Margie McClelland. Celebrated and award-winning photographer. Long-term advertising representative at The Riverine Grazier, and so much more. But that person you see so often, even every day, has stories and experiences of life that you don’t know about, and may really surprise you. Isabella Margaret Christoe was born in Glen Innes, in northern New South Wales. Her mother was a homemaker, and so much more, including Guide Commander of the local guides. Margie’s father was an accountant, and worked for the family business, her mother’s family, M.C. Mackenzie and Sons, which owned a general store employing over 40 people. The firm traded In Glen Innes, Manilla and Barraba for more than 120 years, beginning in 1863. The firm had other businesses around the district, including Mackenzie Motors, which was the local GMH Dealership and Glen Innes brickworks. Margie had two older brothers, and one younger sister. Many cousins enriched their childhood years, as well as many friends. Margie and her family lived in town, but their cousins lived at Stonehenge Station, a property which belonged to their grandparents. Margie and her siblings and family would come to Stonehenge regularly to see their grandparents, and to enjoy something magical. They would walk outside, and over that threshold would be transported to the secret, hidden garden, a spectacular and beautiful place. There Margie and the other children would run about and play for hours. Her grand mother, who was the youngest matron at the Glen Innes Hospital, at age 24, also taught ballet, and would put on musicals in Glen Innes during World War Two. There was a treasure trove of fabrics and costumes in a room dedicated for such events. Margie’s great grandmother after whom she was named, Isabella Margaret, would sew these costumes. Dressed in these, the children would walk out of the room transformed. Out would stride soldiers, and all sorts of different people and creatures, to creep out into the secret garden, and have many adventures. Her grandfather had been the doctor at Glen Innes, and that is how her grandparents met. Along with everything else that Margie’s busy grandmother did, she also wrote plays, and taught, but she gave up everything when she moved out to Stonehenge Station. “In those days, we had to make our own fun, and we really did,” Margie said fondly. “Running around the beautiful gardens at Stonehenge Station were some of the best times of my life.” Her parents kept up the tradition of big, magical gardens. The family lived in a house near the high school, and created a huge garden out of an old cornfield. “Common presents in our family were plants, flowers and shrubs,” Margie said with a laugh. At night, when tucking Margie and her siblings in, Margie’s mother would spin fan tastic tales of the hijinks of the golliwogs throughout the day. The actions and movements of the golliwogs that her mother re counted would always mirror what Margie and her siblings had got up to that day. The children were enraptured, and would greatly look forward to bedtime and the golliwog stories. Margie began her love affair with photography at age 11, and her first camera was a Box Brownie. After a time, she moved on to Instamatic cameras. “My father despaired, it must have cost him a fortune,” Margie laughed. Many a family Christmas was spent at the family’s Yamba cottage, on the mouth of the Clarence River, holidaying at the beach. Margie always misses those times, and went back in May 2021 to enjoy a few days in a cottage at Angourie, which her sister had built. Margie attended Glen Innes Primary School, and then New England Girls School, which she began attending during her last year of Primary School. It was an all-girls boarding school, with no day students. Her parents would come on exeat weekends during the term. Margie made many friends there, and sometimes went home with her friends on day outings. “In my last year of high school, my head mistress instructed me that I was to take the domestic science course,” Margie recalled. “I was a little rebellious, and told her that I would not be doing that, and I had my strike. "I was determined that I was going to be doing my leaving certificate. “I wasn’t the best at English, but I had a wonderful English teacher who supported my desire to sit for the leaving certificate, and assisted me in my studies.” Towards the exams Margie had to sit for, be fore she gained the certificate, she was struck down with appendicitis. The head mistress with whom she did not have the best relation ship with at the time, had to drive her to the exams being conducted at the Armidale High School. She passed and then matriculated. From there, Margie studied a secretarial course at the local TAFE learning touch typing and Pitt man’s shorthand for a year. She then decided to pursue her great inter est, which was nursing. She undertook the training, and then was signed on for a year at the Children’s Hospital, Camperdown. Margie recalls having an immense love for the role, but being pushed into responsibilities far too early that she just was not prepared for at the time. With her limited level of experience, it soured her against the nursing profession. After minimal training, she was then placed in theatre recovery nursing. She was also assigned to a lot of night shifts, with her being the sole nurse there, and many babies to feed and children to look after. “I also fell out with the matron,’ she laughed. “I was a bit rebellious back in those days.” Margie recalls returning to Glen Innes, and then having a handsome young man turn up. Chris McClelland was Margie’s second cousin. Their grandmothers were sisters. Chris was overseer at the nearby Kingsgate Station, and Margie’s mother felt it would be a great opportunity for him to venture out and meet the family. Romance did not immediately blossom, friendship arrived first. Margie and Chris at tended a Bachelor and Spinster’s ball in Armidale. One of Margie’s