ONE OF THE BAROSSA’S OLDEST AND GRANDEST RURAL PROPERTIES, ANLABY STATION IS ENJOYING A NEW LIFE.

IN ITS HALCYON DAYS Anlaby Station in the Barossa Valley was one of South Australia’s grandest pastoral properties. The state’s oldest merino stud was settled in 1839 by Frederick Dutton with 5000 merinos driven overland from NSW. Now 200 hectares, at one time the property encompassed 65,000 hectares with a homestead that, by the 1920s, sprawled to 32 rooms. It sat in extensive gardens amid a village of outbuildings — employees’ houses, stables, a clock tower and coach house around a paved quadrangle. There were also harness and saddle rooms, a blacksmith’s shop and woolshed. Only three families had owned Anlaby when it came on the market in 2002. Andrew Morphett and Peter Hayward have never forgotten their first visit to Anlaby one stifling February day in 2003. “It was 38 degrees and it was just overwhelming,” says Andrew. “In four hours, we’d seen everything once, and then we were in the car heading home, in stunned silence. It was just too big, too far out, too far down a dirt road, too everything! And here we are.” Andrew and Peter were then both in the finance industry in Sydney, and had been looking for a weekender within an hour’s drive from the city. “We both grew up in the country, I was from Echuca and Peter grew up in Mildura. But we lived in Paddington, and those who knew us thought we were the quintessential urban people. We had lovely lives but we wanted something in the country longer term, that we could retire to. It all just got brought forward by about 20 years.” Put simply, they had fallen under Anlaby’s spell, and in August that year they made a second visit. “We took a building inspector, it was raining cats and dogs, and there was water running down the wallpaper in the drawing room, and he said, ‘This will soak up every cent you have!’” Undeterred, by early 2004 they were Anlaby’s new owners. And so began a mountain of research into the history of the place and the prominent Dutton family, the last of whom to live there was Geoffrey Dutton, the noted Australian poet and historian. His first wife Ninette was an artist who also wrote Portrait of a Year about her travels, family and life at Anlaby. For Andrew and Peter, it was also the start of regular trips to their ‘weekender’, where they launched themselves into the mammoth — and still ongoing — task of restoring the house and garden. Huge time, energy and finances have gone into the mostly unseen work; plumbing, drainage, roofing, wiring. The garden astonishingly has separate buildings for growing cucumbers and mushrooms, another for storing apples, as well as glass houses, all in various states of repair. There are also 640 ‘significant’ trees on The National Trust Register, including river red gums. Plus, an orchard and cutting garden. “It was covered in grass and when you walked through it was waist-high in weeds,” says Andrew. “We’d leave work in Sydney at 2pm Friday, jump on a plane, work our backsides off at Anlaby on the weekend. Then we’d get up at 3:30am on Monday morning, and be in our offices in Sydney by 9am. We’d do a full week’s work and then do it all again... We did that for four and a half years.” It was a relief to move into the homestead permanently. Andrew took up a management position at The Louise hotel >