Tony Wright column: A playground on a volcano, a ruin, and an old, old haunting

The former Native Police barracks near Heywood, a reminder of a bitter struggle. Photo: Heritage Victoria

Weekends, my mate Pud and I hitched billy-carts to our pushbikes and sweated our way up a lonely track on the slope of a long-dead volcano.

It was a hard ride, the slope getting steeper, the landscape below spreading forever, but we had the hill and a fast dusty track to ourselves.

Drifting around south-west Victoria the other day, I drove out to the hill to check the authenticity of memory. The track was still there among the trees, the slope as terrifyingly steep, the view as extensive as ever.

The place has come to assume a treasured spot in my personal dreaming, but it has a larger, barely whispered role in Australian history.

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The old volcano is known as Mount Eckersley. It rises above the small town of Heywood. A branch of my family a century ago lived and laboured up there on the grazing station, Oakbank, that flows over the hill and boasts a fine bluestone homestead.

In a corner of the property, however, not far from our childhood billy-carting adventures, exists a ruin with the power to haunt.

A stone chimney stands above broken stone walls, the roof and the floorboards gone. Decades ago, the station owner set fire to the place to rid it of rabbits, and few enough now know of its existence. Others want to forget it altogether.

A couple of mates recently jogged my memory of it, for they had climbed fences to assure themselves of its continued existence.

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Tony Wright column: A playground on a volcano, a ruin, and an old, old haunting