‘Tarraganda’ (an Indigenous word meaning chain of ponds) is a rich, well-watered stretch of country close to the town of Bega on the far south coast of New South Wales. A narrow strip of bitumen cuts its way from Bega through the surrounding pastureland and small farms, eventually turning to dirt as it winds over forested hills to the Pacific Ocean, barely 14 kilometres away.

When British settlers first set eyes on the area in the 1830s they immediately saw its potential for grazing. As was so often the case, they desired the same tracts of land that Aboriginal people prized, for the land was fertile and, due to regular Aboriginal firing, already partly cleared. The Imlay brothers – Peter, George and Alexander – Scottish squatter-barons with an insatiable eye for acquiring vast tracts of crown land, saw Tarraganda as one link in their pastoral empire on the far south coast and beyond. The homestead built in the late 1830s by the former Scottish surgeon, Dr George Imlay, was the first European structure to stand in the area. Eager to commemorate the occasion as one of historical significance, Imlay planted cuttings from a weeping willow (salix alba caerulea or ‘cricket bat willow’) that he had nurtured on the long voyage out to Australia. The cuttings were particularly dear to him because he had collected them during a short stay in St Helena, the isolated island in the South Atlantic Ocean where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled in 1815 and died in 1821. Imlay, a devotee of French language and culture, took the cuttings from the willows that grew close to Napoleon's grave. His plantings at Tarraganda were the first weeping willows in Australia, and from this stock willows were planted later throughout New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, including along the Molonglo River near present-day Canberra.