The whole setting at Muntham Station 'just hugs you' Phil and Dawn Oldham at Muntham Station, in Victoria's Western District, which is now on the market. AN obscure colonial painter and one of Australia's earliest farms have been thrust into the spotlight in a strange convergence of the past and present set amid the parkland estates of Victoria's rich Western District. Muntham Station, the first inland farm on land claimed by Victoria's first white settler, is for sale. At the same time, the first solo exhibition dedicated to a little-known colonial artist who captured its beautiful vale setting in 1859 is being held at the Hamilton Art Gallery, bringing together early paintings of Australia's pastoral beginnings rarely seen before. Two of the landscapes by Thomas Clark, who later taught several of Australia's Heidelberg School painters, show Muntham's modest white wooden farmhouse tucked between two hills. The property, claimed in 1836 by Edward Henty, is near modern-day Coleraine, 35km west of Hamilton. One of the paintings, lent through Sotheby's by a secret collector after having been lost from public sight for nearly 30 years, reveals a previously unknown vegetable and fruit garden established in front of the homestead by Chinese fortune-seekers passing by Muntham on their way to the Ballarat goldfields. Muntham's owners, cattle farmers Phil and Dawn Oldham, believe Edward Henty and his brother Stephen could not have chosen a better place to establish the family's vast pastoral estate. "The whole setting, it just hugs you; you can't help but feel happy here," says Ms Oldham, who like most of the farm's previous occupants calls her home of five years "Dear old Muntham." Her husband describes the setting chosen by the Hentys as almost perfect, sheltered in the lea of the rounded hills, facing east and nestled between two crystal-clear springs. "You wake up with the sun rising out the front of the house, and only the sounds of the birds and the cattle," Mr Oldham says. You can imagine that it has not much changed from Edward Henty's time. Henty first selected 31,500ha of the rolling green hills, majestic red gums and fertile valleys of the Wannon River that explorer Thomas Mitchell had weeks earlier dubbed "Australia Felix." Now, Muntham homestead comes with just 530ha. Instead of 55,000 sheep, 8000 cattle and a farm that once employed more than 50 people, there are just the Oldhams and their Angus herd. But with its 1836 heritage-listed red-brick barn, a hidden cellar where the family used to hide from Aboriginal attacks, concealed rooftop servants' quarters and still-bubbling springs, it remains a place of much mystery. In turn, Hamilton Art Gallery director Daniel McOwan believes Clark's paintings of Muntham and nearby landscapes deserve a higher place in colonial art history. He compares Clark's delicate clouds with those of English painter William Turner and some of his landscapes to those of his contemporary Eugene von Guerard. But he did the trees much better. He was the first artist to really paint eucalypts properly.