Galah Issue 2

GALAH.

GAL AH .

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GALAHPRESS.COM

ISSN 2652-8959

02

ISSUE 02 . the domestic

GAL2_COVER.indd 1

ISSUE 02. the domestic

26/3/21 10:12 am

GAL AH .

contents

chapter 01

chapter 02

08 HOME WORK

56 GROWING UP

A photo essay exploring the emotions and evocations of the domestic.

Memories of childhood are evoked by the fruit that was grown, eaten and shared.

16 AGONY AUNT

58 HAVE YOUR CAKE

Aunty Maude answers your dilemmas.

City-slicker Megan Morton decides that it’s time to return to her country roots.

17 THE BLOKE’S YOKE

Housework is a never-ending chore.

62 TWO WAYS: CAMPING

18 INSIDE OUT

For one man, it’s making a mark in one small town; for another family it’s roving across this wide brown land.

Sharing the ins and outs of private life is a lesson for memoir writer Maggie MacKellar.

68 TWO IN A TENT 22 OFFBEAT PARADISE

At home in the mountains with Sean Moran and his partner Manoo.

Domestic life is reduced to its simplest form when your home is a tent and an old Toyota.

72 DAME ELISABETH MURDOCH

32 LOCAL HEROES

A Thai couple learn that they have found their home in Moree, New South Wales.

A life in her private garden and in the public eye.

76 EUGOWRA HOUSE

38 YOU STILL HAVE TO EAT

Author Charlotte Wood shares recipes that have given comfort throughout her life.

42 THE ONE WHO BOUGHT THE CHURCH

Buying a landmark in a small country town and turning it into a home is a labour of love.

Tim Ross discovers an architectural wonder in this modernist take on a traditional Australian farmhouse.

78 HOME FREE

Now on the outside of the sect that consumed her childhood, Laura McConnell is trying to show others that there is a way out.

chapter 03

chapter 04

82 CARVING A LIFE

122 THE BARN

Kay Norton-Knight’s penchant for keeping busy brings art to Mudgee, New South Wales.

Garden designer Joseph Corkhill turns a dilapidated outbuilding into a cosy retreat.

90 CREATING A GEM

132 COMMUNITY COOK

Greg Stirling’s farmhouse-style furniture evokes times gone by.

A tree change for Belinda Jeffery led from a life in the TV spotlight to becoming part of a local community.

98 EARTHBOUND

Working with earth tones and plant pigments keeps artist Lucy Hersey grounded.

138 MEET THE PRODUCER

104 EVERYDAY ART

Sue Heward moved back to the family orchard and now she turns her parents’ figs into gold.

Domestic scenes inspire the works of artist Craig Handley.

146 LITTLE HOUSE ON THE DAIRY

108 ART SCENE

Selected new works by Australian contemporary artists.

Bunches of homegrown flowers help Erica smooth out the ups and downs of dairy farming.

152 STAY: THREE HUMMOCK ISLAND

110 BOOKSHELF

Book reviews by Annabelle Hickson.

Living the simple life at the ends of the earth in Bass Strait is a marvellous adventure.

112 TAKE MY ADVICE

156 RESTORING THE LAND

A new look at a classic Australian novel with Meg Mason.

Part one of a series about an eco-retreat at Yambulla, New South Wales.

114 SAVING OUR FRAGILE BEAUTY

160 THE BETOOTA BRIEFING

The extraordinary art of nature photographer Pamela Pauline.

The Betoota Advocate’s Editor-at-large Errol Parker reports.

Editor-in-chief ANNABELLE HICKSON Creative Director GIOTA LETSIOS Director SARAH BARRETT Editorial assistant and stockist manager CATE GILPIN Special thanks RYAN BUTTA MAGGIE MACKELLAR

Customer Service WENDY BARRETT Subeditor MELODY LORD Imaging MICHAEL SYKES

CONTRIBUTORS Fiona Bateman Louise Beaumont Naomi Bulger Nicky Cawood Meaghan Coles Joseph Corkhill Lisa Marie Corso Amber Creswell Bell Ceri David Harriet Davidson Alaina Dean Tess Durack Pip Farquharson Julie Gibbs Simon Griffiths Sarah Hall Elisa Hassey Marnie Hawson Ed Hickson Megan Holbeck

Charlie Kinross Laura McConnell Mark McGinness Charlie Maslin Meg Mason Megan Morton Daisy Noyes Jim Osborne Clancy Paine Errol Parker Pamela Pauline Michael Pham Tim Ross Kate Shannon Anson Smart Hugh Stewart Julia Stirling Lean Timms Joe Wigdahl Charlotte Wood

FIND US on Instagram @galah.press and online galahpress.com SUBSCRIBE Never miss an issue. Subscribe at galahpress.com For inquiries about subscriptions please contact info@galahpress.com or call +61 411 562 103 CONTACT US For general inquiries, please email us at info@galahpress.com SUBMISSIONS If you’d like to contribute, please email us at info@galahpress.com SPONSORS To inquire about advertising or sponsorships, please write to editor@galahpress.com STOCKISTS If you’d like to stock GALAH, please get in touch wholesale@galahpress.com ©Galah Press Pty Ltd 2021 ISSN 2652-8959. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, or other direct or electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the editor, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in Australia.

Galah acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which this publication is produced and read.

We pay respect to Elders past and present. Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons.

Cover photograph Clancy Paine Inside front cover Annabelle Hickson Pages 14, 54, 80, 121 Daisy Noyes Opposite page Ed Hickson

a letter from the editor

I WANTED THIS ISSUE TO BE ABOUT THE DOMESTIC, BECAUSE I FIND IT SO HARD: COOK, EAT, CLEAN, REPEAT. NO MATTER HOW WELL YOU DO IT ON ANY GIVEN DAY, IT’S THERE AGAIN THE NEXT. Sometimes I wonder if not having to look at unfolded washing anymore is the secret upside of death. Nora Ephron said it was not having to worry about your hair, but I’ve already given up on that.

It is genuinely perplexing to me how to deal with the domestic. In many areas of life I consider myself to be competent, but not at home. When I hear about friends going away for a few days and filling the freezer with meals so their partners don’t have to cook, I want to collapse at their feet and wail, ‘How?’ I long to be practical and thoughtful. I long to find meaning in the day-to-day routines. I long to not long for something else. After all, I want this glorious, repetitive, domestic life. I can almost touch it, but then I hit perspex.

What really fries my head, though, is that it’s here at home where you need to be at your smartest; at your least numb. It’s where you (and by you I mean me, but hopefully you too) are faced with your most intimate, confronting and complicated feelings.

Long-term relationships are not easy. Resent, react, recover, repeat. Love, hate, soften, repeat.

Home is where you can let your guard down, which can be frightening. To my great shame I am always better behaved when there is someone ex familia in the house. If you want your relationships to persist, let alone mature and evolve and thrive, you need to be a high-level, emotionally intelligent ninja with the courage to face and understand your own behaviours and feelings, and those you live with.

And who wants to do that?

How do you be Martha Stewart and Esther Perel at the same time? How do you want to both wipe down the benches and have sex on the benches?

How do you compartmentalise your one self into such distinct roles?

I simply do not know how to find a stepping stone between the numbed-out vegetative state of throwing packets of pretzels into lunch boxes on autopilot and taking responsibility for my weird passive–aggressive schtick that I roll out whenever

I feel let down. And so I hop from one end of the spectrum to the other while obsessively reading about other people’s struggles with the domestic.

When Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård writes about parenting young children with his wife and says that dinnertime comes as a surprise to them every night, I say, ‘Karl, it does for me too.’

When he more bleakly writes that everyday life with its duties and routines is something he endures, not enjoys, I soberly nod along.

Some more hopeful words are found in the books of American writer Mary Catherine Bateson who writes so beautifully about how we can compose our lives, about how we can make meaning even as we study and work and raise children, while creating and recreating ourselves.

She says that making a home is about creating an environment in which learning is possible. The goal of the domestic sphere is to compose a place for you, and those you share it with, to learn. And for some reason this perspective makes me feel instantly less desperate. We don’t have to work it all out and solve it. We just have to learn.

All of the stories in this issue have helped me think about domestic life in some new way. They have helped me learn. Unfortunately, they have not helped me fold the washing, which is what I really wanted them to do. But sitting here all together, they do illustrate that there is no one way of doing the domestic. Sometimes domestic life can be wonderful.

Sometimes it can be hard. And it’s almost always a bit of both.

Annabelle

HOME WORK

Photographer Clancy Paine captures beauty in the ordinary moments of the everyday at her home near Narromine, New South Wales.

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chapter 01

• aunty Maude • the bloke’s yoke • being seen vs being famous • handpainted walls of waratahs • fake grass and real kindness • you still have to eat • the one who bought the church

GALAH’S

AGONY AUNT

Dear Aunty Maude, There are mice in my walls. Or maybe rats. Vermin of some variety. They scurry like mad in there at night, scratching away, and recently they’ve started having such parties they wake the baby. My husband is ready to burn the house down.

The issue is, I’m vegan. So I ask you, do rodents count?

With love, Sleepless due to squeaking

Dear Sleepless Vegan, The first thought that pops to mind is, ‘Oh, your poor husband’. Of course he wants to burn the house down.

A house full of rats (maybe mice), a screaming kid and a vegan—who could blame him?

But then I wonder if he’s even there. Is he down the pub with his mates? Often? Eating steak? I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me that. I never had that problem with my Jim, but I see it happening to women all around me.

Betsy’s Fred came home after one of his long walks, smelling of Twisties—always Twisties—and announced that he needed to find himself. Unlike every other time Fred needed to find something (clean underwear, false teeth, remote control), Betsy was declared surplus to requirements in this particular search. I warned her that she needed to work on the atmosphere in the home, I told her she had to help him find things, but she didn’t listen.

She didn’t even pack his bags for him when he left for good. Goodness knows what poor Fred has by way of matching socks. Imagine if he gets asked out to dinner?

So that’s what Betsy got. And that’s why you’ve got the vermin. Sleepless, you’ve got to mobilise.

Stop lounging about flicking through the fabulously photographed, tear-stained pages of Galah and inject a bit of atmosphere into your domestic sphere. Set up a nursery for the baby in the garage, preferably your in-laws’ garage. Fry some steak, even just for scent, call your man and say, ‘Honey, it’s time to come home.’

THE BLOKE’S YOKE Words Ryan Butta

Equality in domesticity is a hill I am prepared to die on. An issue over which I have staged many a protest, even gone out on strike for. When I feel the rotation of cooking duties in my household has not rotated enough, to my wife’s innocent request of ‘What are we having for dinner?’ I sit with arms folded and boldly declare that I am on strike. But if I am the Gandhi of ghoulash, the Mandela of moussaka, my wife is the Margaret Thatcher of domestic industrial relations, the Jaffle Iron Lady. Her weapon of choice, the toasted sandwich. For dinner, and the next four dinners, until I can take no more. I return to the kitchen, humbled, hungry and no longer on strike.

As a boy growing up in rural New South Wales, I can never remember Dad going on strike.

There was never any need. Every day was like Christmas for Dad. He would eat, then retire from the table to sleep, sometimes via the lounge chair and sometimes directly to bed. On the rare occasions that he did cook he would proudly announce the feat as if he were presenting us with a Michelin-starred, eight-course degustation menu of local produce that celebrated the changing seasons of Mudgee. In reality, it was only ever cold meat

curry, produced by adding three teaspoons of Keen’s curry powder to whatever mum had cooked the night before.

In his defense, Dad was up every morning at 5 am and off to work. I would hear Dad in the kitchen, making his own lunch, waging a one-man battle against 30 kilometres of plastic wrap and those corned beef sandwiches that refused to be wrapped.

The weight of domestic life fell on mum’s shoulders and, at the time, we never realised how crushing it was. There were days when we would run in from the school bus, gauze door banging and flapping behind us, to find mum, sitting at the kitchen table, head fizzing and bobbing like the toggle on the pressure cooker right before the corned beef was done. One afternoon we arrived home early to find mum meditating, or, as we gleefully told Dad that night over cold meat curry, ‘trying to turn into a cabbage’. But we never thought anything of these strange occurrences.

Perhaps the pressure of domesticity was the reason behind mum’s late blooming artistic career once we left the nest. There is not much room for artistic release in serving meat and two veg for two decades. In some of her more abstract pieces

I can detect hints of plates being thrown at walls and I sometimes think I catch a glimpse of myself and my brother and my father’s faces in the strange blobs of her work, as she doesn’t so much ‘apply the paint’ to the canvas as hurl it with more force than I think is really necessary.

Looking back from where I stand now, in front of a pile of dishes that just won’t wash themselves, it’s hard to see how I managed to miss the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a household, if not sparkling clean, then at least habitable. The tasks that now drive me crazy always seemed to get done. Like many men, I never questioned how or by whom.

I placed my faith in the Domestic Goddess, an omniscient and omnipotent being who ensured that dinner would miraculously appear at 6 pm. But even the Divine are not alone; they have the Holy Trinity. Not Mum. Mum’s generation never had a choice. We do. We get to decide how much or how little of the drudge of domesticity we choose to bear or shirk. The portioning up will never be perfect nor smooth. There will be strikes, negotiations, détentes and sometimes toasted sandwiches.

For dinner. It’s a small price to pay. n

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inside out How do you sell your goods without selling your soul? And where do you draw the line between public and private? Author Maggie MacKellar considers.

For years now I have been mildly obsessed with a family I follow on Instagram. I can’t remember how or why I started following them, but it began when they moved from suburban San Francisco to a ranch in rural California, USA. They have four young daughters all called Mary, known by their second names—a family tradition after their mother, grandmother,

The Heffernans of Five Marys Farms share their everyday lives via Instagram and other social media @fivemarysfarms.

great-grandmother and so on.

Their ranch is called Five Marys Farms. The reason I continue to follow is because the mother of the family, who runs the Instagram account, does not seem to mind collapsing the boundary between public and private; in fact, she recognises that space as a business opportunity, a way to sell their products. When they first started they were quintessential American suburbanites and their inability to tell one end of a cow from another only made for more fascinating viewing. They learned fast and established a thriving multifaceted business. They now ship their meat (beef, pork and lamb) all over the United States; they run workshops, are ambassadors for the clothing brand Carhartt and they have their own cookbook, bar and restaurant.

Mary is an entrepreneur with capital E. But I skip through all the business content because what I am curious about, what keeps drawing me back to their account, is just how much of their lives they share. Over the years I’ve watched Mary’s girls go from barely being able to sit on a horse to competing in roping competitions in rodeos.

I’ve watched them raise poddy

lambs and calves, go on date nights, take family holidays, celebrate birthdays. The girls have grown up in front of the camera.

And it seems that the more they share, the greater their following, the greater their exposure and the greater their business growth.

It’s a model replicated all over Instagram. Our fascination with looking into other people’s living rooms has given rise to thousands of small businesses. I love that I can buy a shirt from a one-woman business in Sydney, a jumper from a sole trader in Narrabri, a pair of shoes from a small business in Orange, riding pants from South Australia, birthday presents from a gift shop in Coonamble ... and all of these tiny businesses tell me about their products and, to a greater and lesser degree, about themselves through Instagram.

These platforms have also given rise to the celebration—even a deification—of the domestic. I’m thinking of a number of accounts where a carefully curated version of the domestic world is captured in neat squares and these (often very beautiful) images offer a portal of calm that I love to slip into. I’m sure, if you are similarly inclined, you have your own favourites: accounts that capture tiny snippets of golden peace. Of course the temptation is to imagine this as an extension of the person behind the camera. To imagine that this is a world you too could curate, if only ...

This brave new world of access.

