They came to heal, stayed to grow
There were two names, Lagan and Sheridan, on the sign that leads to Chateau Xanadu vineyard, just south of the town of Margaret River.
That was because Dr John Lagan and his wife Dr Eithne Sheridan Lagan both owned the vineyard first planted in 1977. They had come from Ireland, not to grow wine but to be doctors in Margaret River.
“We had a number of reasons for leaving Ireland, we didn’t like the national health service. My brother Aidan and I were in practice with our father and he was a domineering man Eithne didn’t get on with. We discovered that my great-grandfather had lived to be 110 and I think that decided her we had to get out. We nearly went to work in a hospital in Chicago, the one you can now see in the TV series ‘ER’. We had three kids at this stage, all adopted,” said John.
“Then Eithne read an advertisement in the British Medical Journal from the WA Government office in London, saying they needed doctors for Dalwallinu, Bridgetown and Margaret River. With advice, we decided on Margaret River and to start with, took 12 months leave, as a precaution in case we had to come back.”
Political upheaval in Ulster did not get ugly until after they had left. John brother Aidan, still there, helped to found the Alliance Party which tries to avoid extremes. However John Quotes him as saying “When you walk down the middle of the road, you get run over.”
With their daughter and two sons, aged six, four and three, John and Eithne flew out to Australia in 1968 and were met at Perth Airport at 1am on the 6th of March by the then Augusta Margaret River Shire President Stewart Smith.
“Another man with him in a black suit and black tie turned out to be Jim Wilson; his brother John, our predecessor as doctor in the town, was being cremated that day. It wasn’t much of an omen,” said John.
It wasn’t all that misleading, either. They found Margaret River depressed and depressing, population declining, the hospital in danger of closing, even a possibility the shire would be merged with Busselton. Three years before, there had been eight suicides in the district in a year. The Lagans, despite being only on leave, bought to this faltering town a brace signal of confidence: a container load of goods and chattels: 3,000 books, many of them old; paintings, fine furniture, antique glass.
Eithne said she cried for the first year. Margaret River’s only cultural establishment was a public library.
“I thought the best I could do was to save to go home again,” she said.
But then things started looking up. Since the Margaret River medical practice was no goldmine, they set up another one at Kwinana, 240 km away. Kevin Cullen asked John to help out in his practice in Busselton. Tom Cullity appeared ‘covered in muck and dirt, announced himself as a consultant cardiologist, and told us to acquire land for viticulture, but to do it properly.’
In 1971, they bought 200 acres of land for $50 an acre. Then, when Eithne went home for to visit her family in Ireland in 1972, John bought 200 more at $65 an acre. It had been in the Terry family since Norman Terry acquired it under conditional purchase lease in 1909 for an annual rent of 5 pounds. It was not cleared, but forest had been extensively logged. Time and money went into preparing it, ripping it 2m deep in several directions, pulling out granite boulders that would be used for the buildings.
In 1975 Chateau Xanadu was registered. John, a serious enthusiast for words, took it from the poem by Samual Taylor Coleridge that runs:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
When Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
- though he points out, the Indian Ocean is rarely sunless. In 1977 the first vines were planted.
John is delighted to have been asked this year to become a ‘Chevalier of the Winegeese’, which needs a bit of an explanation. The Chevaliers will be associated with an International Museum of Wine being set up in 15th century Desmond Castle in the Irish town of Kinsale. Kinsale, as well as being a port dealing in wine and spirits, was the site of a battle in the 17th century at which the English general Lord Mountjoy was victorious. Irish earls who fled overseas after their defeat became known as ‘wild geese’, the implication being they would return.
The ‘winegeese’ will ‘cherish and promote a love and an appreciation of wine and everything to do with its manufacture, distribution and worldwide consumption’ and ‘will further expand knowledge of the Irish connection with vineyards in Europe and overseas’.
John’s only regret was that an illness prevented him from being present at the inaugural banquet in Kinsale in April 1997.
