EUGOWRA HOUSE

illustrated society magazine, and told the hostess of a dance that he would only attend if Miss Greene were there; they met, but did not dance. The next day he asked her to Sorrento. To her family’s fury, she accepted. Their engagement provoked a storm: in a peculiar turn, Elisabeth’s godfather demanded, and had returned, all the gifts he had given to the Greene girls. Keith’s old friend Dame Nellie Melba was particularly put out; but her bullying went largely unnoticed by the happy young bride. On 6th June 1928, they were married by Keith’s father, Reverend Patrick Murdoch, at the Scots’ Church.

Nineteen-year-old Elisabeth accompanied her worldly, much-sought-after ancé to a farm near Langwarrin, just behind seaside Frankston, south-east of Melbourne. Keith Murdoch renamed it Cruden Farm after his grandfather’s Free Church parish in northeast Scotland. They saw a pleasant, undistinguished cottage and a rudimentary garden and were taken by undulating paddocks and surrounding bush.

After they wed, Keith presented Cruden to Elisabeth as a wedding present. He took command and, when she rejected an elaborate Italianate garden plan, he chose young garden writer Edna Walling to design the front garden. Mrs Murdoch was dismayed at not being consulted, so what might have been an impressive partnership between owner and designer never took root, although the essence of Miss Walling’s plan was accepted, adopted and, as the decades rolled on, adapted by its owner.

While Miss Walling’s stone walls are a valued legacy, the most striking feature of the design is a lemon-scented eucalypt–lined drive planted by both Murdochs and their farm manager in 1930. Much of the garden was destroyed by a bush re in 1944, but the gums survived and today 130 of them grace the entrance to what is now one of the country’s most celebrated gardens. It must be unique to nd a garden that has been nurtured and shaped, lived in and shared by the same adult for more than 80 years.

It began as a weekend escape for Keith Murdoch but became his family’s home and the focus of his wife’s life. During the Depression they employed men to build stables and outbuildings. A few years later Keith arrived home in a second-hand Rolls Royce; Elisabeth ordered him to return it the following day. In 1933 Keith was knighted and his wife became Lady Murdoch at the age of 24. In the same year Sir Keith bought the imposing Heath eld in Toorak, but rural Cruden remained core. It was here too, and at

historic Wantabadgery on the Murrumbidgee, that young Rupert spent his childhood, enjoying the freedom of the horse trails and enduring the firm hand of his mother. While their father was indulgent, their mother was strict, but she was consistent and constant. Elisabeth recalled ‘applying a slipper’ to Rupert at Heathfield after he was rude to his governess. ‘I would not allow them to be rude, you know ... that was a great sin. So now when he’s really teasing me in front of people he says, “Of course, my mother beat me”.’

She did not always agree with her adult children’s choices and told them so. She was appalled when Rupert bought News of the World and she protested to him over The Sun’s treatment of the Royal Family. Rupert ‘was a good son and good father’, she would say. All that mattered to her was that her children were caring and useful citizens.

In 1952 Sir Keith died in his sleep at the farm. A widow at 43, Elisabeth decided to plant a copper beech in her husband’s memory. This tree was intended to anchor the redesigned borders, and at the same time the farm itself became the mainstay of her life. A young gardener, Michael Morrison, came to Cruden in 1971. While farming continued, the garden grew; its beauty and sweep almost in defiance of the urban sprawl that now surrounds it. Since the early eighties the public has come to share the garden.

After her husband’s death, Elisabeth threw herself into humanitarian work, particularly for Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital: ‘I felt obliged to do all I could to justify my existence. Giving money is very easy, but you’ve got to be involved,’ she would say.

In 1963, she became Dame Elisabeth, but assumed none of the airs of a grand dame. She was gregarious and social but not Social in the sense that Lady Lloyd Jones and others were. Her feet remained firmly planted and her hands in the soil at Cruden. There was also an abiding frugality, born perhaps of her father’s ruinous spending and a Presbyterian horror of ostentation. Elisabeth had an almost unworldly unpretentiousness and took no real interest in clothes or fashion. She spent money on her garden rather than herself, but not at the expense of her philanthropy. For eight decades she refused heating in the house, she resisted hairdressers, and one year eschewed a trip abroad so she could install a pool in the garden.

In 1968, she was invited to be the first woman appointed as a trustee of the new National Gallery of Victoria—a project that had been championed by Sir Keith. Among her charitable works, she helped her daughter Janet establish Taralye, an oral language centre for deaf children, and became a driving force in the establishment of the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery. In the 1970s, when she learned that Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet considered her a possible candidate for governor-general, she dismissed the idea as absurd. In the eighties, she and her family helped establish the Murdoch Institute for Research into Birth Defects (now the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute). In 2005 she was named Victorian of the Year. In 2009 she was present at the opening of Melbourne Recital Centre’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.

Disarmingly modest with a ready laugh, Dame Elisabeth would close her eyes while she spoke, opening them wide as she finished, fixing her blue gaze on her interlocutor. She was selfless, optimistic and tolerant, believing in the power of good, thinking the best of people. And yet this daughter and wife of church-going folk, did not believe in a personal God. She told Andrew Denton (when she was 99), ‘I believe that somehow there is a higher spirit that I don’t quite know how to define, but I don’t believe that, you know, when we die we go to heaven or anything like that.’

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch died on 5th December 2012, in her sleep in Melbourne, Victoria, at the age of 103. n

‘I FELT OBLIGED TO DO ALL I COULD TO JUSTIFY MY EXISTENCE. GIVING MONEY IS VERY EASY; BUT YOU’VE GOT TO BE INVOLVED.’

Opposite page Lemon-scented eucalypts line the drive at Cruden Farm, having survived fire and drought. As yet they have not lived as long as the woman who planted them in 1930.