It requires the sort of self-belief, an arrogance perhaps, that I think life has stripped from me. I feel uncomfortable on social media, judged, misunderstood, and often as if I’m wilfully misleading my meagre followers when I post a photo of a sunrise or a smiling dog or a lamb. Yet I recognise the

perversity of my position, for I am a writer of memoir. My impetus is to be as open, as authentic to myself as possible to connect with my reader. And so despite my discomfort online I persist in recording my life in words. I record it privately in my journal and then use that journal to write about my life for a public audience.

What I’m working towards is connection from my small existence into a larger experience; perhaps what I’m searching for in writing this way is to be seen, which is a very different thing than wanting to be recognised.

I’m thinking through this conundrum as I’m on the cusp of

‘The trick is to turn your own life into something that has meaning for people whose experience is nothing like your own.’ My friend Sadie Chrestman sends me this quote the day after I have visited her on the flimsiest of excuses to talk to her about how she juggles the boundary between her public and private life. The quote is from the writer Jeanette Winterson—who is most famous for her autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and her brilliant memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? And it speaks directly to the heart of my work and perhaps Sadie’s too.

The lack of confidence is real and what I need is some super selfbelief like the Five Marys have. finishing my third memoir.

Tentatively titled Grafted: A field guide to being, it has at its heart the experience of working alongside my partner on our farm where we run merinos. I’ve taken the journals I kept through drought and lambing seasons and stitched them into a narrative about my changing identity as a mother and a woman, as my youngest child is on the cusp of leaving home. I’ve struggled to write it, not because of the subject matter or even the writing itself, but because of a sudden lack of confidence, the feeling that it’s an indulgence to write from the personal outwards.

My feminist self takes my inner critic to task, but the lack of confidence is real and what I need is some super self-belief like the Five Marys have.

I first met Sadie about five years ago when I was asked to write a feature on her husband, restaurant critic turned farmer and TV star Matthew Evans. I’d driven down to the Huon Valley in Tasmania where their new farm gate restaurant had just opened. I wrote my story on Matthew and his passion to teach people about where their food comes from and how to grow it; a story about determination, commitment and vision, but I left wanting to know Sadie more. She told me she didn’t really enjoy the role she played as front-of-house jack-of-all-trades in order to get their business into shape. What she loved was to be in the garden, but they needed a professional gardener to run it.

We have kept in touch, sending stupid video chats with updates >

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of the undignified tasks we each face on our different farms. We had dinner once. We swapped podcast recommendations and I had that sliding sense of a rich friendship almost within my grasp.

But we live a long way from each other: Sadie on a tiny slice of the Huon Valley surrounded by hills, orchards, a fat river and the wildness of the south west as her southern view. I’m two-and-a-half hours north on a merino sheep farm, where on our western boundary the fingers of the Eastern Tiers slide into farmland and to the east lie the white sand beaches and crystalline waters of the coast. But when I started to think through my hesitancy in once again publishing a memoir, it was Sadie I wanted to talk to.

in the kitchen behind us. It’s one of those startlingly hot days that can come at the end of the benign Tassie summer.

Sadie’s different from the last time I was here. She’s grounded.

Perfectly relaxed in her body.

There’s an authority to her, a sense of purpose that I hadn’t seen last time I’d visited. We are interrupted by one of the WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) who work for Sadie and Matthew, their labour given in exchange for food and experience.

I’m a little surprised by the abruptness of the interruption, until he says he’s just stood on a tiger snake. ‘Stood on it!’ We both leap to our feet. ‘Have you been bitten?’ He looks a little taken aback by our reaction. ‘No,’ he

Working in the garden has given her a place to speak about what she knows to be true.

We have a few aborted attempts at meeting up. Eventually she offers to drive to Hobart to meet halfway. I almost agree and then I realise I want to have this conversation standing in the vegetable garden she has created.

Though we haven’t seen each other for a couple of years, Sadie is the same. She’s dressed in khaki work pants and perfectly worn-in cotton navy work shirt. Her hair is salt and pepper and her body feels strong when we hug (this is COVID-free Tassie). She makes me a coffee and we cram sunhats on and sit on the deck overlooking her small kingdom. The day is perfectly still. There is no sound of traffic, only the hum and clang

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says, ‘it just slithered off. I took a photo.’ He shows us the photo on his phone. After he goes, I comment on how calm he was.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s the beauty of the English workers: they have no idea about snakes.’

We walk down to the vegie garden through the paddock. I’m on fairly high snake alert, but they’re soon forgotten as Sadie hands me a pod of the sweetest peas. I split them with my thumbnail and pop the little orbs of green into my mouth. There’s a row of scarlet runner beans above my head, strawberries at my feet.

We pluck apples and munch as I ask Sadie what’s changed since last I saw her.

She tells me it was stepping up and managing the vegie garden.

Their head gardener had to go back to the mainland and she’d been writing the job advertisement when she realised it was the job she wanted. So she put her pen down and pulled her boots on and, though it has been a steep learning curve, she’s loved every minute.

As we move through the garden, tasting and picking, she’s swollen with knowledge. The garden, its moods and cycles, is a living thing and Sadie is aware she’s part of a conversation with it and beyond into the world. She pulls a tiny Japanese turnip out of the ground and hands it to me. I wipe the dirt from it and bite into its perfect whiteness. It’s delicious.

I ask her if she feels differently about greeting guests and guiding them through the garden tour, which is part of the whole Fat Pig Farm lunch experience. I compare it to the part of my work I find the hardest: speaking on panels, meeting readers, answering questions about how and why and where. When I do it, when I give the talk, sign the books, meet the readers, I am always humbled by their responses. ‘Exactly,’ she says. She tells me that she draws on her training as an actor. As she walks from the restaurant to where the guests have parked their cars she steps into a role.

Sometimes people don’t get what she’s trying to do in growing her own food, honouring the process from the earth to the table, gathering people together. But it’s a delight to see them experience the goodness of cooking, eating food they have just harvested and being changed by the experience.

It’s that connection, that moment that makes it all worth it.

As she’s telling me this, she has a new authority, as if the garden

has given her the literal soil to stand on, so she’s talking as the person who has grown the food their guests are coming to eat.

When she explains about healthy soil, compost and companion planting, it’s not something she has watched or read in a book.

The evidence of her knowledge is under her fingernails and pressed into her skin.

We walk up the hill to the restaurant and Sadie checks there’s enough lunch for an interloper. There is, so I join the kitchen staff, WWOOFers and Matthew sitting in the sun out the back of the kitchen. It’s a perfect lunch. Pickles, cheese, freshly baked bread. The group is a mix of locals and foreigners. I sit on the edge of conversations and admire what Sadie and Matthew have built around a belief they can live lighter on the world.

As I leave, Sadie gives me a bucket of vegetables to take home.

Carrots, beans, shallots and a bunch of the tiny, perfect Japanese turnips. I drive down to the river and pull up in the shade to jot down some thoughts. The car is quickly surrounded by a family of superb fairy-wrens; a small group of tourists and their slightly harassed guide are paddling down the lazy river; and I sit with the taste of pepper from the turnips lingering in my mouth.

It would be simplistic to say Sadie has stepped out from behind Matthew’s considerable shadow, and yet she has. Working in the garden has given her a place to speak about what she knows to be true. I’m drawn to her certainty.

Her activism is a lived one, not curated for a social media account.

Instagram was still reasonably new when I started following Five Marys Farm and since then Mary Heffernan has gone on to build an

Sadie Chrestman, in her vegie patch, generously shares her produce and philosophy @fat_pig_farm. Photograph Matthew Evans

empire. I’ve happily signed up for the ride. But even as I do I have this uncomfortable feeling. I am a voyeur and for Mary to sell her meat, I get to watch her family’s triumphs and tragedies. Sadie of Fat Pig Farm is not an empire builder, not of the Five Marys sort. If Sadie has an empire, it’s built from the soil she has tended.

Mary with her thousand-watt smile, her gorgeous hair, her American ease in front of the camera is far away from Sadie’s occasional humble appearances on Fat Pig Farm’s Instagram account. Yet both women share a passion for what they do and want to spread the concept of farmraised meat and produce grown ethically and transparently.

I’m drawn to them both for different reasons. I’ll never meet Mary; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever commented on her posts, but

I too choose to write about my life in an effort to forge connections about how we live on the land, how we raise our stock to feed and clothe our country. The trick is, as Jeanette Winterson so acutely observed, to make my small experience a universal one and the words on the page a place where readers may recognise themselves.

In the end it is perhaps a matter of degrees between the three of us. I need the silence of my walk to be just that; I need to do the work on the page to form connections and not worry about turning my life into an Instagram opportunity. I take heart from the conversation I shared with Sadie in her vegie garden. Neither of us will ever be Instagram stars, but hopefully both of us will forge real connections with others through our work. n @maggiemackellar_

offbeat paradise Chef Sean Moran has split his time between the Blue Mountains and Bondi Beach since the 1980s, immersing himself in creativity in both his homes.

Words Ceri David Photography Anson Smart

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Below Creativity in the kitchen (and in the paintings on the dining room walls) is Sean’s realm. Opposite page One of the two dams, perfect for swimming in this magical setting.

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‘The Bramley tree has blossom on at the moment, as well as apples,’ says Sean Moran, rolling his eyes.

‘The world doesn’t know what it’s doing.’

It’s true: the past year has forced all notions of normality to twist and tangle, to the point where, clearly, even nature is confused. Fittingly, perched at one end of the massive dining table in Sean’s Bilpin farmhouse, is an upside-down cake.

‘I picked the Bramleys this morning, cracked the walnuts, ground the cassia bark …’ He scampers, elflike, to the kitchen and brings back a glass jar, unscrewing the lid so I can take a sniff. ‘It’s like a grown-up version of cinnamon. Would you like some Greek yoghurt with yours?’

The 20 hectare farm in the New South Wales Blue Mountains has been home for 14 years to Sean and his husband, Michael Robertson—nicknamed Manoo ever since their young nephew had trouble with his real name. Neither of them has roots in the country. Manoo comes from a family of tinkers in the UK, while Sean is from ‘old Sydney convict stock, way back’. The couple fell in love with this part of world in the eighties, when Manoo was working at a guesthouse in Blackheath. The location

was great—just 90 kilometres north-west of Sydney, where Sean worked in Bondi—and they could have the garden they’d always wanted. They first bought a shack in nearby Mount Tomah, and two decades later they upsized to this place.

It’s unlikely the patch of dirt their younger selves dreamed of was anywhere near this size. Fields of vegetables stretch in neat rows into the distance, kept company by sheep, cows, chickens and pigs; the whole operation hydrated by two large dams—one spring-fed and overflowing joyfully into the second.

All up, the farm now supplies 40 per cent of the produce used at Sean’s, the Bondi restaurant—or perhaps ‘institution’ is more accurate—they’ve had since 1993.

Sean and Manoo divide their time between the two, driving back and forth a couple of times a week with crates of produce or buckets of compost scraps, depending on the direction of travel. They haven’t always made these trips together but, lately, says Sean, they prefer to. ‘Manoo had a heart attack a couple of years ago and he says, “I don’t want to die alone”.’

Their Bondi pad is ‘this kooky, dilapidated thing that overlooks the ocean, one level above the >

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It’s a life Sean enjoys sharing, describing the farm as a drop-in centre.

Above The waratahs in the bedroom were Sean’s first attempts at decorative wall art, before he moved on to the more ambitious project of painting the vegetables in the dining room. Opposite page Manoo (left) and Sean.

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restaurant’, which gels with the vibe of the eatery below. ‘We’ve still got a plastic bucket for a till.’

Choosing between the two halves of his existence isn’t something Sean’s keen to contemplate. ‘My heart is torn,’ he says. ‘I love the coast, I love my little bunker by the sea, and it’s given me this life.’

It’s a life he enjoys sharing, describing the farm as a drop-in centre. Right now, his sister, Toni, who’s visiting from Mullumbimby, is doing her best to distract the various dogs (they have five) that seem intent on joining our conversation. Meanwhile, Marie, a pastry chef from the Bondi restaurant, lives on the farm in an old bus, and takes care of things when the men of the house are away. ‘Marie’s incredible,’ says Sean. ‘We worked together in Italy, years ago. She’s Italian and she’s all about that bella figura thing: the notion of making a good impression.

When we come back, our bed’s made and there are fresh flowers. Manoo’s like a teenager; he leaves crap everywhere. I’m forever tidying after him, and then Marie tidies up after both of us.’

During lockdown, the farm was also home to some of the chefs on his payroll. ‘They had nowhere to go and no income. We just cooked and gardened.’

Idyllic though it sounds, it was far from stress-free, particularly during the three months when Sean’s had to close. ‘We thought we were going to lose the restaurant. The landlord wasn’t going to budge on the rent, and we owed all this money. We’d have had to walk away. Thankfully she decided it was better to cherish the relationship we’ve had for so long.’

In the midst of all the uncertainty, Sean found a new outlet for his creativity, painting produce from the garden directly onto the dining room walls. ‘I needed to nest. I felt like I’d lost control, and it was my way of coping.’ The result hovers somewhere between the crumbling frescoes of Pompeii and a textbook of horticultural diagrams, featuring asparagus tied with string, multicoloured rhubarb, zucchini and their flowers, and many more.

Toni wanders in, hoping for a slice of cake. She’s an artist, complete with paint-flecked trousers. Is she impressed by her brother’s oeuvre de la terre?

‘I actually think Sean is an artist: he’s more creative than me, with everything he touches,’ she insists.

‘This is the first time he’s painted, and it’s amazing.

I told him he’s not allowed. Painting’s my thing.’

Sean interrupts: ‘Well, don’t look behind that cabinet. I made sure that’s where my ugly things are.

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Clumps of spinach. How do you paint that? It’s just all fuckin’ green.’

It turns out the project began with a mural of rich red waratahs in one of the bedrooms. (Their bedroom? ‘It depends; we move around. At the moment it is.’) Pleased with the result, he graduated to vegetables, starting with the boldest of all: beetroot. ‘It was what we harvested that day, so that’s what we were having for dinner.’

To be clear, in most homes, this would be a categorically bad idea. Here, it’s just one of countless treasures to feast your eyes on. The pantry looks like a historical timeline of food processors, owned and operated exclusively by Sean. Manoo doesn’t cook, at home or at work; his role in hospitality has always been on the business side of things—including running the High Hopes Roadhouse they recently opened here in Bilpin. ‘When I’m not here, he’ll have cheese on toast for dinner,’ says Sean. ‘And when I am, he’s a tricky customer. No coriander, no chilli, no skin, no bones. It drives him nuts that my freezer’s full of chicken carcasses. I save them up until I can make a big pot of stock when I’ve got enough.’

How many are in there now? ‘Probably a couple of dozen.’

Possibly not the nicest surprise for someone just hoping for a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, but it gets worse. ‘I once had that kingfisher in the freezer.’ He’s pointing towards a glass cabinet. ‘It flew into the window. And that fox. It was trying to get the chickens, and Manoo shot it, by fluke. I froze them until I could take them to the taxidermist.’

Outdoors, the farm is just as magical. There’s the jetty that Sean and Manoo dive off into the deep water of the dam. The Smyrna quince tree that sweats its fragrance onto your fingers when you touch its fruit. The ram, who won’t go anywhere without his alpaca best friend.

Then there’s the bed on the verandah. Fully made up with sheets and pillows, it was transplanted from one of the bedrooms, and now lounges under the tin roof, shrouded in a puff of mosquito netting. Their old friends Den and Sheila were the inspiration.

‘They had a place out at Ilford, and they slept every night outside,’ explains Sean. ‘Even in the snow, they just put more blankets and a beanie on. I love that romance. It just made your heart sing.’