nursing friends lived there and would be attending, and Chris knew the brother of that friend, and there they danced and socialised. Margie recalls spending Christmas at the hospital not long after that ball, but that was when her nursing career was truly drawing to a close. She recalled making special formula for the many babies on the early morning shift. She had Christmas lunch with Chris and the many relatives of her father. When one of Margie’s brothers graduated from high school, she met with Chris’ mother, and grandmother, and recalled seeing one of Chris’ drawings, of a bucking horse, hanging in the house where they met. “I woke up in the midst of being worked on, a flurry of activity surrounding me, and my child’s and my own life hanging in the balance, and there was nobody there.” Margie is pictured during one of her African safaris, looking justifiably charmed by an elephant encounter. Image supplied. It was when they had their next family gathering at Yamba, when Chris and Margie began to grow closer. At a party in Glen Innes, Chris asked Margie to marry him, and thus they were engaged. Her mother wanted them both to wait a year Chris being 25 and Margie 19. It was at this point that Margie gave up nursing for good, and came home to Glen Innes for a year, working for the family business. The couple were married in 1969, and moved to Kingsgate Station shortly after, having five gates to open before they could get to their house. The couple were transferred to Trigamon North Station near Yetman on the Queensland border. “I was pregnant with Miranda at the time,” Margie recalled. “We had a cook and four jackeroos, with Chris now a station manager for the Scottish Australian Company.” They basically managed three properties, with sheep, cattle, and sharefarmers growing wheat and tobacco with the largest licence in NSW. “It was much fun and games with the cooks in that time,” she recalled bemusedly. “Power outages were a regularity also. "There was a big cyclone that came through the area, leaving us without power for three days. “We were not on the river, and Chris was not told immediately that one of the tobacco growers’ big diesel pump engines had been immersed in the flooded Macintyre River. "He had to go out and spend the whole night stripping it down, cleaning and putting it back together.” Margie also cooked for the jackeroos, and during the blackouts they had improvised, placing canvas sheeting over the barbecue out side and cooking by fire. “These times were really a baptism of fire,” Margie recalled. Their daughter Miranda was born in June of 1970, at Texas Hospital. Margie fell pregnant a second time, and sadly became quite ill dur ing this pregnancy. She was ordered by her doctor to take a month’s bed rest in hospital, but she insisted that she was capable of getting up once a day to shower, and she did. Suffering from pregnancy toxemia, young Roland was brought into the world via caesarean section. Terribly ill, Chris was told that his wife and child would most likely not make it through the night. Margie survived, but devastatingly, little Roland did not. “It was after losing baby Roland that I be came an agnostic,” Margie said. “I woke up in the midst of being worked on, a flurry of activity surrounding me, and my child’s and my own life hanging in the balance, and there was nobody there.” During that unimaginable ordeal, Chris’ mother came down to help look after Miranda, and Margie recalls everyone on the property, in the hospital and in the community being very helpful and kind to her during that time. When Miranda was little there were floods occurring, and Chris had to venture to Toowoomba to pick up a much-needed part. So, the family loaded into the car, and made the journey to Toowoomba. On their way home, they encountered water coming across the road, so the family spent the night in the car, rather than risk driving through the floodwaters. Margie has fond memories of Miranda as a child, citing that she was a quiet baby. “One night, the jackeroos volunteered to mind Miranda while Chris and I went out for three hours. "This was something I rarely, if ever got to do, so we said yes. “When we got home, they were all around her basinet watching her. Because she was so quiet, they wanted to make sure she was al right.”One of the cooks on the property during their tenure there was named Miss Green, and she had a cat named Goldenia. One day Goldenia decided she would get into Mi randa’s basinet and sit on her head. Margie luckily came upon the scene in time, threw the cat outside and spoke stern words to the cook, who got upset, perhaps not understanding how lucky it was that Margie came upon the scene before tragedy struck. The company Margie and Chris worked for was the Scottish Australian Company, Chris had been with them for 14 years. They worked on the property for three years, until the company Managing Director changed hands, and then the new fellow, a prominent academic with little pastoral experience, decided to foolishly release the huge overseas investment funds the Company had accumulated over time, to its investors. A lovely premise but the reality was that these funds were drought funds, or emergency funds and the health of this once grand old company began to wane under the poor seasonal conditions that followed. So, with this new change, Chris was advised by the company to look for other employment, as they were now having to sell off their twenty-two pastoral properties. When the manager of Kingsgate Station heard that Chris was looking for other work, he got in touch. He advised that he was also leaving, and had recommended Chris to the prospective buyers. Angus McLachlan called Chris, asking him to come to Sydney for an interview with him and his brother Ian, and was subsequently given the managership of Kingsgate. The little family went to stay with Margie’s parents. From there, Chris would commute daily, as the transfer of ownership of the