She lived to the age of 94, but still I thought she died before her time – as all highly intelligent people do.

We first met and bonded delivering a lamb in farmland surrounding her home.

We shared a mutual affection for horses and nature.

Traversing her Buangor family farm she reminisced: negotiating the seasonal flooding at the headwaters of the Billy Billy Creek to drop the children to wait at the foot of Mt Langi Ghiran, for the car pool to Buangor Primary School; and how husband Alistair helped fence that creek supplying water to Buangor School.

She was fit and flew over fences as she led the way to the creek with the watercress, in her other home (near mine) in Daylesford.

Isabel was ahead of her time. She was a conservationist, who, at 91 cabled herself to a Buangor roadside tree whist reflecting “I’m normally a very peaceful citizen. 

However, she wanted to “bring attention to the devastation that’s being wrought”. She chained herself to the river red gum on the side of the Western Highway near Buangor in March 2015 as part of a campaign to reroute the highway to preserve native roadside vegetation.

Her infectious joie de vivre imbued her children with curiosity and respect for our planet. All were born in Ararat, and grew up in Buangor; and Buangor is a part of their mandala.

Isabel was fascinated by indigenous culture, the landscape of its inhabitants and the culturally modified trees around her.

She felt influenced by her mother – a thinker and suffragette. Isabel believed that standing up for human rights and the rights of nature was a natural, traditional way to express social responsibility.

She said “VicRoads were basically telling us what they wanted to give us, consultation was in name only”.  It seems again she was ahead of her time in this wisdom.

Isabel died not knowing if the land upon which her husband Ali’s ashes are scattered, and where they raised their family, will be protected. She wondered many times: “I don’t know why they can’t see it, it’s so obvious, to put the road in the existing power line easement. It saves so much unnecessary destruction.”