Standing here in this offbeat slice of paradise, high in the mountains, I know exactly what he means. n

‘I needed to nest. I felt like I’d lost control, and it was my way of coping.’

LOCAL HEROES

A violent robbery at the Relaxing Cafe led owners Jacky and Peaw to find their community and home in the north-western New South Wales town of Moree.

Words Annabelle Hickson Photography Hugh Stewart and Annabelle Hickson

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Opposite page Jacky (left) and Peaw run the Relaxing Café in Moree, New South Wales.

The grass is always green at the Relaxing Café. Literally, because fake grass covers the floor, but also because owners Warunee (Jacky) Panichattra and Suparak (Peaw) Wongsuwan, a couple from Thailand who have made the New South Wales agricultural town of Moree their home, refuse to let it be anything else.

It was early in the morning— still dark—when Jacky and Peaw unlocked the doors of the Relaxing Café to prepare for a day of service ahead. One of their regulars, bus driver Peter McLellan, was there too. The 65-year-old would often lend a hand before grabbing his takeaway coffee for his morning bus run. He was carrying chairs out to the verandah when three teenagers wearing hooded jumpers crashed into the café from the side entrance.

One picked up a milk crate and used it to bash Jacky repeatedly over her head and back. Another tried to rip Peaw’s handbag off her. The third got into a scuffle with Peter. The kids then cleared out as quickly as they arrived, jumping the side fence and disappearing into the dark morning. They didn’t steal anything, but they had terrified the women and badly hurt Jacky.

An ambulance arrived and took

Jacky to hospital and the Relaxing Café shut its doors.

For a month the doors stayed shut. Jacky and Peaw were frightened. At first the women wanted to return to Sydney, where they had lived and worked for almost 10 years, meeting there after separately moving from Thailand to Australia to study—Jacky from Chiang Rai in the north and Peaw from the south. But then the Moree community—population 7300— rallied around them in ways they did not expect.

Peter visited them daily. Other customers sent flowers and plants. Another paid for security cameras to be installed in the café. Messages of love and support came pouring in from loyal customers. This was the moment that Jacky and Peow, despite being bruised and rattled and having lived in Moree for not quite a year, realised this small town was their home. They felt acknowledged, accepted and appreciated. This is where they wanted to stay.

Today, four years after the attack, the Relaxing Café is buzzing. The customers steadily stream through the door, which Amy the waitress continually opens as she delivers coffees to tables and greets or farewells

the incomings and outgoings.

There are tradies and blokes in high-vis, farmers, undercover detectives, council workers, professionals and mothers with prams. There’s talk of frosted wheat crops and snakes on the move. There are two ladies visiting from Sydney who come to Moree to ‘take the waters’ in the artesian pools; they swear by the Relaxing Café’s golden teas. Peaw and Jacky greet everyone with cheerful hellos and the singsong Sah-wat-di-kha from the kitchen. Amy opens the door again, slightly bowing and smiling. Everyone is smiling.

Jacky has a freakishly good memory for how people like their coffees, even if they only come in occasionally. Most people don’t have to actually place their order. They arrive, Jacky clocks them and she starts making the coffee while they chat to whoever is around. Peaw knows to what exact degree of crispiness each customer likes their bacon cooked. And if it’s a regular’s birthday, she’ll slip them a little cake or make them some special Thai food.

‘We look after everyone like friends and family, not like customers,’ says Peaw proudly.

‘They love it. They give to me.

I give back to them.’ >

Opposite page, clockwise from top left One hundred-and-one-year-old Les visits the café five days a week; the menu, prepared with care by Peaw and Jacky; Amy delivers a coffee.

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‘YOU CAN SEE HOW POPULAR THEY ARE ...

YOU DON’T GET THAT FOR NOTHING.’ Peter, who has now retired from full-time bus driving, is sipping his coffee in the corner of the café. He doesn’t have to be up early for work any more, but every morning just before six, he comes to the café and makes sure it is safe for Jacky and Peaw to hop out of their car.

If he can’t make it, he organises someone else to be there. The girls have never opened up alone since the attack.

‘I enjoy the coffee; I enjoy the company. They’re like kids to me,’ he says without any fuss.

Peaw and Jacky make more of a fuss about him, though, calling Peter their Moree Dad. It’s Peter, and customers like Peter, they insist, who gave them a reason to stay and a place to call home.

‘That’s why we’re still here,’ says Jacky firmly.

‘When we first came here, it was hot,’ says Jacky, remembering the summer they moved to Moree to help Thai friends who ran a restaurant in Moree. ‘In Thailand and in Sydney it is hot and humid and then it rains. Here it is just hot and hot and hot. At first it was hard. And very quiet. After eight o’clock nothing: nothing at all.’

After three weeks they wanted out, but stayed on, somewhat ambivalently, until the attack. It

was only in the aftermath that they felt sure they wanted to make Moree their home.

Jacky and Peaw own a house on the other side of town where they live with a couple and the couple’s two children. They are good friends with another couple who run a local Thai restaurant.

That couple also has a child, and Peaw babysits at night while both sets of parents work.

‘I love it,’ says Peaw. ‘I have three kids now.’

Regular Mel Jensen says the women have a knack for bringing out the best in people. ‘Their best customers are probably some of the more conservative people in the community. Even guys who are quite prejudiced, they just can’t do it to these girls, who remember everyone and make them feel so important,’ says Mel. ‘They have created a place where people have met and made connections. Some mornings it might take you an hour to get out of here, because one person after another will turn up. And the men coming in: I never thought I’d see so many men get into the coffee culture.’

Les Smith, a 101-year-old mechanic-turned-poet who has spent most of his life in Moree, apart from ‘a few years during the war’, drives himself to the

Relaxing Café for a coffee with his mate Rudy five days a week.

He’s seen a lot of businesses come and go over the years.

‘In the early days all the cafés were Greek. This here was a bakery,’ Les says, pointing at the homewares shop next door. ‘And here,’ pointing at the café, ‘was the living quarters.’ About Jacky and Peaw, Les says, ‘you couldn’t find better people anywhere.

‘It’s a pleasure to spend your money here. They are very kind and thoughtful. You can see how popular they are … you don’t get that for nothing; you’ve got to earn it, and they certainly have.’

Through their intentional, indefatigable friendliness, these two women have created for themselves a place in the Moree community. And in doing so they have also created a place for the community itself, where everyone is welcome to sit on the mismatched chairs, with the fake grass underfoot.

The kids in the hooded jumpers were never caught, but that doesn’t really matter to Jacky and Peaw. They’re far more interested in love than revenge. If the love you give determines the love you receive, it’s no wonder everyone looks so happy in the Relaxing Café. n 75 Heber Street, Moree NSW.

Opposite page Former bus driver Peter McLellan is loved by the two women, who think of him as their ‘Moree Dad’. He turns up every morning to make sure it’s safe for them to open.

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you still have to eat

Words Charlotte Wood

Seventeen years ago my two younger sisters were caring for our sick mother at home. Twice a week, a neighbour called Ruby would come knocking at their door.

‘How’s ya mum, darlin’?’ she would croak. ‘Doin’ any bedda today?’

Ruby was aged around eighty, about four feet tall, and as slight as a stick. She had a smoker’s voice so gloriously raspy she might have roughened it daily on a carpenter’s rasp. The weathered skin of her face was grey with lack of oxygen and the fact she walked anywhere, let alone up our mother’s three front steps, seemed heroic.

No, the girls would have to tell Ruby, our mother was still not feeling so good. Sometimes they would lie and say that she was feeling a bit perkier today, or had some colour in her cheeks, was up to eating. It seemed too sad to answer Ruby’s hopeful questions with the truth: that our mother was dying. But what the girls said really made no difference; no matter their response, Ruby would shake her head.

‘Ah, the poor bugger,’ she’d say, wheezing soulfully at the doormat. Then, as she did every visit, she

would make her offering: ‘Just a bit of sumthink for ya mum, darlin’, to make her feel better.’

Every time, my sisters would exclaim and accept Ruby’s offering with gratitude. Then she would hobble off down the garden path until the next visit.

Ruby’s bits of something really were quite something. The gift always came in one small, speckled ceramic cereal bowl, covered in slightly sodden plastic wrap. In the bowl was always some bizarre concoction. A few sardines wrapped in a slice of devon, perhaps, or three little sippets of white toast with baked beans, given a glossy slipcover of condensed milk, or a thick slab of undercooked scone dough fashioned into a lumpy pineapple-andVegemite pizza.

I can’t accurately recall all of Ruby’s dishes, but tapioca, arrowroot, sago and junket seem to feature in my memory, usually in strong-smelling combination with other treats—fricasseed brains, maybe, or tuna mornay.

Of course, in our small town Ruby’s gifts of solace were just a few among many. A casserole appeared on the doorstep for my sisters at least once or twice a week over those months, most often without a note or anything else to identify the giver. It was the kind of routine kindness that happened then in country towns and suburbs everywhere.

A decade before this, our father, too, had been gravely ill. Back then our mother was just 48 years old, bewildered with shock and grief, and trying to come to terms with this hole punched in our world while caring for a houseful of equally stunned teenagers.

One day, a ute appeared in our driveway. Someone unloaded a small chest freezer and installed it in our kitchen. It was packed to the brim with frozen casseroles, soups, pies and desserts. For the many months of treatment and grieving that followed, that freezer was restocked every week by our neighbours and friends.

That year on Christmas Day, as every day, we went to visit our dad in hospital.

Our neighbours then were Jim and Pat Rodda.

They had lived next door forever and we loved them nearly as much as our own family. We had never heard of Jim cooking, but that day we came home to find our dining table spread with a lavish Christmas feast—turkey, ham and all the trimmings—that Jim had cooked for us entirely by himself.

The food was excellent, but the gift was far more than that. Though he and our dad were chalk and cheese—Jim drank beer and adored golf, while our eccentric father spent his time reading Catholic theology and making wine from oak leaves and raisins—they loved each other. And of course Jim was a father himself. It was only much later that I understood the magnitude of his cooking for us that day. It was not so much a present for us, but a message to our father, an expression of masculine love and fatherly solidarity that to this day makes me cry to think of it. Our dad died the next day, taking with him the knowledge that his family would be cared for by our town in exactly such tender, graceful ways.

These things—Ruby’s alarming concoctions, the freezer full of casseroles and Jim’s Christmas dinner—all happened a long time ago, when my siblings and I were very young people. But the experience went deep. Now, for all of us, when news of a friend or neighbour’s crisis hits, our first instinct is: cook. I used to think this impulse was common to everyone, not just people raised in country towns.

Perhaps it was usual at one time. But I have come to think we’ve lost confidence in our instincts.

Recently, I heard that one of our neighbours was having cancer treatment, and had been for several months. I felt dreadful that we’d not known, and had done nothing for his wife and kids before now, so my husband and I popped round with a quiche. It wasn’t much, obviously—more a gesture than anything— but still, I trusted my instincts.

When V. opened the door I was shocked. Not because she looked any different—she didn’t, except perhaps a little tired, for her husband was in hospital again, this time with pneumonia. But as she took the quiche from us she began to cry, and said this was the first time anyone had done such a thing. Her gratitude was completely over the top—it was only a quiche— but it made me remember how magnified the smallest gestures of kindness can become when one is marooned in this way by terror and grief. And it made me ashamed, that our neighbours had been left alone with it for so long.

How does this happen? I wonder if it might partly have to do with our contemporary preoccupation with experts, and outsourcing, and privacy. In middle-class Australia, it seems that if something needs addressing, it is always possible to pay >

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a stranger to do it. From the washing of undies to the cleaning of one’s toilet, from the mending of a broken heart to insomnia or nightmares, from toenail clipping to hair removal, these days one need never turn to one’s family or friends for help in caring for one’s ailing body or soul.

In general I find this enormously liberating. Who wants to assault one’s friends with yet another round of howling over a lover’s betrayal, or the details of that (let’s face it, unpleasant) intimate medical issue?

Professional help, if affordable, is a fine thing, allowing the maintenance of one’s dignity and privacy in matters of the heart or hoof.

And yet. I think of Ruby, and the freezer, and Jim, and my neighbour dissolving in tears over a baconand-egg quiche. And these incidents reinforce what I already know: food is not just food, and cooking is not just a practical act. A casserole on the doorstep can be nourishment not only to the body—which is essential—but also an act of love, a refreshment for the mind and the soul. When things are too terrible to talk about, an offering of home-cooked food is a silent, loving letter telling your broken-hearted friend or your ailing aunt that they are not alone, that someone cares, that they are loved.

There is one more incident I’ve remembered. My friend Paul, an excellent cook, was devastated to learn of the serious illness of a family friend who himself had a young family. Paul came up with the obvious way to help: he would deliver a weekly meal to the family home without fuss, without intrusion.

He rang the friend’s wife to make his offer, relieved he had finally found a practical way to help. Her response was unexpected. No thank you, she said icily. She was not a charity case, his social work was not required, and he should find someone else to patronise. Paul, of course, was mortified. Not only had he not found a way to help, he had made things much, much worse.

This is a dreadful story, but it’s rare. To my mind the story only shows that the woman was in a state of such grief that she could not respond to kindness.

Which brings me to realise that there is more than one gift happening when you offer a dish of food: the gracious acceptance of it is a gift in return. What my sisters did every time they took one of Ruby’s pineapple-and-Vegemite pizzas was let her know that her kindness was helping them, and it did. The food

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there is more than one gift happening when you offer food may have been inedible, but the love in it was one of the many acts of simple humanity that sustained those young women through six months of caring for a dying mother.

Just as importantly, offerings like Ruby’s taught us how to do the same (with a few adjustments!) for others. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde’s much-loved book on creativity, Hyde says: ‘Whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept ...

In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move.’

If your gift is refused, there is nothing to be done but mark it down to experience. But I can guarantee that there are many more neighbours who will be grateful for the smallest plate of home-cooked food than there are those who might lash out at the offer.

Amazingly, most human beings intuitively understand—even in the depths of their despair— that the gift must always move.

So, to anyone who has ever heard of a friend in need and thought, ‘I wish there was something I could do to help,’ there is. It’s called chicken cacciatore or lamb tagine or couscous with pine nuts or soupe au pistou or beef Bourguignon or linguine al pesto. It’s also called, simply, love. n

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE SOUP Serves 6

When my friend Di’s sister died, a big pot of this green-and-white chicken noodle soup kept her going for several days. Inspired

by Karen Martini’s chicken brodo recipe, I have also found it to cure many ills of body and spirit.

1.5 kg chicken wings olive oil 2 L (4 cups) chicken stock 1 bunch silverbeet, stems finely chopped, leaves cut into strips 1 leek, finely chopped 1 fennel bulb, finely chopped 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1 cup white cabbage, finely chopped 2 celery sticks, finely chopped 1 carrot, finely chopped ½ cup arborio rice 50 g spaghetti, broken into 5 cm pieces a handful of green beans, chopped into 2 cm lengths 2 zucchini, sliced ½ cup cauliflower, broken into small florets ½ cup frozen peas ½ bunch parsley, chopped, to serve salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Toss the wings in olive oil with lots of salt and roast until golden (about 20 minutes).

Bring the stock to the boil.

Toss in chicken wings and cook on a rolling boil for another 20 minutes.

Turn off heat, remove wings from stock and leave to cool.

Meanwhile, in a heavy-based pan fry silverbeet stems, leek,

fennel, garlic, cabbage, celery and carrot over high heat until it all begins to turn golden.

This is the fiddly part. When wings are cool enough, pick off the meat and discard the bones and half the skin, leaving a little bowl of deliciously moist shreds of chicken.

Bring stock to the boil again, and throw in the rice, then add the pasta a few minutes later.

