AN EVOLUTIONARY TALE

With help from architects, designers gardeners and farm workers, six generations of the Litchfield family have shaped the benchmark that is Hazeldean Station in the Monaro region of NSW.

- KIRSTY MCKENZIE

The old adage says that good things, like fine wine, improve with age. Hazeldean's farming operation, homestead and garden in the Monaro high plains are another case in point. They've been a work in progress since the 1860s, when James and Ann Litchfield arrived in the southeastern NSW high country.

When James arrived in the colony from Saffron Walden in Essex, England, in 1852, he had a letter of introduction to William Bradley, a pioneering member of the Monaro squattocracy, who built an empire which, at its peak, covered 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) of the naturally treeless high plains. James gained employment as a manager of one of William's properties, Myalla.

With the division of the region following the Lands Act of 1861 under Premier John Robertson, James was able to select his own 320-acre (130-hectare) block. He built the original stone cottage in a natural bowl, which he surrounded with radiata pines and English elms that have suckered through the years to create several forests surrounding the present homestead. The Litchfields added to their holdings through the generations, and in 1967 they bought Myalla, which is where the present custodians, Jim and Libby, lived when they were first married.