\u2019<\/p>\n Susan Downes<\/p>\n Downes has grown to rely on a small army of volunteers, aged eight to 80, who have assembled around the restoration project. \u201cWe\u2019ve got about 80 on our Friends of Mount Mackie list. I\u2019m grateful \u2013 I couldn\u2019t do this without them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve planted about 45,000 trees already, over five planting seasons. I would say survival is more than 40 per cent. It\u2019s daunting at times, but I believe if we concentrate on small areas at a time, eventually we\u2019ll fill it all in with York gum and jam wattle and two or three types of melaleucas. We\u2019re aiming for tree cover. You can see all the trees coming up through the native grass, and see these seedlings here? We planted them last year. It\u2019s so exciting that they\u2019re goers now \u2013 they\u2019ll survive the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n The main planting and seed-spreading is conducted on five planting weekends a year, when dozens of helpers turn up from as far away as Perth. One weekend, an entire women\u2019s soccer team brought their partners. \u201cOne of the mothers of a soccer player has been coming here for a few years with her daughter,\u201d explains Downes. \u201cAnd then the whole team brought their men \u2013 we got a huge amount done that weekend. We\u2019ve also got a group called Intrepid Landcare, who come from Fremantle. And they are the most enthusiastic, fabulous young men and women who come and camp and tackle the toughest jobs on the hardest slopes.\u201d<\/p>\n A visiting ecologist urged her to be patient and \u201clet the land settle\u201d. He told her not to use fire to clean out weeds before planting, \u201cso for now, I\u2019m treating the weeds as my friends, protecting the ground from erosion and heat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI remind myself that over 90 per cent of Western Australia\u2019s wheat-belt region has been cleared,\u201d she adds. \u201cIf we could replant a third of it, the temperatures would go down and rainfall would go up. And the productivity levels might well be the same. But it\u2019s very difficult to get broadacre farmers to think that way. They\u2019ve spent a lot of money and time getting this land cleared, and unless they\u2019ve got a crop in, they\u2019ve wasted that money.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article Downes strides up the slope to a cluster of boulders, and motions for me to sit on a smooth one, shaped oddly like a seat. She says a local Indigenous man told her the site was probably an Aboriginal \u201cworkshop\u201d, where men would sit making tools. She adds that in her kitchen dresser at home is a large, heavy stone that fits in her palm and has grooves that are perfect for grasping. \u201cIt\u2019s a grinding stone, which we found on the property,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cSome farmers around here don\u2019t like my sign on the back gate that refers to a shared history. It says \u2018Site of Aboriginal heritage and European history. Enquiries and volunteers welcome.\u2019\u2006\u201d Among regular visitors are a group of Aboriginal women from a nearby town, led by Downes\u2019 friend and author Dr Marion Kickett, who was raised in an Aboriginal reserve near York. The women\u2019s group, called the York Yorgas, arrive and camp for the day around a huge fire pit with log seats on a secluded slope. It\u2019s a yarning circle in a spot that Downes and Kickett decided was a perfect place to swap stories about family and country. \u201cI built it because it felt right to me,\u201d Downes says simply.<\/p>\n She\u2019s working to put a covenant over a large part of the property to protect it in perpetuity, leaving only the homestead on a sliver of land under separate title. \u201cBasically, I want it to be no logging, no clearing, no stock. But who looks after it when I\u2019ve gone? That is the question that I\u2019m trying to answer myself. Do I just leave it to my grandchildren? I don\u2019t know yet. I\u2019ve got to go down that track somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n Downes has been down many tracks in her life, most of them leading to out-of-the-way places. She even featured in Outback magazine\u2019s \u201c20 Living Legends of the Bush\u201d, published by footwear and clothing company R.M. Williams. The article depicts her leaning on the wing of a two-seater Boomerang at sunrise, holding a portable ultrasound machine. On the day that photo was taken, she and her Royal Flying Doctor Service [RFDS] pilot were headed north to visit remote women\u2019s health clinics, such as at Jigalong in the Little Sandy Desert, 165 kilometres east of the mining town of Newman.