West Wyalong filmmaker Ross Harmer has spent almost two decades bringing the bush stories that might otherwise be lost back to life. Photo: Barellan Working Clydesdales “The Good Old Days” Weekend/Facebook.
Ross Harmer’s filmmaking career began with a sacking.
The Lake Cowal district farmer was a local history enthusiast, not a man who made documentaries.
That changed as the district geared up for the West Wyalong Show Society’s centenary year and Ross – a committee member – advertised for photographs, memorabilia and old film.
Soon, reels were emerging from cupboards across the district and the past was moving again.
Then a committee dispute over who owned and controlled the showground brought Mr Harmer’s time with the society to an abrupt end – but left him with a story waiting to be told.
He kept digging, uncovering 1926 footage of West Wyalong’s eucalyptus oil industry, businesses along its famously crooked main street and scenes from the 1973 show.
He had found the pictures and the people. What he lacked was any idea how to turn them into a film.
“It was a lot of stumbling in the dark for me,” he said.
With guidance from people experienced in documentary production, Mr Harmer combined the old reels with photographs, interviews and newly filmed material.
The result was the four-part West Wyalong Movies, released in 2008.
The film was meant to be a one-off.
Thirty-eight documentaries later, with another five or six taking shape, Mr Harmer is still chasing the past wherever it leads.
The trail rarely runs in a straight line.
His mind works like the traditional bush telegraph, carrying names, memories and connections from one district to the next. There are few people he cannot place and fewer conversations that do not send him somewhere else.
He has enough tales to keep a campfire going long after the stars come out.
“You get into people’s lives and their stories,” he said, “that’s how one story leads into another.”
One of his more recent documentaries, Lindley’s Last Ride, is a case in point.
It was not the film he and veteran rural journalist Kim Woods had planned to make when they travelled to Gundagai to interview former overlanders who had driven stock from Queensland through the Snowy Mountains towards East Gippsland.
But several of the people lined up to speak withdrew.
The gaps in their schedule left Mr Harmer and Ms Woods talking with the Lindleys, a long-established Gundagai cattle-grazing family.
The conversation led them to a memorial marking where Hannah Sophia Lindley and her four children were swept away with Gundagai’s original township in 1852, among up to 100 people killed in Australia’s deadliest recorded flood.
Hannah’s husband, former convict and Rose Inn publican Thomas Lindley, escaped the disaster because he was away in Yass. He later remarried, beginning the branch of the family from which the present-day Lindleys descend.
The memorial held the tragedy. The surprise was that the Lindley story was still moving.
Mr Harmer and Ms Woods learnt the family retained one of the few freehold grazing properties within Kosciuszko National Park (KNP) and continued the age-old practice of taking cattle into the high country each summer.
The cattle are trucked to a family property near the park boundary, then walked into the mountains to graze on native pasture over summer.
As the season turns, horsemen muster them and bring them home through the Goobarragandra country — a journey once common across the Snowy Mountains but now undertaken by only a handful of families.
Ms Woods turned to Mr Harmer.
“That’s the story,” she said.
Mr Harmer packed food and a swag for the two-day shoot, but the Lindleys offered him and his cameraman an upgrade: an old hut known as the “bridal suite”.
Its chief luxury was a pair of beds whose best years had also disappeared into history.
“The springs were so worn out, I had a job getting out of it,” he said.
By morning, despite a rough night, their high country adventure had delivered a very modern filmmaking gift: trouble.
Twenty-eight cattle were missing, apparently after a gate was left open.
The search gave Lindley’s Last Ride a storyline no scriptwriter could have improved – horsemen combing the mountains for lost cattle as the cameras rolled.
It also brought Mr Harmer back to his own family history.
His grandfather helped drive about 20,000 sheep from “Manna Park”, near Condobolin, to summer grazing country at “Burra Station”, near Tumbarumba.
The journey took six weeks each way, with the men and sheep spending three months in the mountains.
“It was just a way of life, and no-one had to write it down much,” Mr Harmer said.
Finding what was never written down has become the heart of his work.
A visit to Borambola to film heavy-horseman Tim Peel cracking a bullock whip grew into a wider record of skills disappearing from the bush.
Mr Harmer discovered a saddlery where traditional horse collars and harnesses were still being made, a blacksmith’s shop containing historic horseshoes as large as dinner plates and an old milk-delivery wagon connected to Mr Peel’s family dairy at Parklea.
Another deep dive resulted from a neighbour’s memory of a Tiger Moth spraying crops for skeleton weed.
Mr Harmer said the aircraft clipped a powerline and plunged nose-first into the ground, burying its engine, yet the pilot escaped with a broken collarbone.
He has since assembled film of the Tiger Moth flying before the crash, photographs of the wreck and recollections from people who were there – enough fragments to return one extraordinary moment to the screen.
Mr Harmer’s documentaries range from Tractors, Trains, Headers & Hay and Bags to Bulk to films about farming, working horses, trucks, railways, country shows and towns including Temora, Ungarie, Ariah Park and Quandialla.
The archive behind them has grown through film reels and videotapes recovered from farm sheds, family collections and country photographic studios.
Mr Harmer arranges for private footage to be digitised, returning the originals and a digital copy to their owners in exchange for permission to use relevant material.
Each reel brings more names. Each name carries another memory. Each memory opens another road into Australia’s rural past.
The first two documentaries sold more than 4500 copies, with most of the proceeds – more than $70,000 – directed into improvements at the West Wyalong Showground.
Other productions have raised money for show societies, historical groups and education funds.
Mr Harmer calls it, “using our heritage to preserve our heritage”.
And then there are the charity events.
A recent Leeton screening of Lindley’s Last Ride raised money for Can Assist Leeton, supporting regional cancer patients with the costs of treatment and travel.
Much of the history Mr Harmer records survives only because someone remembers it – but his inquiring mind keeps following those recollections wherever they lead, making sure that what was never written down, or recorded, is not lost to time.
Original Article published by Edwina Mason on About Regional.