property to the McLachlans was being made unnecessarily difficult and yet to be finalised. Chris was left with one of the unfortunate first tasks of informing the proposed new owners of the undisclosed fact that all the cattle on the property were under quarantine for Brucellosis after positive cases had been found during a previous government testing program. Therefore, the cattle could not be sold locally, only in saleyards of an untested area. Chris worked there for nine years and during this time their son Lochie was born, at 7am, in Glen Innes. Getting into town to give birth was a rush, as they lived in a valley which was over 1000 feet below the town’s elevation, linked by a long winding, narrow road. It was this long winding road that prompted Margie to make the decision to teach her chil dren by correspondence. She initially opted not to include religious studies in her correspondence program, but the Uniting Church minister visited, and said to Margie that she needed to give the children something to believe in, or someone else will. So, she added religion to their correspondence curriculum. Margie would take the children into town on Wednesday nights, and stay with her parents. She would spend her time dressmaking, while Miranda attended primary school one day a week, and Lochie attended preschool, for the social benefits. Margie inadvertently picked up many hobbies during correspondence teaching which she enjoyed for many years after that time was over. “As I had to sit there, and teach, I had great difficulty being idle,” Margie said. “As a result, I took up activities such as sewing, and creative needlework.” During these times, Margie was still also cooking for the property jackeroos, making it a full-on time. Margie was a keen gardener and would grow plants from cuttings or seeds. She became the President of Glen Innes Garden Club. The children grew up in the area which Margie did, making their life full with cousins. After a time, however, Kingsgate was put up for sale. At that time, Chris had taken a trip to Tupra Station, to take cattle there for agistment. Ian McLachlan and Chris discussed the prospect of Chris managing Tupra Station which they intended purchasing. However, such a big landscape and lifestyle change meant it was essential to see how Margie felt about the prospect. The move meant the children would have to go away to attend school, so they began looking into private schools. For the first year, Margie continued to teach via correspondence, before Miranda then went to an Adelaide boarding school. Luckily enough, Margie had previously met Errolly and Bob McFarland at a cousin’s wed ding at Stonehenge Station in Glen Innes. The McFarlands lived at Oxley Station, only eight kilometres away, and their daughter Fiona and son Andrew were the same age as Miranda and Lochie respectively, and they quickly became great friends. When the family arrived, they came with two horses and three dogs. Chris was a polo crosse player, having being chosen to represent NSW in New Zealand and at home, and could do absolutely anything on a horse. On the way to Tupra, they got a flat tyre, arriving at the property at 11pm, and Margie wondering what they were in for. The only power Tupra had at the time was via generator, and it kicked back early in the morning, frightening Margie awake. The first day of actual work, a fire broke out, a channel burst, and crutching was taking place - an absolutely chaotic first day. When they lived at Tupra, Margie revelled in photography, the big open cloudy sky was something that she enjoyed capturing. However, a new love affair sprung into their lives with the African safaris. Miranda had finished school, and Lochie was attending boarding school at Kings School in Sydney. Miranda was working as a radiographer in Tasmania at the time, and Chris and Margie decided to go and see her, as this was her first job. So, they drove their car onto the ferry and ventured over. On the way, Chris bought a copy of the African Safari Magazine. His father was in the Southern Sudan commanding a British RAF Staging Post at Juba during the Second World War and Chris had wanted to visit the places his father had served and worked decades before, including Patagonia. So, the couple made their first trip to Africa in 1994. They could not go to the Sudan, as political issues and fighting made it impossible, so they decided to go and see the mountain gorillas in Zaire. Miranda, having already caught the travel bug herself, accompanied her parents the next time they made the journey to Africa. It was during these initial trips to Africa that Chris’ lifelong drawing talent and passion was reignited since his schooldays. The editor of the African Safari Magazine had come across some of Chris’ African drawings, and it all spiralled from there. In 1996, they contacted Chris, and asked if he would be interested, during their next trip to Africa, to write a review of Pamuzinda safari lodge at Selous, Zimbabwe. The family were doing a trip in the Kalahari, Botswana at the time. After the trip Miranda and Lochie went home while their parents went on this assignment to draw and review the lodge. When the drawing and review appeared in the magazine, a prominent safari operator, Stewart Cranswick of Landela Safaris noticed it and asked Chris if he would be willing to come to Africa and draw all his Zimbabwe, Botswana and South African lodges. The deal also included Chris’ 87-year-old mother who accompanied the family to Africa in 1997. The family continued their African trips over the next 10 years during their annual, generously stretched holidays. Thus, for a number of years they would re turn to Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa reviewing lodges and drawing them. Margie, and indeed Chris have lived many lives rolled into one. Their amazing stories could fill a book. We are truly lucky at The Grazier to have their expertise, camaraderie and friendship.
