QUIET ACHIEVER

“Sometimes I miss that quiet afternoon moving a mob along the road, just you and nature,” Vanessa says, remembering her early days at Bangor, the Tasmanian farm she runs with her husband Matt, who is the fifth generation of his family to live and work on the Forestier Peninsula property.

At other times, the self-described introvert longs to fall back into computer plant modelling, a mostly solitary pursuit that formerly filled her days as a research fellow at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, University of Tasmania.

“Sometimes I miss the deep focus you have in research, which is gloriously selfish in a way, diving deep into your research topic,” she says. “Being stretched in a lot of directions gets frustrating. That’s why I enjoy strategic planning. It’s more of that dreaming and deep thinking you do as a researcher.”

For Vanessa, life at Bangor is all about the vision, not just the extraordinary views on the stunning coastal farm. Vanessa and Matt, who have been together since Year 11 at Hobart’s Elizabeth College, have a mission “to be caring custodians of Bangor, managing the property for generations to come”. They understand themselves to be part of something much bigger.

“We have inherited that ethos,” Vanessa says. “A deep con­nection and sense of responsibility has passed through the generations. We don’t have the story of recovery because Bangor wasn’t degraded in the first place.”

Of Bangor’s 6300 hectares, just 840 — spread in pockets over the property — are used for agricultural purposes, mostly for grazing 8000 Merino sheep. A further 270 hectares is plantation forest. The remainder of the land, largely unsuitable for farming and grazing, is covered in native vegetation, including dense forests, open woodlands and a 35 kilometre stretch of coastal fringe vegetation. A substantial 2100 hectares are protected in perpetual conservation reserves that include endangered swift parrot habitat.

Bangor’s history is rich. Part of the traditional homelands of Oyster Bay Tasmanian language group (Paredarerme) tribes, it is recognised as a site of first contact between First Nations people and Europeans: the Dutch Prince’s flag was hoisted on the Bangor shore by Abel Tasman’s carpenter in 1642. The land was developed as a farm in the 1830s to supply food to the penal settlement at Port Arthur, as well as being put to use as a whaling station.

Four precious hectares put Bangor on the food tourism map a decade ago: these are the site of their vineyard and cellar-door restaurant. Though it sits on the Arthur Highway, the main tourist route to the Port Arthur historic site, relatively few people had heard of Bangor. That changed when the Dunbabins launched Bangor Vineyard Shed in 2014.

“We planted the vineyard in 2010,” Vanessa says. “It was a romantic idea: we’d stand at our kitchen window and imagine looking out at grapevines. I think we’d talked about it for a decade, and the idea hadn’t floated off, and one day we just did it.”

Planting pinot noir, pinot gris and chardonnay varieties, the couple was set to harvest grapes for Bangor’s first vintage when the Dunalley bushfires swept through in January 2013. A third of the farm burned, including most of its fences and numerous outbuildings such as the old shearing shed near the highway, which the Dunbabins had earmarked for their cellar door. The vintage itself was lost to smoke taint. The slow work of recovery and rebuilding, including the stunning new cellar door, began.

“Farming is fascinating in the way it makes you resilient,” Vanessa says. “You see a lot of problems over the years. It’s the cyclical nature of farms, with natural disasters part of all that. You learn that you can deal with it, recover and move on.

“All farmers have similar stories. It’s a combination of just being able to get on with the day-to-day, combined with the big ger picture. We know why we are doing what we are doing, so when the latest ridiculous obstacle is in our way, we think we will get through it because we have a bigger reason. The previous generations didn’t give up, so we can’t give up.”