A legacy of bringing bush moments to life
Artist captures country colours and moments
PLACES can mean different things to different people. Say the name Urannah Creek and many people think of the lurking, controversial idea of a proposed dam; but for artist, cattle farmer and permaculturist Maree Angus, Urannah Station and its creek were simply her first home.
For her, it was a place of afternoons spent down at the fishing hut, of clear lively pools full of so many fish. Of bottlebrush and gum trees. The occasional crocodile slide, right up to the filleting block. A flying fox zipline across the water. Of great times spent with family.
And even back then in the ’60s, occasional choppers arriving with government hydrologists to survey the creek and valley, soon to disappear and drop the idea of a dam once again.
The Angus family bought the 81,000-hectare Urannah Station in the Mackay hinterlands in 1951. It was a good breeding lot of open ironbark forest country, but not a great fattening lot, so the family extended their holdings to include properties at Collinsville, Red Hill near Moranbah, and Kimberley Station near Clermont.
Past the age of seven, Maree and her parents were based at the other family properties, but her grandparents remained on Urannah, so the connection was maintained.
TAKING TIME FROM CATTLE WORK TO DRAW
Maree said cattle station life was busy, but her art began with her parents John and Clover, in times away from work.
“I was always drawing. Mum had a big blackboard on the front veranda to use,” Maree said.
“Mum was a teacher, so she taught us at home for Grade 1 and 2. Mum always encouraged me to enter shows, and I often won prizes at the Collinsville Show.
“Sometimes Dad would take me out to draw. Dad was always very busy, so it was pretty special when he took that time out to do that, when I think back on it.
“Dad liked to draw and paint cattle and horses, and people. He didn’t have any training, he was just self-taught. A lot of his friends didn’t know he did it, he hardly had time for it, because in those days everyone was just busy working.
“But I remember Dad at Red Hill, when he had a bit of leftover black paint, and a wide brush, and he did this big three-foot portrait of an Aboriginal face on the corrugated iron. He did it like a Rolf Harris: you had to go way back to see what it was.
“Dad died in 1989, and one of the main reasons I decided to really take up my art was because Dad always thought he would do his art when he retired.
“But he was only 57 when he died, and I thought, ‘Well, you shouldn’t put it off’.”
THE GENTLE ART OF WORKING SUSTAINABLY
Maree is an accredited master pastellist, trained at the Julian Ashton Art School in The Rocks, Sydney. She regularly exhibits, enters competitions, and has performed numerous commissions. She captures landscapes, portraiture and scenes from life.
There’s a certain warm light and rich sense of colour in the artworks of Maree Angus that say something of the woman, who is certainly more than any one thing.
❝Sometimes Dad would take me out to draw ... it was pretty special. — Maree Angus
She runs a 101ha cattle property near the coast south of Mackay with her husband Michael Young, who is also a commercial cattle buyer and occasional show judge.
Since the couple moved onto the property 23 years ago, they have developed it with a good sense of sustainability. Just under 200 head of brangus enjoy rotational grazing on pastures.
“We could run more, but we don’t want to flog the soil,” Maree said. “Michael really keeps an eye on that – if it’s getting a bit dry, we sell off a few. He’s a cattle buyer, and he travels a lot for work, and he sees what it does to the soil when a place is over-grazed.”
Other sustainable practices include avoiding the burning of pasture, minimising soil disturbance, promoting legumes in pasture, and adding trees into pasture areas, especially replacing any that are lost in drought times.
Cattle also have the opportunity to browse on neem and mango leaves, both of which they love. Visible from Maree and Michael’s veranda, a neem tree, an Indian species well-known for its anti-parasitic properties, has a perfectly hedged cow-height under-canopy.
It was during the drought years around 2003 that Maree was really able to concentrate on her art and develop professionally.
“I couldn’t do any gardening, we just didn’t have the water for the garden. We had the biocycle, but that was really it, so I just had to let it go. I just thought, whatever survives survives, and that’s why I had time for my art,” she said.
It’s hard to recognise that drought effect now, surrounded by wild bird song, the lush home yard featuring a mix of ferns, orchids and ornamentals with mature mangoes, tamarind, citrus and banana in an abundant swaled food forest with integrated productive layers.
Maree has appreciated being able to connect with people in a growing movement around permaculture concepts of sustainable systems of land management, and integrating those concepts into producing food at the property.
“I’ve always had some fruit trees, although I probably didn’t plant enough originally,” Maree said.
“It’s always been in me, I just needed to meet all those other permaculturists to realise that it’s normal. These people that like recycling, they know it’s better to mend, to look after the earth.
“There is a growing number of people coming out of the woodwork that think like that, and it’s really heartening.”