<\/p>\n \u201cI used to go out bush every month on the Rural Women\u2019s GP program, to the Martu people of the Eastern Pilbara, to Jigalong, then Parnngurr, Kunawarritji and Punmu,\u201d Downes says. \u201cI did all the women\u2019s business stuff. I used to arrive and I\u2019d say, \u2018Where is everybody?\u2019 and be told, \u2018Oh, they\u2019ve gone out hunting for goanna.\u2019 So, I\u2019d go out hunting. And I\u2019d find the women and then we\u2019d come back and sit round the fire. And then I\u2019d say, \u2018Who needs to come and see the doctor?\u2019 We\u2019d sometimes do clinics late into the night.\u201d<\/p>\n Downes\u2019 trajectory into medicine was as tangential as her later move into conservation work. As a young woman, she\u2019d wanted to be a veterinarian but opted for science, majoring in botany at the University of Western Australia. During a stint working at the WA Herbarium, she made a research trip to the UK to study prototype specimens of Western Australian plants (many collected by Dale\u2019s colonial contemporaries) held at Kew Gardens. She met and married Ray, a teacher, and they set up home in Cumbria, in north-west England, restoring a 17th-century ruin. Her interest in medicine was inspired by a job as a research assistant investigating a local cluster of leukaemia cases in children, some of whose parents worked at the nearby Sellafield nuclear power station.<\/p>\n Realising that her vocation was to become a doctor, she began studying at Nottingham University. By then, she was a 35-year-old mother of two sons and a stepson. \u201cI\u2019d be sitting in lectures trying to concentrate and I\u2019d think, \u2018Oh my god, I didn\u2019t take dinner out of the freezer.\u2019\u2009\u201d She graduated with first-class honours aged 42 \u2013 at the time, she was the oldest woman to graduate from a British medical school.<\/p>\n When the family moved back to Downes\u2019 home town of Perth in 1993, she worked in a busy maternity hospital. When that hospital was closed, Downes eagerly accepted an RFDS offer to perform remote medical care for women.<\/p>\n \u201cThe conditions were extraordinary, the pushing, shoving and lumping gear in and out of planes and trucks \u2013 it\u2019s hot, and dusty as hell sometimes, but there were magic times that made everything worthwhile.\u201d She treated young Aboriginal women for teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and older women for cervical cancer and menopause, \u201creal cradle-to-grave medicine\u201d. Downes also promoted the use of ultrasound so that pregnancy dates were more accurate, as well as the wider use of contraceptive implants. \u201cThey gave young women a better chance to mature and allow their bodies and minds to develop before falling pregnant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn the Western Desert, where I visited for 25 years, there were amazing changes. Women began to understand their reproductive anatomy; they knew what to look out for, they understood what makes a child sick and when to seek help.\u201d<\/p>\n Regular flights to distant Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) islands to attend pregnant Malay, Chinese and Muslim women earned her a General Practice Prize for Excellence in Population Health. She even found herself performing emergency brain surgery on a man on Christmas Island, drilling a hole in his skull to relieve pressure after he fell down concrete steps. It was the first \u2013 and last \u2013 time she carried out such a procedure.<\/p>\n In 2017, Downes was awarded an Order of Australia for \u201csignificant service to rural and remote medicine and Indigenous health\u201d. Her love of remote and rural obstetric care saw her continuing to fly north even after she purchased the farm. \u201cThere\u2019s a fine balance between working less and retaining my credentials. But last year, I found a wonderful doctor who I felt could take over from me. It was incredibly sad to leave, but I did it. The mob still rings me and asks me things.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"E\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/40714b81013a8313ac751227194a9f589764f67864a0ec6f1a62e82c9e9600ce.gif\")
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A dedicated yarning-circle location on Susan Downes\u2019 farm is regularly
\nvisited by a local women\u2019s group, who gather there to share stories.Tony McDonough<\/p>\n![\"Early](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/22c1ce57a7ee938ff91d23ad7ce6f08c2260734a78efd8eb1c6ef69e84cf3611.jpeg\")
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Downes in 2013, waiting for a plane to take her on a Royal Flying Doctor Service clinic run.<\/p>\n
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Downes hopes that by 2030, her farm will be planted with native species, and that Aboriginal elders will make the place part of reconciliation and healing.Tony McDonough<\/p>\n