Add the sautéed vegetables, then the remaining vegetables.

Season well and cook until everything is tender, giving the soup a stir now and then to make sure nothing sticks.

Add the parsley and check the seasoning before serving.

SPINACH QUICHE Serves 6 1 quantity frozen shortcrust pastry or rough puff pastry olive oil 1 bunch silverbeet, washed, stems and leaves separated and finely chopped 1 onion, finely chopped 3 tablespoons chopped bacon or pancetta (optional) 6 eggs 200 g natural yoghurt 2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Line a tart shell or flan tin with pastry, prick base with a fork and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Heat some oil and sauté the silverbeet stems and onion with bacon or pancetta (if using) for a few minutes until bacon is crisp and vegetables are soft.

Add silverbeet leaves and fry for a few more minutes, then leave to cool.

To blind bake, line the chilled pastry with baking paper and fill with baking beans, rice or pastry weights. Bake for 8–10 minutes.

Remove baking paper and weights. Return to the oven for a further 5–10 minutes or until light golden, then remove from oven and set aside to cool.

Reduce the oven to 180°C. In a mixing bowl, lightly whisk eggs and yoghurt together until well combined. When spinach mixture is cool, add to egg mixture and pour into blindbaked tart shell.

Bake the tart in the oven for 20–30 minutes or until the top is golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

VEGETARIAN OPTION Omit bacon.

This is an edited extract from Love and Hunger by Charlotte Wood, published by Allen & Unwin, 2012.

THE ONE WHO BOUGHT THE CHURCH Sarah Hall writes about buying a public building, and how she saw the turning of the tide from community concern to community support.

Words Sarah Hall Photography Marnie Hawson

Adam and Sarah share a love of history and old buildings, which has stood them in good stead during the renovation of their heritage-listed home in the old church. Gothic arches on the windows and doors are certainly striking features.

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The large wallhanging, found rolled up and unloved in the back of someone’s shed, is the perfect scale and subject for the space.

At first it was hard to buy and renovate such a public building. The deconsecrated Blue Doors Church belonged to the community: it was used for local music gigs, yoga lessons and school concerts.

Everyone offered opinions about what to do with it and told us of their fond memories as children and the good times they’d had in it.

We couldn’t set foot in the front yard without unsolicited advice, curious questions about what we were doing, or running into a National Trust tour group (we’re stop number 19 on the Willunga Slate Trail.) We were scared to paint the walls and change the lighting and make it ours. The community judgment and expectation felt weighty.

But buildings need people who love them. My sister Em, who had lived in the town longer than us, gave me lots of pep talks: ‘You can do what you want.

It’s yours!’ Slowly, slowly we started to add ourselves and our lives into this historic space. We started to have fun with it, and we gave ourselves permission to make mistakes. > The old bright blue doors are now painted a subtler shade. Opposite A new mezzanine level divides the interior.

‘EVERYONE OFFERED OPINIONS ABOUT WHAT TO DO WITH IT AND TOLD US OF THEIR FOND MEMORIES’

The mezzanine level was designed by Adam. Sarah uses rugs to make room divisions in the large open living space.

In 2017 the church, named for the shade of electric blue that the gothic arch doors were painted (the colour was beloved by the town, although I had strong aversion to it), had stood empty for ages; just a building that had held various community events, the ins and outs of a small town’s needs over time. Built in 1870 without religious adornment, it had since served many purposes: prisoner of war control centre, Country Women’s Association rest rooms, Masonic Hall, then a venue for local dances and 21st birthday parties.

My husband Adam and I, my sister Emma and my brother-in-law Matt had seen it for sale. We’d gone to the open inspections—along with half the town— more for a love of history and old buildings than anything else. Adam and I made a ridiculous lowball offer because we had always wanted to live in a romantic old building and this one had the advantage of being near my sister’s house and the school our kids were already attending.

Our offer was dismissed by the agent; then the church went through several failed contracts for restaurants, cafés, wedding reception venues. Failed because the enormity of the task at hand became

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apparent and the sane among us walked away. We went back to life in our rented house. Six months after our mostly forgotten offer, the agent finally called us back in the middle of the dinner-bath-bed routine. ‘The vendor will accept your original offer.

You have until 9 am tomorrow to decide.’ The agent’s contract with the vendor was about to expire and we were the last ones standing.

We said a hesitant but secretly excited ‘yes’ despite the fact that it had no kitchen, bedrooms, backyard. It had a gaol-cell toilet, State Heritage listing and a protective community of townsfolk who did not want to see it turn into a single family home, especially a new-to-the-town family. But man, those windows.

Feeling sheepish and unsure and not at all confident in our ownership, a period of honouring prebooked events ensued: kids’ parties, Persian classical guitar gigs and a ‘sound bath’ in which I was blessed as the new custodian of the building. In the general store one day I heard whispers of how sad it was that Blue Doors Church was ‘closing down’; the local yoga teacher stopped her lessons for lack of a venue and everywhere my sister introduced me, I was already known as ‘the one who bought the church’.

In the meantime my drafter husband was in overdrive with mezzanine plans, my Pinterest board was full, and Em and I were in heaven planning and dreaming. Possibilities of mending and restoring with reclaimed salvage, without the size limitations of a regular house, seemed thrillingly endless. Our children ran wild in the empty space, which was perfect for scootering, rollerskating and handball.

Two years in and this is how it’s going: the mezzanine is complete and—stunningly, gloriously— two more windows have been installed at the front, for the first time in the building’s history. They let in the north-facing sunlight, and introduced us to some of the lost trades of the town: the blacksmith and the stonemason. But more importantly, the renovation has made the church ours and, yes, it has given us a level of street cred amongst the locals. The forgemade front gates were given the tick of approval from the many unofficial town mayors.

We finally painted over those blue doors. And it’s gone from feeling like a former church hall to just our house, complete with lack of adequate heating and gaol-cell toilet. We are still working on those, > Above Blue kitchen tiles add depth to the colour palette.

Opposite A banquette seat is an ideal reading nook.

and that’s the thing with old buildings, they are a project and a commitment which some days feel like something we didn’t sign up for.

It’s now treasured and loved and marvelled at each day. We truly feel we’ve breathed life into it. A big part of yearning for an old building with a lofty ceiling and majestic windows is the ability to ignore the reality that they usually come with a barely functional tacked-on bathroom, heritage delays and rats. Oh, and in many cases, years of waiting for the money and the time for it to function like a normal house. But still, the majestic windows, the old doors, the history in every not-straight floorboard!

It was Em who emboldened me to share our house on Instagram. In truth, this is what helped me own the space: seeing others on the same path of oldbuilding love and all it entails. We love hearing all of the multigenerational local memories, and mostly how they love seeing the smoke from the chimney and the lights on every evening. n @readandhall Internal windows in the upstairs rooms maintain the feeling of light and space while ensuring privacy.

chapter 02

• on picking fruit • a radical move to a banana farm • camping • six months in a tent with your son • the grande dame of the domestic • piles of tea leaves and a 1980s farmhouse • in the kitchen with a fundamentalist Christian family

GROWING UP

Memories are made of this: fruit grown, picked and eaten with love.

APPLES My cousins were only allowed to give bruised apples to the horses. We spent afternoons dropping apples on the kitchen floor, waiting for them to soften.

APRICOTS This is the recipe for stewed apricots: halve the apricots you have picked and put them in a stock pot with as much sugar as you want: maybe a cup, maybe two. Cook until the apricots are swimming in their juice and the sugar has dissolved. Depending on your harvest, you can ladle it into blue 2 litre ice-cream containers and put it in the deep freeze to make sure you have stewed apricots all year round.

I made stewed apricots this summer, with 10 kilos of apricots I bought at my innercity suburb’s farmers’ market.

I spent an afternoon in a friend’s kitchen, stirring the apricots until they oozed deep orange.

I burnt my fingertips dipping them into the juice as it boiled.

It almost tasted the same.

My mother and I make stewed apricots, but Grandma was famous for apricot jam. The apricot tree in her backyard was immense, stretching out across the garden shed and the woodshed. The last year she made jam, she had us get up on top of the woodshed to pick as many apricots as we could reach. The woodshed was rickety, riddled with termite damage, and the corrugated iron rusty, peeling and searing hot.

Below, in her housedress, Grandma watched with her hands shielding her eyes from the sun, occasionally pointing at an apricot she wanted us to pick.

That last batch of apricot jam set in the pantry on the top shelf where no-one would disturb it when looking for biscuits.

BLACKBERRIES Once we made a blackberry pie and took a thick slice wrapped in baking paper down to our Pa. He ate the pie with us sitting on the floor around his chair and asked where we got the blackberries from. We told him, down in the bottom gully where the bushes cling to the rocky wall. He said, ‘There were never blackberries down there in my day.’

We were all a bit sunburnt from the picking blackberries, all a bit scratched from reaching too far into the bushes, all a bit stung from mozzies that lingered in the puddles at the bottom of the gully. The snake bandage was still tucked in my back pocket, just in case, as was the note that we had taped to the front door that said, ‘Gone picking berries at 11am.’ The bath was still streaked with dirt from where we had lined up to wash our legs and the kitchen was still a mess of flour. Our fingers were stained, but the pie was once-in-a-lifetime good.

Years after Pa ate the slice of pie, our uncle sprayed the blackberries and we couldn’t pick any that summer. But the year after that the blackberries

were back and a fox made its den somewhere deep in the bushes. We could smell it when we checked to see if the berries were ripe.

CUMQUATS There is a single cumquat growing stubbornly on the cumquat tree two doors down from my apartment. I noticed it a week ago—I can’t figure out if it’s an extremely late cumquat or an exceedingly early one. There is a man working from the front room of the house and I don’t want him to see me stealing his only cumquat.

The cumquat tree that grew out of the front porch of my grandparent’s red-brick house was always fully grown, even when I was small. It was laden with fruit. I don’t know why it was planted—only one person from church ever dropped in to pick cumquats to make marmalade. We watched her from the lounge room, mad that she was taking our cumquats.

We claimed the cumquat tree as our own. The sole purpose of the tree was to entertain us.

When our aunts and mother sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, we stood on the front porch lobbing cumquats over the front fence and down the driveway.

Over and over. We would sit in a circle under the shade of the tree, peeling cumquats and eating them segment by segment. Our eyes would water and we’d gasp. When we convinced the little cousins to try them, they would cry at the

sourness and sit on the garden bench, arms folded, watching us with accusing eyes.

I really, really want to eat that cumquat growing two doors down.

‘OUR FINGERS WERE STAINED, BUT THE PIE WAS ONCE-IN-ALIFETIME GOOD.’

MANDARINS If my father has picked a mandarin from the drought-stunted tree at the bottom of the yard, shined it against his Ruggers shorts, and brought it up to the house for me, it’s the best mandarin I will ever taste in my life.

PEACHES & NECTARINES We weren’t allowed to open the windows of the school bus when we were looping around the dirt road, because we’d choke on the dust. But sometimes, on a Friday afternoon, one of us was allowed to pick the nectarines and peaches growing on the corner. We all knew, without anyone telling us, the trees grew from fruit stones thrown from the bus by school-kids years earlier. They were ours.

Usually, the cockatoos got to the fruit before we did. Now, I eat peaches from the tin. n Words Alaina Dean Illustration Naomi Bulger

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have your cake Her parents’ choice to pull up stumps and move to the country makes more sense to Megan Morton, now she is a very urbanised mother of three herself.

Words Megan Morton Photograph Michael Pham

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The day my dad blindfolded my mum, spun her around in front of a map of Queensland and told us we’d move to wherever her finger landed, Johnny Cash was singing ‘The Gambler’ in the background, mum’s finger landed on banana country in the Gold Coast hinterland, and I was astonished at how carefree and adventurous my city-slicker parents appeared to be, all of a sudden.

Later that night, I went to mum to check for any signs of flagging.

Disguising my ploy to check her dressing-gown pockets for sodden tissues as a hug, I put my head on her heart to count the beats. My mother wore the best of game faces, but there were no tissues, no racing heart beats. This might actually happen, I thought with mounting excitement.

That night l asked my sister from the top bunk if she thought

the whole thing was preplanned and if the map was even real. She whispered that sadly it was, and that she had major reservations about the entire thing and planned to call the authorities (whoever they were) the next day to check her rights. Our beautiful baby brother didn’t mind either way.

At dinner on our first night in our new life, I asked my father what language our new neighbour Farmer Ruffles and his wife Noreen spoke. Mum and dad laughed loudly and explained that I’d get used to the way they spoke soon enough. And I did. I adored Noreen. A glorious marmalade born-and-bred country woman, pale blue eyes, chubby to the point of explosion. She was the first person I heard admit that banana bread wasn’t bread at all. ‘If you are bloody lucky to be enjoying it, call it for what it is, a cake.’ >

Mum would send us outside to ‘let the hills take care of it’.

Our new street was named after the Ruffles and I took huge delight in writing to my grandmother with the news that I was ‘keeping very busy having delicious banana cake on the Ruffles’ verandah on Ruffles Road’ with ‘Ruffles’ underlined so she understood the importance of my hosts.

Childhood rolled along and we all survived the city-to-country transformation. All those almost invisible little initiations: dam swimming instead of pools; fresh milk rather than being storedependent; and forgetting our shoes when we had to leave our slice of paradise for supplies. As our forward-thinking parents predicted, before we knew it our family was largely self-sufficient, working as a fivesome, learning how to be farmers. Bananas were first, but between seasons we’d experiment with passionfruit,

cucumbers and zucchini. We saw that seeds need time to grow and that nothing worthwhile was fast.

When we had a problem, mum would send us outside to ‘let the hills take care of it’ as they often miraculously did. A playdate with neighbouring farm kids could take up to half a day’s walk, which made us fiercely loyal pals. ‘It pays to be picky with who gets your time anyway’ was another one of our mother’s take-aways, always reframing a negative.

Some of us thrived more than others, but the family pact seemed to be that one of us would take the hit in the face of the group’s newfound joy. My mother’s impressive output was evidence of her successful changeover, but I could sense, in the most invisible of ways, her constant struggle.

Outwardly, though, her ideas were genius, resourceful and downright

magic-making. She was helped very much by her bible, Grass Roots, a magazine that would take like-mindeds step-by-step (with hand-drawn illustrations) through ways to do a wide range of useful things; from breaking in a pony, making crazy paving or building a pizza oven, to improving the microbes in your dam.

My mother demanded a pool, the right of every Queenslander, so it was hand-dug by all of us. ‘If you can’t understand the job at hand,’ my Dad would say, ‘how can you ask another person to do it?’ Mum and Dad read up on mosaics, borrowed some gear and started to tile the pool themselves, bringing in a pro when it counted.

With ideas bigger than they ever had budget for, and more chutzpah than they were born to, they decided at the last minute to add a pair of swimming dolphins in the

deep end. Made of tiles! Not even my grandmother could believe our flair. Was there anything that we couldn’t do?

And this is what I now realise was the bravery and genius of my parents. Whether they staged it or not and whatever was going on for them to make such a bold move, they showed us that nature was always the fix. That doing things with our own hands was the only way to feel satisfied and that the real luxury was in long form: slow paving, slow cooking, waiting for mango season, eating our meat meaningfully. It was idyllic for us and restorative for my then midlife father who was (and still is) horse crazy. As a mother now to my own three, I can see the sacrifices that my mother made. But having four out of five was a good enough happiness ratio and she really threw her deeply academic self into farming life.

When I grew up, I decided I’d had enough of banana farming. I left the farm for Los Angeles as early as a minor could. I never looked back. Not until five years ago, when, very much entrenched in my close-to-burnout city life, I knocked on the door of our old house and asked the new owners if I could have a mosey around.

