The Land They Learnt To Love is an account of the arrival of the Scott family in the newly-colonised farming region, after abandoning a once-comfortable life in Glasgow for the uncertainty of the Victorian countryside.

Ms Wood Lake, who has lived on Mt Buninyong for 25 years, said the history of the early squatters in the area had fascinated her for many years, and the Scott family especially so, as they are still farming the land they took up in the late 1830s.

She worked closely with the descendants of the original immigrants who provided her with an invaluable first-hand resource, the daybooks and diaries of the Scotts, written as they struggled to make a hold on the new land through drought and disaster.

"I'd heard of the Scotts who lived out the other side of the mountain; I didn't know them but I'd heard of them," says Ms Wood Lake.

"It occurred to me that Celia Burnham, who was a Scott, might be interested in a paper I had written at the time, for their records. I took her out a copy and on the table when I got there were the diaries, the notebooks, the invoices -  just the richest source of history. It really sparked my imagination."

Andrew and his wife, also named Celia, arrived in a country when they were, for the time, older than most settlers; Andrew 46 and Celia 42. They brought their children, Robert, Andrew Jr, Thomas and Martha, and servants, all financed by the sale of their ancestral home.

They took up land where a number of other Scottish migrants had squatted, in a place known to the Indigenous owners as 'Bonan Yowang'. The Andersons on 'Waverley Park', Reads on 'Cargery', Learmonths on 'Boninyong' and the Yuilles on 'Balla Arat' had established their rough stations. In the winter of 1839 the Scotts settled on 'Mt Boninyong'.

Ms Wood Lake goes into great detail about the travails suffered by the family as they established their station: the financial disasters and the physical setbacks of injuries; how the luck of growing a few potatoes saw them through a potential famine in the economic downturn of 1840; how an early and disastrous attempt at sheep grazing led the Scotts to take up further land in the Wimmera - 'Werraknabeal' -  land which the family still runs today.

Ms Wood Lake says the meticulous nature of the paperwork kept by the Scotts gave her an insight into the way the people felt about their venture, even though there is next-to-no emotional narrative in the diaries, just financial, stock and weather records.

"The diaries are so brief, they don't give a lot of richness about character," says Ms Wood Lake.

"There are tiny moments in it, like Andrew Scott buying a new dress for his wife and his daughter Martha a couple of years after y they had lost everything. It was interesting he put that in the diary when nothing else personal was there."

The story Celia Burnham told Glenice Wood Lake has also inspired her to write a children's story called Flora, about the horse Andrew Scott walked to Geelong from Melbourne to purchase in order to make a start of farming. There being no horses available in the burgeoning four-year-old city, Scott was apparently told to walk the two days south to the region, which was in the early days of being run to pasture. He purchased the grey for £48, and it was the family's companion and broodmare for years after.

The Scott's descendants have now been at Mt Boninyong for 180 years.

The Land They Learnt To Love is available through local bookshops, the Buninyong Historical Society and Royal Historical Society of Victoria bookshops.