The man who loved children stirring division 60 years on Margaret Kitson, a volunteer at the Wirrimbirra Nature Reserve in Bargo, NSW. FOR half a century, the character at the heart of Australian novelist Christina Stead's 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loves Children has had a living memorial to his pioneering naturalist efforts: 90 hectares of near-virgin bushland southwest of Sydney. A devoted band of volunteers has maintained a research and teaching centre at Wirrimbirra, established outside the hamlet of Bargo in 1963 by the widow of David Stead. He was an eccentric proto-environmentalist and self-taught fisheries expert who was the model for the unstable, domineering patriarch Sam Pollit in his daughter's work, one of the great achievements in Australian literature. Thistle Harris, David Stead's lover and muse from some time after a 1918 meeting in Sydney when she was just 16, and he 41, before becoming his wife decades later, was the same age as Christina Stead and the inspiration for the novel's Gillian Roebuck. It was Thistle who, after David Stead's death in 1957, drove the idea of developing the sanctuary to honour his work and then convinced the National Trust to take on its ownership so that it could be preserved in perpetuity. Except that perpetuity, in the view of the trust, appears to run out at about the 50-year mark. It plans to sell the property for $1.3 million and plough the money back into its operations. The move has outraged supporters of Wirrimbirra, who see in it a repeat of the scandal following Thistle's death in 1990. A $1.2m bequest from the sale of the house in Watsons Bay, in Sydney's east, where Stead brought up his clan and which was the basis for the novel's dark scenes of dysfunctional family life, was spent not on maintaining the sanctuary as Thistle's will had instructed, but on retiring National Trust debt. And the plan appears to contradict a 1989 statement by then National Trust president Barry O'Keefe - in the foreword to a biography of Thistle - the organisation had "committed itself to the maintenance of the Wirrimbirra Sanctuary in perpetuity." National Trust NSW chief executive Brian Scarsbrick said last week there were good reasons to get rid of the property as the organisation restructured its finances. Conditions change. Legally, we are able to sell it. It was gifted to us, and we want to ensure that the sanctuary lives up to the objectives Thistle gave it to us with," Mr Scarsbrick said. A letter sent to members with details of the proposed sale advises that the trust has "not been able to invest in the facility to a level that would ensure its long-term future" and requests responses on the matter by May 31. Disposing of the property now, it notes, would be "a significant step in advancing ... the long-term security of the Trust." One such response to the trust, from David's Brisbane-based grandson, John Stead, notes that "obviously if Thistle Stead's legacy had been used as intended this (financial situation) would not be the case." "It's a betrayal of trust by the National Trust," charges a former director of both the heritage organisation and the self-governing foundation established to run the nature sanctuary, Janine Kitson. It's abominable that they are selling Wirrimbirra - it's totally unacceptable. Kitson, a schoolteacher, says she was "inspired" to become involved at Wirrimbirra by Thistle Harris Stead's pioneering academic work. "She was a visionary, a woman before her time, and the lasting legacy of Wirrimbirra is that it was at the beginning of environmental education in NSW," Ms Kitson says. The department of education for many years had a schoolteacher's position attached to the sanctuary. Ms Kitson resigned from both organisations in frustration amid charges in 2009 that she faced a conflict of interest. Her mother, Margaret Kitson, also of Sydney, maintains involvement as a volunteer at the sanctuary. "It's run entirely by volunteers - the National Trust has never really had much interest in it, but they shouldn't be allowed to sell it either," the elder Mrs Kitson says. To complicate matters, the organisation proposing to buy Wirrimbirra, the Wildlife Preservation Society, was co-founded by David Stead in 1909 - but by the time Thistle came to consider how she could guarantee the longevity of this memorial to her late husband, she decided the National Trust was the more appropriate organisation to hold the title deeds. Tape recordings and papers held in the Mitchell Library leave no doubt what Thistle's intentions were. Wirrimbirra was, she said, "handed over to the National Trust ... so that it would be safe for all time." For all his visionary qualities as a scientist and autodidact, there was also much not to admire about David Stead; the psychic wounds borne by his daughter Christina were lifelong. In a letter to Thistle two years after The Man Who Loved Children was published, she wrote, "not to see him again is one of my aims in life." Now the supporters of Wirrimbirra fear that, inadvertently, his legacy could disappear.