The brief visit brought up an avalanche of feelings. I started to panic. I had not given my children any of this. Not even a slice. Was it too late?

With control as one of my biggest drivers, there was no way I would relocate pin-the-tail-onthe-donkey style as my parents did. Instead, I started to acclimatise my city kids into country life, bit by bit. Motorbikes on dirt tracks, dares to swim in dark dams, visits to friends living a real McLeod’s Daughters life, among other simple things I had once found such bliss in.

‘You’re too late,’ said my older two, as they took their own transport back to the city to their respective networks. But I could see the glint in our youngest one’s eyes. I took her away with me, as deep as we could go on the weekends, desperate to show her the joy in nature’s rhythm and the solace in non-forced isolation. She took to it like a duck to water, more than I could ever have imagined. She now has a horse.

This is a significant feat for a family who lives in an apartment in Sydney.

Our city life is starting to show cracks. The closer she gets to nature and animals and her horse, the more she seems to release. I know too well the gifts of a childhood spent in nature, but now my daughter wants them too, without just dipping in and out.

Taking the COVID-19 silver lining of the challenging school year of 2020, we found her a school in the country where she could keep a horse and ride before

and after school. There’s a school pig that just had babies and a family of ducks that waddle past the classroom. A business-savvy year sixer sold me half a kilo of his parents’ potatoes from his locker. We are still talking about their creaminess.

While she is there for a trial, living on campus with her new friends and their horses, we are left in our unnervingly quiet city life, feeling very much like the middle-aged machines that we are. She is young, but as my father says, she is more than ready for real lessons, and his point is that not every child is. It’s not a given that just because one person wants a horse, it doesn’t mean the whole family would. Pot: kettle, Dad! I think of my own siblings and how it was my brother who had the most country air in him and it was he who suffered most when he came back to the city after the Ruffles retired and we all started selling off corners of our paradise.

My mother, an educational academic, reminded me that the only way to guarantee what she calls a ‘thorough’ education is through the magic glue of passion.

I’ve long accepted that the school fees I pay have nothing to do with my youngest child’s passions and that self-realisation is the stickiest of all the glues. I thought it was my job to show her the beauty of country life, but now she is showing it to me. n

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two ways

CAMPING Meet Tim Atkins at his campsite on the banks of the Dumaresq River on the New South Wales–Queensland border, and Marthe Rovik who lives in a beautifully renovated bus with her young family. They both swapped traditional house-life for something a bit different, and neither of them are looking back.

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TIM ATKINS

BONSHAW, NEW SOUTH WALES

When work dried up in Wollongong earlier last year, construction labourer Tim Atkins moved out of his rented home, packed his tent and fishing rods into his RAV4 and drove nine hours north west to the hundred-person village of Bonshaw on the New South Wales–Queensland border where his father is buried.

He set up camp on the bank of the Dumaresq River. The plan was to get out of the city and spend two weeks catching cod, letting his dicky knee heal and tending to the grave of his father, who died in a truck accident in Bonshaw when Tim was two years old.

Three months later, Tim has caught ‘six fish bigger than my biggest fish ever’ and has embarked on a renovation of all 27 graves in the cemetery, not just his father’s. He’s scrubbed all the headstones with bleach, he’s bought fake flowers and sourced 30 concrete vases to hold them. There are three spares, or rather two: one will be for Tim when he is buried there. He’s dug trenches for drainage around the graves, he’s built retaining walls to stop erosion on the sloping site and he’s planted grass, watering the bright green strips by hand with water lugged up from the town. (There’s no tap at the cemetery.)

‘I am having a blast. It’s the best time of my life, no two ways about it,’ says Tim. ‘I can’t remember my father, and it’s only now I’m hearing all the stories.’

Tim spent the first two years of his life in Bonshaw, but after his father’s death his family moved away and his mother remarried. Most Christmases they’d return—his mother and stepfather and Tim and his siblings—to clean the grave as a family.

‘We’d start with my father’s grave and my grandfathers’ graves, but then we’d give them all a clean down. I was brought up being told that no job’s worth doing unless you do it properly. If I do my family’s graves, well they would prefer that I cleaned everyone else’s graves as well. They’d expect it.’

Tim plans to spend at least another three months camping and working at the cemetery. Others are responding to his enthusiasm.

The local council has committed to building an animal-proof fence around the cemetery, while another local got out her gold nail polish and painted over the faded lettering on the headstones. ‘It does look a bit like a kid has done it, but she’s done a pretty good job ... it’s a hard job to do without stepping on the graves or the grass. She must have straddled.’ A local artist has offered to take off the nail polish and do the lettering by hand with paint.

‘The older you get, the more you start to think about these things and you start to show respect for others. If you’ve got luck and you’re grateful, you can do things to help the next guy that comes along. That’s what I’m doing in the cemetery. Everything I do there, it has to be an improvement in one way, shape or form. I’m blessed. That’s the word I use. Blessed for the luck that I’ve had to be here and to be able to do this.’

Words and photography Annabelle Hickson 64

MARTHE SNORRESDOTTER ROVIK LLOYD THE BUS, EVERYWHERE

When Norwegian-born actress Marthe Snorresdotter Rovik had her first baby, she knew she wanted to leave the city. She didn’t care that she’d be away from her agent and her network, she just felt in her bones that she needed to raise her daughter out of the city.

Her husband, Jed, who had always wanted to live in the country, jumped onto Gumtree and found a cottage to rent in Margaret River before Marthe could change her mind. They leased their city home and shifted down south, where Jed was able to continue his fly-in-fly-out iron ore job. It paid the bills but it did take him away from his family for weeks on end. When Marthe was pregnant with their second child, they started to wonder if there was a different way they could live their life.

‘We were always talking about how we could consciously design our lives so that we could be together. It just didn’t feel right, raising children alone. We landed on the decision that maybe we didn’t need more money. Maybe we just needed to have less expenses.’

So they sold everything: their Fremantle house and almost everything in it.

They ended the lease on the Margaret River cottage and bought a 12.5 metre bus called Lloyd. Jed, who quit his FIFO job, transformed the bus into an offgrid home with a kitchen, a pot-belly stove, solar panels and a composting toilet.

For the past year and a half, the family have lived full time in the bus, making their way slowly from Western Australia to Tasmania and New South Wales, stopping at beautiful camping spots on beaches and farm land for weeks at a time. They also camp on private properties in exchange for work.

‘We’ve used community notice boards a lot, which has been really fascinating: everywhere we’ve gone, we have been inundated with people who want to accommodate us,’ says Marthe. ‘I think people just really welcome the type of lifestyle that we’ve chosen, to kind of break free from the chains a little. And a lot of people have land, but they don’t have accommodation, so if they need a little bit of help around the place, someone completely selfcontained, who can chip in … a lot of people welcome that.’

Their first stop was Kalbarri, 600 kilometres north of Perth, where they spent eight weeks on a beachfront property in exchange for four hours of raking a week.

‘Jed was plodding around with the girls running naked in this huge private block right on the beach, just raking leaves, you know. We were like, wow, we can make our travel budget last for a really long time.’

Marthe says they have everything they need in the bus. The girls, Ellida and Embla, have one drawer each for their clothes and one little chest that Jed made that stores their toys.

‘We have warm, cosy beds to fall asleep in every night. We have a bath for our kids, we have a shower with warm water. We have a full kitchen. We have a full-size fridge, we have a freezer. We haven’t compromised on any of the comforts, because we knew we wanted to do this for many years.

‘It’s the best decision we’ve ever made. There is not one single night that I go to bed without saying to Jed, “How amazing is our life?” We get to go to bed together every night, we get to wake up together every morning, we get to watch our girls grow by the minute and they get to have their parents around, which is like an unfathomable luxury these days. I feel really grounded and really strong as a family. I know that whatever happens we have our home.’ n Words Annabelle Hickson Photography Louise Beaumont 67

Words and photograph Tess Durack

TWO IN A TENT

Flashy caravans are nice, but for six months travelling through the outback, Tess Durack and her young son didn’t want anything more than their old Toyota and their little tent. Most of the time.

Grady races across the stony ground as the tent bounds and billows away on the wind. ‘Get it, get it!’ I yell, and he makes a lunge, crash tackling it to the ground just before it scoots across the muddy water of a small dam. He’s only eight, but the tent is light enough for him to hold above his head triumphantly as the wind threatens to take both of them up, up into the air: my small boy and our tent.

It’s a flimsy thing, really. Just three walls of netting and a zip-up ‘door’ with a small net ‘window’ you can open and close. It’s held upright by two sets of poles. If we put up the fly, there’s more poles and a bunch of pegs to push or hammer into the earth. But unless rain threatens, we rarely use the fly. It blocks the breeze. And the stars.

In still weather we can put it up in about four minutes flat, my son and I a well-oiled machine.

‘Hold the pole.’ ‘Got it mum.’ ‘Hooks on.’ ‘Yep, done.’ ‘Tie the top.’ ‘Righto.’ All set. When it’s windy, he climbs inside to hold it down in lieu of pegs while I get our sleeping gear. That evening next to the dam, it got away from us, an unexpected gust sweeping it up like a stray balloon.

According to the label it’s a four-man tent, but they’d have to be pretty small men. It fits my son and me snugly, along with the battery-powered fan to get us through the nights when it’s still 37°C at midnight. Add a bottle of water, my book, his comic, a small torch, and we are set for each night.

Mosquitos are an ever-present enemy and keeping them out of the tent requires vigilance.

We’ve mastered the quick entry. Standing at the zipped door, feet on top of our shoes, I count down, ‘Three, two, one ... go!’ I unzip it fast. My son

favours a dramatic leap while I go for an inelegant commando roll, then whip around to zip it back up.

Sometimes other things get in. One morning an enormous centipede swirls out from under my sleeping mat. Stick insects are regular visitors, and crickets, too.

Thankfully, it keeps other things at bay. One night, camped outside of Katherine in the Northern Territory, the storms circle us as we lie panting in the heat. I’m reading, my arm propped up against the netting on the side of the tent when a huge cane toad jumps up onto it. I feel its awful wetness on my skin through the netting and screech. We watch appalled as it slides slowly down the side of the tent and plops back into the wet grass.

At Umagico on the tip of Cape York, a local camp dog adopts us. In the evening she rests against the side of the tent until it collapses in and she can sleep beside us. During the night she gets up from time to time to snarl away other dogs. The tent wall springs back until she returns from her prowling and leans her warm weight against it.

My son nudges me awake early one morning at Lorella Springs (in the Northern Territory). I look up sleepily to see a young wallaby about a metre from the tent. His mum is further back, watching cautiously. My son and the joey gaze at each other before it’s beckoned away, back into the bush.

At Mataranka, south of Katherine, we float down the springs with a family of five who invite us back to their enormous campervan for dinner. ‘Where’s your rig?’ asks the dad. ‘Down there,’ I point.

‘What? In the unpowereds?’ he asks, astonished.

‘That’s one way to do it.’ >

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ACCORDING TO THE LABEL IT’S A FOUR-MAN TENT, BUT THEY’D HAVE TO BE PRETTY SMALL MEN. IT FITS MY SON AND ME SNUGLY. Their campervan hums and glows cosily as they heat up some pies for us in the microwave and pop the telly on for the kids. My son stares, wide-eyed, at the bunk beds, the huge fridge. But he is ever loyal. ‘I prefer our tent,’ he says when the kids question him. He steals a backward look though, as we stroll through the evening down the path to the ‘unpowereds’. We’ve forgotten to bring a torch and peer through the rising blackness for our own little home of ancient Toyota, card table, camp chairs and tent.

Some nights it feels almost unbearably claustrophobic. The relentless heat, the shrill wall of insect song, the stillness, the moon blazing through the tent like a spotlight. ‘Why are we doing this?’ I occasionally ask myself as other campers emerge fresh into the day from the air-conditioned comfort of their caravans.

The tent netting starts to get small holes in it.

From embers? Insects? Being rolled up on stony ground? I get out the duct tape and cut a dozen pieces. My son stands outside the tent and I sit inside. We stick the pieces of tape together over the holes, our palms pressed together. Every few weeks we add a few more squares of tape to our increasingly mosaiced tent.

On windy nights I worry about falling branches.

Sometimes I adjust the car’s position three or four times before I’m satisfied that if a casuarina tree goes over, the car will break its fall before it hits the tent. There’s a lot to worry about. Water and fuel supplies. The state of the car. The heat. That snake I spotted on the edge of camp earlier in the evening.

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But in the tent, we feel safe, peaceful. After even the longest, dustiest days, it’s a sanctuary; more than the sum of its modest parts.

One night on the Tanami Track in the Kimberleys, after changing a blown tyre in forty-degree heat, we camp beside the dusty, deserted road where the tyre forced our stop. There’s a small clearing in the spinifex, just big enough to pitch the tent. A gentle breeze comes up as the sun sets peachy gold across the desert. We wash the dust from our skin with water from the billy and eat avocado on crackers, sliced pepperoni and chopped apple.

Then we fall into the tent exhausted. The desert night cools fast. No need for the fan.

The bush pulses up against the fine membrane of our tent. Sometimes gently, sometimes with blustering force. From our tent we watch for shooting stars and shine our torches to catch the eyes of possums and, one night in the rainforest, a cuscus. We feel but never see the swoop of a silent owl flying by in the dark. In the mornings we wake to birds. Some days it’s a few sweet coos from peaceful doves and spinifex pigeons or the pretty warble of magpies. On other days it’s a riot of squawks and screeching from budgies, lorikeets and corellas. We open our eyes to dawns pink and orange, to lightning and gathering clouds, to the clearest of blue skies. Around us are the traces of the night’s activities: tiny tracks in the sand or the dust made by the smallest of marsupial paws and tails. We make our own tracks as we break camp, our tent leaving just the faintest shadow of a square in the dirt. n

DAME ELISABETH MURDOCH Married at 19 to her media mogul husband, petite Elisabeth Greene was fated to become the formidable matriarch of a powerful dynasty. But to the end of her long life, her true loves were her family, her garden and her charitable work.

Words Mark McGinness Photography Simon Griffiths

We have been graced with fewer than 70 Dames in our country’s history. In the course of a century we have honoured legends like Flora Reid and Florence Bligh, Nellie Melba and Mabel Brookes, Mary Gilmore and Mary Durack. And Elisabeth Murdoch. A Dame for half a century, she was among the longest-lived DBEs in the Empire’s history—only outrun by Olivia de Havilland and Elizabeth May Couchman (a co-founder of the Australian Liberal Party, who lived to be 106).

She survived her beloved husband, Sir Keith, by six decades and lived to see her son and grandsons build upon her husband’s legacy. She was quoted as saying, ‘I can’t possibly die. I want to see what Rupert is going to do next.’ In her own right, she left the most remarkable and sustained commitment to philanthropy, said to donate to 110 charities annually.

Another significant strand of her life, and one that brought her joy, was the garden she created at Cruden Farm, on the Mornington Peninsula, her home for 80 years.

Born four months before Errol Flynn and six months before the death of Mary MacKillop, she was the third and youngest daughter of a wool broker, Rupert Greene, a reckless Anglo–Irish charmer, whom they all loved but whose gambling regularly forced the family to let their Toorak home, Pemberley. Like the Austenian owner of Pemberley, Mrs Greene—Marie Grace de Lancey Forth—was proud of her descent; in her case, from a court chamberlain to King George III and an aide-de-camp to Sir George Arthur in Hobart; she was an intelligent, serene and gritty beauty without whom, Elisabeth’s elder sister Sylvia said, ‘we would have lived behind the privet hedge at Flemington’.

