Photo: Virginia Bear
It was at a meeting of the Society for Growing Australian Plants in Lismore NSW, when I first met Stephanie and Julian Lymburner. That was sometime in the early 1990s. We became friends quickly and easily in the hospitable atmosphere of that organisation. We found we had a lot in common. Anybody who spent time with them would know that it’s impossible to talk about one without the other. They were many-faceted people who had lived rich lives together before I ever met them. At that stage, our interest in Australian plants was broad and general, our conservation values still a bit naive and undefined.
That changed about 1995, when Stephanie and Julian started studying the Bushland Regeneration course at Wollongbar TAFE College. Their enthusiasm for the quality of the course was directly responsible for my own enrolment the following year. Through these studies, our ecological sensibilities changed forever as we focused on preserving and promoting the values of the local indigenous plants of our region.
Fanciful view of Crystal-Hill 1994 by Tim Roberts
The bush regeneration world was a small one in those days, and the Lymburners and I were soon fortunate enough to gain employment with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Environmental Training and Employment, Lismore Council and others, where we worked alongside some very knowledgeable and experienced regenerators. I can’t remember all the sites we worked on together, and there were many, but I have special memories of extended times we spent together at Iluka Nature Reserve, at Digger’s Camp and at Brockley. These were big projects and we were doing pioneering work.
We spent a couple of years in Yuraygir National Park on the Iluka to Shark Bay track, cutting climbing asparagus, spraying regrowth, then the same thing all over again. Bush regenerators need to make it clear to environmental weeds that there can be only one winner. Our efforts at Iluka and elsewhere made us realise that as professional bush regenerators, we could contribute to the great cause of conservation in the most direct way possible.
We spent another couple of years working from Digger’s Camp to Wilson Headland (east of Grafton), exploring and improving the bush there from the heathland to the coast. Too far to drive home each day in Julian’s lime green Kombi, we would often stay for two or three days at a time, camp on site, cooking together, playing Scrabble and drinking red wine after dinner then swimming at daybreak in the seagrasses of the little rocky bay at Digger’s Camp before going to work.
We also shared work over several years at Brockley, a lovely property near Wollongbar, where Stephanie’s wonderful cakes were regularly admired and consumed at morning tea time. In those days, stem injection was initiated by opening up the stem of target trees with a tomahawk, a tiresome and dangerous chore. Julian, always the practical thinking man, came up with the idea of chucking the tomahawk and taking up the brace-and-bit for drilling injection holes. It was so much safer, just as efficient, and somehow presaged the merciful invention of the cordless drill a couple of years later.
All through those fabulous years, there were endless stories and anecdotes, there was good humour and a strong conservation ethic common to us all. Lots of hard work too, something that the Lymburners never shied away from. One of their greatest achievements was the restoration of the bushland at their uniquely beautiful property, ‘Crystal Hill’ at Coolgardie, mostly by themselves, no small undertaking considering the steep, rocky terrain there, and the scale of the task.
And this is only a sketch on a page of a single chapter in the big picture book of Stephanie and Julian, dear friends, great workmates, much missed and always remembered with great affection.
Stephanie passed away this year (2024), and Julian in 2021(see Newsletter #150 for Julian’s story written by Stephanie).
Tim Roberts
October 2024
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