A Garden on the Margaret: The Path to Old Bridge House by Gillian Lilleyman

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and at spine tail. Dust jacket has creasing at top edge and wear to right corners. Interior and binding are both very good.

While researching the garden at Old Bridge House for a conservation report, Gillian Lilleyman was drawn into the lives of the settlers at ‘the Margaret’, as the small founding community of Margaret River was known. Tracing the families associated with Old Bridge House, this story follows their links through the generations and underlines the roles they played in shaping Margaret River as it is today.

It charts their many sagas and supplies insights into the personalities of those involved – Fanny Brock,an (née Bussell) who built Bridge House in the 1880s, the Keenan sisters who helped to run it as a halfway house, the Peirce sisters who currently tend the garden, and the many others in-between.

Liberally supplemented with extracts from diaries and letters, it provides the reader with a strong sense of ‘being there’ as the property’s physical and human history is being written and the garden’s legacy created.

First depicted through the Aboriginal legend of Meekadarribee, the moon’s bathing place on the Ellen Brook, the unique beauty of the area was recognised, and capitalised on, by the early settlers when farming could no longer provide the sole source of revenue. For example, along with his sisters, John Bussell was a pioneer of the tourist industry based upon the discovery of the area’s remarkable caves. Others turned to forestry, horticulture, and then viticulture, each leaving their mark on Margaret River’s emerging social heritage. Dorothy Peirce’s mark is a beautiful garden. (front flap)