Some enterprising and influential friends organised Rupert’s appointment as the official starter for the racing clubs, a position which forbade him from betting and reduced, but did not eradicate, financial crises throughout his daughters’ childhoods. It surely influenced a sense of thrift in their own lives.

At 14, after being educated by a number of governesses, Elisabeth was sent to board at Clyde School, near Mount Macedon, where she thrived, especially in sport. Her godfather John Riddoch, an old family friend, paid the fees.

Keith Murdoch, 42-year-old Melbourne Herald editor and powerbroker, had sought out 19-year-old Elisabeth, not long out of school. He’d seen her photo in Table Talk, an >

Above Elisabeth found architect Harold Desbrowe Annear’s renovations to the Cruden Farm house ostentatious, and set about ‘burying it in the garden’. She always preferred to use a side entrance.

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illustrated society magazine, and told the hostess of a dance that he would only attend if Miss Greene were there; they met, but did not dance. The next day he asked her to Sorrento. To her family’s fury, she accepted. Their engagement provoked a storm: in a peculiar turn, Elisabeth’s godfather demanded, and had returned, all the gifts he had given to the Greene girls. Keith’s old friend Dame Nellie Melba was particularly put out; but her bullying went largely unnoticed by the happy young bride. On 6th June 1928, they were married by Keith’s father, Reverend Patrick Murdoch, at the Scots’ Church.

Nineteen-year-old Elisabeth accompanied her worldly, much-sought-after fiancé to a farm near Langwarrin, just behind seaside Frankston, south-east of Melbourne. Keith Murdoch renamed it Cruden Farm after his grandfather’s Free Church parish in northeast Scotland. They saw a pleasant, undistinguished cottage and a rudimentary garden and were taken by undulating paddocks and surrounding bush.

After they wed, Keith presented Cruden to Elisabeth as a wedding present. He took command and, when she rejected an elaborate Italianate garden plan, he chose young garden writer Edna Walling to design the front garden. Mrs Murdoch was dismayed at not being consulted, so what might have been an impressive partnership between owner and designer never took root, although the essence of Miss Walling’s plan was accepted, adopted and, as the decades rolled on, adapted by its owner.

While Miss Walling’s stone walls are a valued legacy, the most striking feature of the design is a lemon-scented eucalypt–lined drive planted by both Murdochs and their farm manager in 1930. Much of the garden was destroyed by a bushfire in 1944, but the gums survived and today 130 of them grace the entrance to what is now one of the country’s most celebrated gardens. It must be unique to find a garden that has been nurtured and shaped, lived in and shared by the same adult for more than 80 years.

It began as a weekend escape for Keith Murdoch but became his family’s home and the focus of his wife’s life. During the Depression they employed men to build stables and outbuildings. A few years later Keith arrived home in a second-hand Rolls Royce; Elisabeth ordered him to return it the following day. In 1933 Keith was knighted and his wife became Lady Murdoch at the age of 24. In the same year Sir Keith bought the imposing Heathfield in Toorak, but rural Cruden remained core. It was here too, and at

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historic Wantabadgery on the Murrumbidgee, that young Rupert spent his childhood, enjoying the freedom of the horse trails and enduring the firm hand of his mother. While their father was indulgent, their mother was strict, but she was consistent and constant.

Elisabeth recalled ‘applying a slipper’ to Rupert at Heathfield after he was rude to his governess. ‘I would not allow them to be rude, you know ... that was a great sin. So now when he’s really teasing me in front of people he says, “Of course, my mother beat me”.’

She did not always agree with her adult children’s choices and told them so. She was appalled when Rupert bought News of the World and she protested to him over The Sun’s treatment of the Royal Family. Rupert ‘was a good son and good father’, she would say.

All that mattered to her was that her children were caring and useful citizens.

In 1952 Sir Keith died in his sleep at the farm. A widow at 43, Elisabeth decided to plant a copper beech in her husband’s memory. This tree was intended to anchor the redesigned borders, and at the same time the farm itself became the mainstay of her life.

A young gardener, Michael Morrison, came to Cruden in 1971. While farming continued, the garden grew; its beauty and sweep almost in defiance of the urban sprawl that now surrounds it. Since the early eighties the public has come to share the garden.

After her husband’s death, Elisabeth threw herself into humanitarian work, particularly for Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital: ‘I felt obliged to do all I could to justify my existence. Giving money is very easy, but you’ve got to be involved,’ she would say.

In 1963, she became Dame Elisabeth, but assumed none of the airs of a grand dame.

She was gregarious and social but not Social in the sense that Lady Lloyd Jones and others were. Her feet remained firmly planted and her hands in the soil at Cruden. There was also an ‘I FELT OBLIGED TO DO ALL abiding frugality, born perhaps of her father’s ruinous spending and a Presbyterian horror of I COULD TO JUSTIFY MY ostentation. Elisabeth had an almost unworldly EXISTENCE. GIVING MONEY unpretentiousness and took no real interest in IS VERY EASY; BUT YOU’VE clothes or fashion. She spent money on her garden rather than herself, but not at the GOT TO BE INVOLVED.’ expense of her philanthropy. For eight decades she refused heating in the house, she resisted hairdressers, and one year eschewed a trip abroad so she could install a pool in the garden.

In 1968, she was invited to be the first woman appointed as a trustee of the new National Gallery of Victoria—a project that had been championed by Sir Keith. Among her charitable works, she helped her daughter Janet establish Taralye, an oral language centre for deaf children, and became a driving force in the establishment of the McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery. In the 1970s, when she learned that Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s cabinet considered her a possible candidate for governor-general, she dismissed the idea as absurd. In the eighties, she and her family helped establish the Murdoch Institute for Research into Birth Defects (now the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute).

In 2005 she was named Victorian of the Year. In 2009 she was present at the opening of Melbourne Recital Centre’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.

Disarmingly modest with a ready laugh, Dame Elisabeth would close her eyes while she spoke, opening them wide as she finished, fixing her blue gaze on her interlocutor.

She was selfless, optimistic and tolerant, believing in the power of good, thinking the best of people. And yet this daughter and wife of church-going folk, did not believe in a personal God. She told Andrew Denton (when she was 99), ‘I believe that somehow there is a higher spirit that I don’t quite know how to define, but I don’t believe that, you know, when we die we go to heaven or anything like that.’

Dame Elisabeth Murdoch died on 5th December 2012, in her sleep in Melbourne, Victoria, at the age of 103. n Opposite page Lemon-scented eucalypts line the drive at Cruden Farm, having survived fire and drought. As yet they have not lived as long as the woman who planted them in 1930.

architecture

EUGOWRA HOUSE If you’re reading this publication, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here if I presume you’ve had a few Australian farmhouse fantasies in your time. There’s an enduring romance to the idea of the Australian homestead and, from what I can see, the lure has never been more appealing.

Being a kid of the bush suburbs I’ll never forget my first visit to a relative’s sheep farm in Western Victoria. They were hard-working folks who had roast lamb for lunch every day and talked out the sides of their mouths with a long slow drawl.

The house sat on the top of the hill and at night they would sit on the wraparound verandah and recount the story of my city-slicker grandfather accidentally leaving the gate open and the flock making their way halfway to town. It was a story they never let him forget— it’s made me paranoid about closing gates to this day.

And then there was their mound of tea leaves. Decades of emptying the teapot behind the hydrangeas had created a two-foot high pyramid. Etched in my brain is my great aunt slinging the leaves over the bushes and then waddling back into the kitchen, an apron around her waist, and absentmindedly farting like a Clydesdale jettisoning lunch.

A farmhouse is about context and I romanticise their

connection to the Australian landscape. I don’t need pots of lavender and a French cane basked stacked with designer gumboots. I want to sit on rickety wooden boards, nurse a beer, watch the sun go down through the gums and the dappled light touch the orangey hue of Australian clay.

An Australian farmhouse that moved me deeply came surprisingly out of the 1980s rather than the 1880s, but the essence of its success certainly comes from an earlier time.

I was taking a trip to Orange in central western New South Wales to film an interview with John Andrews, a retired architect who is respected internationally for commercial architecture. I was fascinated by how a young man who grew up in an outer suburban house in Sydney ended up studying architecture at Harvard and designing a slew of acclaimed buildings across North America, including the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. I was curating an exhibition of his work and made the journey out to make a small film with him.

Now in his eighties, John is confined to a wheelchair but still possesses that straight-talking knockabout Aussie charm that made him so successful. When I asked him why he wanted to be an architect he dryly replied, ‘Because they said I couldn’t fucking do it!’

It was a priceless response and I quickly came up with a name for the exhibition—The Practical Outsider—which summed up his pragmatic, no-nonsense and very Australian take on architecture with a nod to his success as a foreigner in North America.

In the mid 1970s, John returned from Canada and purchased a farm at Eugowra, an hour west of Orange.

Determined to get his sons to have a relationship with what he calls ‘the real Australia’, their weekends were spent rounding up sheep, cutting up wood and smashing themselves up on motorbikes. In 1980 John decided to add to the property with his modernist take on an Australian farmhouse.

He designed the whole house from steel, which was quickly assembled on site and clad with corrugated iron.

Practicality made sustainably a no-brainer for John and he situated the house in a position with window openings designed to capture the breeze from any direction. He also added what he called the energy tower on the roof that boasted a water tank and a solar water-heater.

When I’d gone to visit John— who no longer lived in the Eugowra house—we’d also organised to go and visit the house and its new owners. John hadn’t been back for 15 years and had originally shown little

Words Tim Ross Photographs David Moore/Powerhouse Museum Collection: gift of John Andrews, 2009.

Opposite page This modernist farmhouse has a fairly traditional exterior appearance (apart from the ‘energy tower’ on the roof), but inside it is anchored in the twentieth century by a 360 degree fireplace that dominates the room.

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interest. As we were leaving, he suddenly changed his mind and before we knew it, he’d pulled himself out of his wheelchair and into the front seat and was quickly giving directions.

The return was one of mixed emotions; a concern that the house had been changed and memories of his herd of deer that had been cruelly poisoned.

Those concerns quickly disappeared as we approached the house down the long and winding driveway, with the sound of tyres on gravel welcoming him home.

The house was magnificent, initially presenting as a typical homestead with a wide, welcoming verandah, but

on closer inspection the real magic of the house became apparent. The steel formwork pulls the house into the twentieth century and delivers a very sophisticated piece of architecture. The house is anchored around a large lounge and dining room, divided by a 360 degree fireplace that dominates the room. The bedrooms are placed around the sides; the real conversation starter is a circular transparent shower that sits out from the main bedroom and gives 180 degree views in and out of the wash space. Certainly not a place for a wallflower.

John soon found himself effortlessly talking to the new

owners, their respect well and truly evident, and he felt that his old family home was safe in their hands.

I walked around and fantasised about living in the house. If it had been on a smaller parcel of land, didn’t have three other houses on site and was remotely affordable, I would have moved in and started a pile of tea-leaves in a heartbeat. n Tim’s documentary Designing a Legacy is on ABC iview.

HOME FREE

Sharing love and laughter around the kitchen table is a privilege we can sometimes take for granted in a happy home.

Laura McConnell knows that sometimes all is not as it seems.

I grew up sitting around the kitchen table in a fundamentalist Christian family, with a tightly controlled, narrow view of ‘the world’ that existed outside our home.

My home now is a place of healing, of growth and of knowledge. I run an online space for women who are leaving, or who have recently left, the group known as The Truth.

I left this group as a naive 19 year old and found myself alone in a city and world I knew nothing about. I spent 20 years working out how to ‘fit’, how to dress, how to speak, how to get an education. I had to learn how to wear jeans, cut my hair, wear jewellery and make-up. My kitchen table is now a place to support other women on their journey out of fundamentalist Christian groups.

I was raised as a fourth generation Truth member, on farms in far western New South Wales in a triangle between Nyngan, Bourke and Brewarrina. Many of the community I grew up in live on rural and remote properties where they can keep to themselves, within their families and communities, without drawing too much attention to their beliefs and way of life. You might have seen them at the supermarket or in your primary schools. They are identifiable as the women who wear long dresses, never cut their hair, never wear make-up or jewellery, have no TV or radio. The community is seen mostly as ‘harmless’ Christians, who keep to themselves. Fundamentalists like The Truth—and there are a few different groups, such as the Brethren and Jehovah’s Witnesses—rarely discuss their beliefs or way of life.

They may appear harmless, but the harm occurring in these communities and in our homes is real. Women in my family have experienced sexual grooming and abuse; they often leave school and marry young and have no concept of the world outside their Bibles and community. We are naive. We believe those outside our religion to be ‘worldly’ and to be headed to a fiery end in hell, while we are the only ones who will be saved. The Truth, in particular, believes in a strict conservative strain of Christianity and a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Women have little power or autonomy. Family groups tend to congregate together in rural communities, where they can worship together in family homes. Often large families are sustained financially by a multigenerational family farm. The structure results in women having little or no financial independence. With inadequate education, no skills—outside of sewing dresses—it’s easy for these women to be trapped in abusive and coercive families. Many women do not have access to friends or colleagues or know anyone outside our community. Thus women’s lives can be devastatingly lonely and isolating.

I was raised in this remote community, surrounded by first, second and third cousins. I had countless aunts and uncles, and wonderful hardworking grandparents who ran the farms with my parents. The first eight years of my life were blissful: I was unaware that I was different. It wasn’t until I was in Year Three at a tiny school on the road between Nyngan and Bourke, Coolabah Public

School (now closed)—where I was one of just five kids in my class— that I realised that other kids didn’t live like us. I had no idea that other children had TVs and radios; that other girls my age could wear trousers and cut their hair.

For me, from the age of eight to 17, the years were lonely and tumultuous. I wanted a different life to the women around me. I loved our farm; I loved my large family; however, I never quite felt that I fitted in. I was active and loved running, swimming and being with my father on the farm.

None of those things are acceptable for a Truth girl. Truth women stay home: they keep house, they sew dresses. I flashed my knickers too many times, I loved swimming, I laughed too loudly and I had a big imagination. I did not fit in. I still wonder if I’d have made it inside The Truth if I’d been a boy.

But I was never going to make it as a girl.

Leaving a fundamentalist group like The Truth is difficult: when you leave you are excommunicated, shunned and cut off from your community and family. My journey out started when I was 14 and decided that I’d like to finish high school. Two of my older cousins had recently left school and married.

I did not feel comfortable making that decision. So my first step was to finish school. That set me apart from others in our community, and then I decided, ‘If they think I’m weird for finishing school, maybe I’ll go to university like the other kids.’

It was leaving home to go to university that finally led me out of The Truth and lost me my place in our family and community. I was shunned. I had relatives who would cross the street to avoid me.

I plunged for years into a deep depression, which I now realise was PTSD: the after-effects of losing my whole identity. I was no longer welcome in the community I had loved.

The loss of family, connection to my community, land and identity is what drives me to run The Kitchen Table and to offer advice to other women leaving, or contemplating leaving, The Truth. I want other women to leave with power: to leave with money, identity and a place in the local community.

I want them to be able to stay on the land they love, to raise their children in rural communities and not be shunned and shamed out of town.

My love of rural Australia runs deep, and I know farm life can be a romantic, beautiful experience. I miss the beautiful sunsets, the red sand, and the dry heat of the far west. But the reality for women in my community is that rural life is a lonely, isolating and sometimes abusive life. Beyond the romance is sometimes financial abuse, coercive control and religious shaming; and, because of the rural isolation, women in my community do not have the luxury of a support structure that urban women can access.

So when you gather at your kitchen table, think of the women who gather at mine. The women who leave family farms with nothing, who’ve never had the freedom to dress the way they choose or pursue an education. Think of the women who have experienced sexual abuse, grooming and gaslighting. I have a duty to speak up for them. n lauramcconnell.com.au. If this article raises concerns for you or a loved one, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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chapter 03

• carving a creative life with family • two artists and one kitchen table • the 90-second commute • art making sense of domestic life • art scene • bookshelf • a guide to raising teenagers • our domestic flora and fauna

CARVING A LIFE

Kay Norton-Knight does not let things get in the way.

When Kay Norton-Knight needed a job, after moving to a run-down pisé farmhouse called Rosby near the New South Wales wine town of Mudgee with her husband Gerry and their two young daughters, she invented one.

She got hold of a truck, some fabric offcuts and set up shop as a travelling saleswoman, flinging open her truck doors to sell affordable material to the housewives of western New South Wales.

Kay grew her business into a bricks-and-mortar chain called Material World and within eight years she had 15 shops throughout regional New South Wales and Sydney. That could be the story, right there. With a cameo from the lawyer who would buy fabric from Kay just to support her—‘Local mates are so loyal,’ says Kay. ‘He probably took it back to his office and chucked it out, who knows?’—and then there’d be stories from Kay’s four daughters (she and Gerry had two more after moving to Rosby) about how Kay would pick them up from boarding school in a van filled to the brim with rolls of fabric, which they would have to somehow mould themselves around for the trip home, suitcases on their laps.

But during this time, Kay had also enrolled in a fine arts

course in Sydney, a four-hour drive from her Mudgee home.

This decision sent her down another track with a whole other story, which started like this: every Monday morning, while Gerry was sleeping, Kay would head off to Sydney before dawn and arrive at the Meadowbank TAFE classroom ready for the 9am start, buzzing with energy for the two days of art classes ahead. (Can I just point out that I have friends in Sydney who don’t like to cross the Harbour Bridge for a dinner out?) Kay enjoyed the practicality of sculpture and chose to focus on that, juggling her fabric business, raising four daughters and running the household in tandem with her art studies.

It took Kay 10 years to finish the course, because she was a part-time student, but also because she kept losing her driving licence. Opportunities for speeding, with all the driving she was doing for art school and her shops, were many. During these periods of suspension, Kay would jump on a bicycle to cover the 10 kilometres from Rosby into town to her Mudgee shop. She’d cycle back to meet her daughters at the bus stop after school. Kay said it was ‘the horror of all horrors’ for her daughters, who would sink into the seats of the school bus as

they passed their mother and her pushbike on the road.

Kay eventually reached the end of the course. As part of the finishing requirements, she and her classmates had to put on an exhibition and curate the class’s artworks. ‘We couldn’t find anywhere in Sydney to stage it,’ said Kay. ‘And I said, jokingly, sort of, “I live at Rosby in Mudgee, you can have it at my place”, thinking they wouldn’t even contemplate doing that.’ But they did. Kay invited a few other sculptors in the region to join them and what had begun as a TAFE assignment quickly turned into a successful exhibition of 80 works and 500 visitors.

Ten years on, Sculptures in the Garden is one of the largest sculpture exhibitions in regional Australia. It offers over $50,000 in prize money; attracts more than 3000 visitors each year; has exhibited more than 2000 sculptures; and has raised nearly $200,000 for Guide Dogs NSW/ACT. With sale commissions, it has funded a public sculpture walk in Mudgee’s Lawson Park. The walk, jointly funded by the local council, leads to what will be the new Mudgee regional art gallery, slated to open this year.

But beyond the numbers, this event is the reason women >

Words Annabelle Hickson Photography Pip Farquharson Opposite page Wearing gloves to protect her hands from the twigs and a hat to shade her face from the sun, Kay wrestles with vines to form a sculpture in the garden at Rosby.

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Clockwise from above The homestead at Rosby; a horse sculpture made by local schoolchildren under Kay’s supervision as part of a Watershed Landcare program called Greenday; Kay’s kitchen; fresh produce is just one of the attractions, as are sumptuous baked goods; Kay Norton-Knight and her family in the garden. From left: George, nine, Kay, Annabelle, five, Gerry, Jimmy, eight, Amber and Cameron; the dogs are Dash and Pepper.

such as sisters Andrena Smith and Rochelle McKillop—who’ve endured almost 10 years of drought on their western properties—are now sculptors, transforming old barbed wire into art. They’ve exhibited at Sculptures in the Garden every year. It’s the reason Rosby is now an arts workshop venue, connecting printmaking, painting and welding teachers with those who want to learn (and who want to eat Kay’s famous stew and drink Gerry’s wine). And it is the reason Kay’s daughter Amber moved back to Mudgee with her own young family. In chasing her own dreams, Kay has created opportunities for many others.

Today Amber Anderson is sitting next to Kay at a wooden table in the green kitchen of the Rosby farmhouse where she grew up. They both have a steaming cup of tea in front of them and the exposed mudbrick walls of the Rosby house behind.

They look into the computer to talk to me, Amber steering her mother back to my questions after Kay goes off piste.

Kay’s husband Gerry, an accountant-turned-vigneron, and Amber’s Cameron, an architect who now runs his regional practice from Mudgee, are there too, but out of frame.

When I ask them what it’s like to work together, as mother and daughter, they both laugh.

‘Mum is a fiercely independent woman,’ says Amber. ‘She’s definitely softened now she’s a grandmother.’ Kay looks into the computer with a deadpan shrug and then laughs, at herself, I think. In 2010 Amber returned to Mudgee with her then boyfriend Cameron for six months to help her parents

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fix up a guesthouse. They had no intention of leaving their Melbourne life and careers behind. Eleven years on, a marriage and three children later, they are still there.

‘There was a period when I didn’t know how it was going to go,’ said Amber about her move back home. ‘I was pregnant.

Cameron was away working in Sydney. I was living with my parents. I didn’t know how I was going to fit into this town and how I was going to be anyone other than Kay Norton-Knight’s daughter. It was a weird time.’

But Amber eventually found her way, becoming a crucial

‘I THINK PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO REALISE WHAT THEY’VE BEEN MISSING OUT ON’ member of the Rosby team, while Cameron established his own architecture firm in town.

‘Now I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else. Having Mum and Dad be so much a part of my children’s upbringing and this property being loved and enjoyed by them as much as it was by me and my sisters, it’s pretty special.’

While Kay is the face of Sculptures in the Garden—she’s got the contacts with the artists and the big ideas—Amber, who had a career in film and TV production, handles the back end and makes these big ideas happen. Together, with the support of Gerry and Cameron and a dedicated committee and volunteers, they make a

formidable team. As well as Sculptures in the Garden and the residential workshops, they have recently built a permanent gallery and cellar door at Rosby, which will host a series of exhibitions throughout the year.

‘To Mum and Dad’s credit, they are very open to our suggestions. We all respect what each other brings to the table. We still have our barneys and disagree immensely, but we have learned over the past 11 years exactly what each other’s skills are.’

The art workshops started as a way to for locals to learn skills, but last year it was mainly people from the city and the coast who booked out all the classes and the guesthouse too.

‘I think people are beginning to realise what they’ve been missing out on and what we can offer them,’ says Kay. Amber speaks of the changing culture in towns like Mudgee and how she sees more people her age moving there. ‘And everyone who comes brings something with them— knowledge, experience, style, the ability to make great coffee.’

She also thinks regional towns are good places to experiment with new businesses.

‘You can start in your garage or garden with very little outlay or pressure, unlike in the capital cities. That’s how all our Rosby businesses have started. We can do this ourselves, we say, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world, we just move on.’ n Sculptures in the Garden runs from Saturday 9th to Sunday 24th October 2021. Visit sculpturesinthegarden.com.au or @sculpturesinthegarden for more information.

creating a gem During the pandemic, Greg and Julia Stirling retreated into a handmade world, keeping busy until the family could gather again at last.

Words Julia Stirling Photography Charlie Kinross

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By Julia Stirling

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A pandemic will see you do unusual things. In my case, I dug out the leaves of our 10 foot cherry extension table that Greg made more than 20 years ago and slotted them in, bringing the table to full extension. It seems ridiculous to see the two of us sitting in the kitchen for lunch at such a large table. Usually we only ever extend the table for family celebrations where the 13 of us can sit: children, partners and grandchildren all together.

However, there it sits, waiting for our family to return, acting as a kind of beacon helping me through the day; to feel connected to our family who are cut off from us with closed borders around Melbourne and New South Wales.

My view from our cherry table is of a blue sky, pale green olive trees set to a backdrop of black wattle and the bush beyond. The crab apples at the foreground are laden with fruit that the parrots are eating. And our resident magpies graze close to the house with their offspring. The honeyeaters, wrens, firetails and pardalotes dart between the shrubs as they go about their business.

The land we live on is tough clay soil—the topsoil pillaged during the 1850s gold rush in central Victoria. We’ve slowly nurtured it back to life: mulched it with sawdust, newspapers and ground covers, shrubs, fruit trees and natives; and we’ve watched the wildlife proliferate. When we first went into lockdown and businesses closed and people were ordered to work from home, we felt grateful that working from home was the norm for us. > Opposite page Windsor chairs are just one example of the simple, made-with-love furniture that Greg Stirling crafts in his workshop.

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Greg has always had a home-based workshop where he crafts his handmade furniture. He decided more than 40 years ago to buck the family trend of a career in engineering and forge his own path. It was very much a leap of faith. Growing up in a tough industrialised western suburb of Melbourne saw him yearning for a different way of living.

Leaving home at the tender age of 16, he worked around Australia before he had a chance meeting in Alice Springs with master craftsman Dickie Blackman, who became his mentor, on and off, over 15 years. Blackman was raised on a Quaker farm in the English Midlands and he had a prodigious background in craft: woodworking, blacksmithing, leatherwork and other skills related to the maintenance of a nineteenth century farm.

Greg travelled to Britain where he found himself restoring Iris Murdoch’s roof on bitterly cold winter days, or weeding around devas in spiritualist Maud Kennedy’s garden. When he ran out of money, Maud advised him to go to Ireland because ‘they will look after you’. And so they did.

For board and food, Greg spent nine months living with musician Peadar Ó Riada and his Irish-speaking family in County Cork: building Peadar a shed for his beekeeping, and helping a handful of local farmers as the need arose.

He was enchanted by the landscape and the small farming community that was rich in music, language, poetry and history: > Julia’s floral still-life paintings adorn the walls of the dining room, where Greg’s cherry wood table is at full extension, waiting for the family to gather.

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Clockwise from above Julia sits in one of Greg’s handcrafted chairs as she works on a painting. She says she feels held and protected by his craft; at the front of the house, built by their son Sean when he was just 21, firescreens are ready for an emergency; Greg and Julia stroll towards Greg’s workshop.

the contrast to the tough industrial suburb he’d grown up in couldn’t be underestimated. It was the magic of this experience that consolidated his desire to follow a career in craft.

Greg’s most recent chair—based on an eighteenth century West Country style—has me convinced he is a chair whisperer, a nest-builder of sorts. When I sat in the chair I felt myself held.

Protected even.

The West Country craftsmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a strong vernacular quality in their chairs. The rustic quality speaks to the characters who made them. Their lack of concern for uniformity is something that resonates with Greg’s own work practice. Greg uses hand tools for the majority of time, as opposed to sophisticated machinery. Each piece is handmade.

It’s not a production line; it’s one item at a time.

We both value the creative journey, the privilege that comes with creating whether that be making chairs, painting, writing or film making. The process acts as a mirror. It connects you to a deeper part of yourself. Every bit of frustration and difficulty can be seen and felt, but the search for beauty leads you deeper in, and therefore shines brighter outwards.

I love the regularity and rhythm of our lives. Meeting for lunch at the kitchen table, sometimes we hardly need to speak, other times we discuss the meaning of our lives—who we are both individually and together—and the importance of treading gently on this earth.

Other times it’s just talking about business.

Like the landscape itself, crafting furniture has shaped our lives—our daily rhythms, the choices we make—right down to the wrinkles on our foreheads.

Encouraging one another has been key. Greg has always supported my need to find my own creative voice too. Similar to Greg, I left home at 15 to pursue my own dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Now I paint. It is the closest thing to dance for me.

It is a celebration: being still enough to see and transform the moment acts like a meditation. It’s incredibly nurturing.

I manage our business as well. The rise of the internet and social media has been hugely liberating, especially for a country-based business. It means our reach is Australia-wide, and we can connect more directly with clients. Recently I took online classes in filmmaking so as to give glimpses into Greg’s work practices, and unexpectedly fell in love with the process.

Xanthe Berkeley’s film-making classes reminded me of the need to play, to accept myself where I am and make the film anyway; it doesn’t need to be perfect. As the eighteenth and nineteenth century craftsmen of the West Country show us, a lack of concern for uniformity and perfection can lead you to creating a gem. n gregstirlingfurniture.com; @gregstirlingfurniture; @julia _stirling

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EARTHBOUND

Interested in how colour and texture can be created using natural materials, Lucy Hersey works in earth pigments and plant inks foraged locally to her South Gippsland home.

Words Lisa Marie Corso Photograph Nicky Cawood

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You can learn a lot about a person on a phone call: it’s the sound of their voice, the rising pitch when delivering a punchline, the way they navigate the silence between sentences. People are more forthcoming over the phone, even when it’s two strangers speaking for the first time, as was the case for artist Lucy Hersey and myself.

Lucy is a really good talker. She’s also a really good painter. Most of her life she’s been painting, beside her other commitments, but at the beginning of this year she took the plunge to make it her fulltime day job. It’s hard to paint on the side when painting is at the core of everything you do.

‘It’s just something I can’t not do: my brain sees things I can paint and gets excited and I can’t turn this feeling off,’ says Lucy.

Painting in her backyard studio on her property in Loch, a town in South Gippsland, Victoria, Lucy’s domestic and creative lives meld together the same way a splash of milk hits a cup of tea: the good way.

If this sounds like things just fell into place, they > The natural world is the source of Lucy’s materials and the inspiration for her paintings, too.

did not. It was the culmination of years of hard work in an academic job while Lucy’s desire to paint simmered beneath the surface.

‘I always loved art and was always making stuff but didn’t really know anyone who was an artist as their job and made money from it,’ explains Lucy.

‘I did well at school but had no idea what I wanted to do, so enrolled into a Bachelor of Arts and Science and thought I would figure it out.’ And she did: ‘I absolutely loved the science and dropped the arts.’

‘I HAD A FEELING THE SEASONS WERE CHANGING AND MY TIME IN ACADEMIA WAS COMING TO AN END.’ She went on to do honours and was asked to work as a research assistant at Monash University’s Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, a job she also loved for nine years. However, during this time her paintbrush was still perfectly poised.

‘I was still painting and giving them away as presents because I had so many at home,’ she says.

Painting proved to be a method of understanding the complexities of life and funnelling her emotions in a way that made sense: on the canvas.

‘There was stuff going on in my life and I was like, “Let’s think about my painting more intentionally,” and it kind of came together in a small body of work where these paintings were all having a conversation.’

Thirteen resulting works became Lucy’s first solo show in 2018.

Lucy kept painting alongside her day job in the lab.

She’d commute 90 minutes to and from work, but still find the time to paint because to her it was essential. She started exhibiting her work in group shows and selling her paintings online. And not even

to her friends; to strangers who shared a bond with Lucy’s compositions of nature, native birds and stilllife botanicals painted in earth pigments that she makes herself. In between all of this, Lucy also became a mother to her son Hugo.

‘I had this feeling the seasons were changing and my time in academia was coming to an end, especially since I was painting more intentionally,’ she says.

‘I wanted to make painting more of a thing in my life, so I sat down with Nathan [her partner] and said, “I think if I put the time I spend commuting and working for someone else into my own art practice, I could probably make some really good work and probably make the same money”.’ And it turned out to be true.

Lucy’s commute diminished from 90 minutes to 90 seconds, as she takes her morning cuppa from the kitchen to her backyard studio. Nathan built and customised her studio from a kit he bought online and together the pair juggle their domestic and work lives, while parenting their toddler Hugo.

Lucy used to paint inside the house, but having a designated space on its periphery has changed the rhythm in which she works. ‘Having long periods of time to sit with a painting is a real treat, because before I was doing a little bit here, a little bit there,’ she explains. ‘There’s also pressure now, which is good, because I know these extended blocks of time usually come along when Hugo is at daycare, someone else is with him or he’s having a nap.’ Hugo has been known to get on the tools himself and a framed artwork hangs above his parents’ bed.

Lucy’s ‘go with the flow’ philosophy has anchored her art practice and domestic life. She knows you can’t rush good things and that sometimes it’s what you discover in between that ends up on the canvas.

She stops. She looks around. She catalogues for later.

She paints. She tells me all this on the phone. Just two strangers, sharing a yarn. n lucyhersey.com; @lucehersey

Opposite page Lucy’s media are earth pigments and plant inks that she seeks nearby and processes in her studio, built for her by her partner Nathan. Her paintings are inspired by the local landscape, birds and plant life.

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artist

CRAIG HANDLEY

EVERYDAY ART From lawns to laundry, Craig Handley makes sense of domestic life through his art.

Looking at Craig Handley’s paintings has an auditory effect on me: in my mind I am hearing a distant lawnmower, a dog barking and a sprinkler clicking. If I close my eyes and imagine his works, a montage of fifties fibro, breeze blocks, swan flowerpots and kangaroos against faded blue skies converges onto the cinematic projector screen of my mind’s eye. And montage might be just the right word. By his own description, Craig sees his work simply as ‘a medley, a collage of all the things I come across while travelling about. They are rearrangements, a hodgepodge of places and objects and light.’

Born and raised in Sydney suburbia, he knows the trope well. But eighteen months ago, Craig > Patternrecognition3 (left) is one of Craig’s recent ‘Backyard’ works, available from Piermarq.

Words Amber Creswell Bell Photography Lean Timms

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CRAIG HAS MAINTAINED A STEADFAST COMPULSION TO EXAMINE AND PAINT THE THINGS HE IS WITNESS TO ON A DAILY BASIS.

Above Craigjumping features the recurring motif of a jumping boy, available at Piermarq; Craig’s studio is in his backyard. Opposite page Working sparingly in oils.

felt the lure of change and ventured south to Berry, a bucolic New South Wales south-coast hinterland town that promotes itself as the ‘town of trees’. It has a distinctly English feel, likely owing to the ubiquitous greenness of it all, the numerous preserved historic buildings, and extensive stands of English oaks, elms and beech trees planted by the local settlers at the end of the last century. It’s a town where one might well have a romantic stay in a bed-and-breakfast and go ‘antiquing’. Despite this, Craig and his wife Christina managed to move into one of the few classic Australian sixties red-brick three-fronters that exist in Berry. The house stands on a modest block with a neatly mowed lawn. ‘People like to say that I moved into one of my paintings,’ says Craig.

Berry poses a stark contrast to his digs prior to the move, when Craig lived and had his studio in the guts of Woolloomooloo, in inner-city Sydney, and he says he is still adjusting to the differences. ‘It’s the quiet that hit me the most initially, the lack of city smells, the night sky, the abundance of bird life ... so many things,’ he reflects. ‘Woolloomooloo was a unique and lively place to be, with a very strong sense of community, but also a lot of heaviness to witness on a daily basis. Makes you very aware of the slippery slope.’ Seeing Berry as a kind of stepping stone, the longer-term plan is to move somewhere more isolated, with a bit of land around them.

Three years shy of sixty, Craig has been working as a full-time artist since 2004. He originally left school and took on a signwriting apprenticeship which later led him into animation—a career that sustained him for decades both here and abroad. ‘I climbed to the level of director, then crashed and burned. Since then, it’s just been painting, painting, painting for almost 20 years.’

Despite his geographical shifts from suburban life and city studios and tree changes, Craig has maintained a steadfast compulsion to examine and paint the things he is witness to on a daily basis. ‘I question constantly: motives and cycles and repetitions and demands and pressures and burdens,’ he considers, ‘the things that are very common to a lot of us, the joys and disappointments and the difficulties. The source material is endless and constantly challenging.’ What Craig masters in his output is the ability to convey it in an entertaining way, with a layer-cake of stories, but it is the composition that is paramount. ‘I try to make that the first point of engagement,’ he says.

Shortlisted as a finalist in notable art prizes more than 80 times in the past decade, Craig works sparingly in oil, producing images that I suggest to him might be considered as ‘surrealist’; he counters that it is probably more accurately described as ‘realist’. ‘I feel because of my time in directing, my

work is very story-based and filmic in its realisation.

It is very much a camera point of view with a set designed specifically for a narrative that, more often than not, involves a cast of players,’ he explains. ‘So perhaps “narrative painting” is a better descriptor.’

Craig’s work appears to be anchored devoutly in the notion of the Australian domestic, and he has tirelessly examined this subject. ‘I find the domestic very difficult but have found a way to navigate it all through painting,’ he offers. ‘Most of my work, if not all of it, draws on the constant toll-taking of the daily grind, from lawns to laundry and all the whatnots.’

He acknowledges that as he is now a bit older, he has an advantage. ‘I am in a good place to be able to paint. My kids are older and establishing themselves in their own ways so that time-heavy, emotion-heavy, toll-taking period is back there in the fog somewhere!’

Now considering himself lucky to be in a position where painting can be his main activity, it’s the staying focused part that Craig finds most challenging, admitting that he is very easily distracted. Attempting to maintain a routine, Craig will paint every day. ‘It doesn’t get any easier though!’ Craig admits. ‘I am also lucky that my studio is now in the backyard ... and that can be a double-edged sword. Have I earned this fortunate position I’m in? Who’s to say?

Everything has its costs I suppose.’ n @craig_handley_painter; @piermarqart

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ART SCENE

with Fiona Bateman @fionabatemanart

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Nicholas Osmond, Moree, New South Wales.

Paul Keating as Stockman I just love Nick Osmond’s paintings. So many people ask, ‘Who did that?’ as they walk past his work in my house and stop to take a better look.

His bold colours and distinct, broad brushwork make his portraits wonderfully identifiable and often give a haunting insight into the subject, whether it be HRH Elizabeth II or Miss Piggy. @nicholasosmond @akbellingergallery

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Anh Nguyen, Thirroul, New South Wales.

Cloudy Summer Day Anh Nguyen captures fleeting moments of domesticity in her home town of Thirroul. ‘My motifs revolve around daily rhythms, human activity and small moments.’ Light is portrayed so beautifully in Anh’s work, allowing us to glimpse into her world at a precise moment in time. @msanhpaints @studiodirect_michaelreid

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Amy Clarke, Eumundi, Queensland.

Moreton View Amy Clarke’s country childhood instilled strong memories and ties to the earth and, she says, while her work may now seem more abstract, the landscape is always there: ‘It is my belief that the directness of a simple childhood and our daily engagement with nature laid the foundations of me being an artist.’ @amyclarkeartist @coolartgallery @walchagallery @studiodirect_michaelreid

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Sam Field, Bream Creek, Tasmania.

The Future Sam Field lives in a dairy farming community at the bottom of the east coast of Tasmania where he creates works that deal with race, identity, masculinity and the landscape. Field is ‘endlessly fascinated by the Australian narrative’, and paints in order to understand his place within it. @samfieldartista @akbellingergallery

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Artworks Nicholas Osmond Paul Keating 2021 65 x 90 cm; Anh Nguyen Cloudy Summer Day 2021 oil on board 30 x 35 cm; Amy Clarke Moreton View 2020 acrylic on canvas 63 x 53 cm; Sam Field The Future 2020 oil on board 110 x 120 cm.

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John Bokor, Thirroul, New South Wales.

Afternoon Rose Just as there is a Yves Klein blue, there should be a John Bokor pink. John captures the fleeting light and daily joy in every breakfast table and cocktail hour. We all want to sit at his table. Bokor has said, ‘It is the shared experience of the human condition that I try to invest in my work and what I admire most in the work of others.’ @johnbokor @kingstreetgallery @edwinacorlette @nicholasthompsongallery

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Mark Nodea, Warmun, Gija Country, Western Australia. Fish Hole ‘I do love my art: it is my life.’ Mark Nodea grew up in Warmun and continues to paint in the way his elders taught him. Nodea spent his childhood at Texas Downs Station where he was taken into the bush and taught Gija law, language and culture.

These beautiful paintings make me feel as if I have been taken up to the clouds and shown Nodea’s beloved Country below. @shortstgallery

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Rachel Doller, Tatura, Victoria.

Swimming Pool Graphic designer and artist Rachel Doller was inspired to paint by the escape she found in swimming during lockdown. ‘My mixed media works are generally created from a bird’s eye view and they feature colours from blow-up floaty things, green grass, crisp light, sharp shadows and blue skies.’ @rachel.doller @dookie_artists_tree

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Clare Purser, Scenic Rim Region, Queensland.

Looking Towards Welcome Bay Purser will head off on a day of plein air painting, to paint this landscape of soaring forested mountains and the lush green valley below. Purser explains, ‘I’m attracted to the changing landscape during the different seasons. The colours can be rich and deep after the summer rain and the shadows are really sharp and hard. Winter brings softer light and hues of ochre and subdued greens.’ @clarepurserstudio @walchagallery @gabba_art @packgallerystudio @purplenoongallery

Artworks John Bokor Afternoon Rose 2020 oil on board 60 x 70 cm; Mark Nodea Fish Hole 2020 ochre and PVA fixative on canvas 80 x 80 cm; Rachel Doller Swimming Pool Study 8 2021 acrylic, oil pastel and cutout paper on paper 45 x 45 cm; Clare Purser Looking Towards Welcome Bay 2020 gouache on paper 30 x 40 cm.

BOOKSHELF

by Annabelle Hickson

In Good Company Sophie Hansen Murdoch Books, $39.99 Sophie Hansen has done it again. The Orange-based cookery writer has a knack for creating go-to cookbooks for particular occasions. For example, if I have to make a picnic, or if a friend has just had a baby, or if I have to bring a platter to a community event, I reach for Sophie’s second book A Basket By the Door, where she’ll guide me through not only what to make, but also the practicalities of making and moving transportable food. In her new book, Sophie acts as a kind of fairy godmother for feeding groups of people at home. She gives you the recipes you need when you’re having people over and you want to feed them in a way that won’t send you into an anxiety spiral.

Sophie’s recipes are reliable, never overly complicated and full of joy. Every country kitchen needs a copy on its shelves.

Ken Done: Art Design Life Amber Creswell Bell Thames & Hudson, $80 This magnificent book chronicles the 40 years of art, doona covers and businesssmarts of Ken Done, one of Australia’s most original and iconic artists, who did so much to help us throw off the cultural cringe and authentically embrace what it meant to be Australian. From Done’s ideas for a new Australian flag to the covers of a weekly Japanese women’s magazine he illustrated for 15 years, this book explores many facets of his art and life.

‘You see one of Ken’s drawings or paintings and you suddenly feel glad and proud that you belong to a country that can inspire such a joyous response,’ playwright David Williamson says in the book, and that is exactly how I felt after reading it.

Spirit of the Garden Trisha Dixon National Library of Australia, $65 The best gardens are those that consult the spirit of the place, according to Monaro-based author and photographer Trisha Dixon. Just as Maya Angelou believes that it’s not what people say that you remember but rather how they make you feel, Trisha believes the feeling of the garden is what matters.

Trees, shrubs, plants, design and sculpture are secondary.

This beautiful book made me reflect on why we garden and how, instead of imposing total control over the landscape, we might work with the natural surrounds and value and respect its own particular genius loci.

On a more superficial note, it also made me audibly gasp when I saw the photo of Trisha’s book-lined reading room in her Monaro farmhouse.

Landscapes in Between Sophie Perez sophieperezartist.com, $55 UK-born and now Mornington Peninsula–based, artist Sophie Perez had never dreamed of publishing a book, at least not until COVID-19 entered our lives.

Sophie, whose parents and twin sister still live in the UK, had an idea to connect with other people who were also feeling isolated, via Instagram. She asked people to send her a photo of a place that had significance to them but that they couldn’t visit because of restrictions, with a few words about why it was important.

She’d then paint the places for these people. The response was overwhelming. The result is this 244-page book with paintings of more than 200 places. It’s a beautiful and uplifting response to a situation that was far from beautiful or uplifting.

Sorrow and Bliss Meg Mason HarperCollins, $32.99 Galah’s book columnist, Meg Mason, has written a truly great novel: about Martha—a clever, funny, snarky character with an undefined mental illness—and the relationships around her. It’s had enthusiastic praise here and overseas. Ann Patchett said she was making a list of all the people she wanted to send it to, ‘until I realised that I wanted to send it to everyone I know’. Back at home, The Australian’s book reviewer Stephen Romei said it was ‘one of the best novels about marriage that I have read’.

A Los Angeles production company has bought the film and TV rights, so hopefully we’ll see Sorrow and Bliss on the big screen before too long. In Meg’s dreams, British actress Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret in The Crown, will play Martha. Meg insists that, even if she has to re-engineer the entire novel, Benedict Cumberbatch needs to play a part too.

Wonderground Issue One: Arise and Shine A Planthunter Publication, $35 Georgina Reid’s not-quitepocket-size biannual journal of new nature writing is called Wonderground and it certainly does live up to its name, in that it’s breaking wonderful new ground in the print world.

Gorgeous photography complements thought-provoking writing about the intersection of nature, gardening and farming from different parts of the world. An interview with Dan Pearson—the god of natural garden design—had me hanging on to every word. ‘It’s quite rare to be able to talk gardens with people,’ Pearson told Georgina.

‘I felt like a freak when I was a kid because all my friends were ladies in their sixties and seventies who were garden fanatics.’ Georgina describes Wonderground as a reminder and a challenge: a reminder to see the glorious natural world around us; and a challenge to protect it. I am already hooked.

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BOOKS with MEG MASON

TAKE MY ADVICE Miles Franklin’s celebrated novel, My Brilliant Career, offers clear insights into the mind of a teenager.

It is a long time since I have walked, not by mistake, into the parenting aisle of a bookshop.

When my daughters were babies, I craved instruction, I wanted experts telling me what to do and how to do it, preferably at what time and in very basic language.

If Gina Ford said blackout blinds, I was at Spotlight in the first sanctioned window of the feed–wake–sleep cycle. If Robin Barker told me scrunched-up newspaper in an onion bag solves boredom for babies eight months and up, dawn found me digging through the recycling, wondering if a damp Domayne catalogue would also work, wishing she had been specific on that score.

But then, the children reach a certain age, or you do, and you’re less inclined towards advice. Feeling you’ve either worked it out or just made your bed, parenting-wise, and if you haven’t been doing Active

Listening since the beginning —being more of the Active Shouting Until You Taste Metal school of thought—meaningful nodding can’t be introduced to any effect now.

Even as the teenage years hove into view, I didn’t seek out related texts, not wishing to pay money to be made afraid of these years, not wanting to believe they can only be terrible.

But I have just read one by accident, picking it up as literature, unsure now why My Brilliant Career has not been rejacketed as What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Thirteen-year-old and shifted from Fiction to Parenting Teens.

If you were doing what you were meant to at high school, not rocking on two legs of your chair using liquid paper nail polish for the absolute bulk of it, you have read the 1901 Australian classic already, saving us all a plot summary.

Still, then, it would have been in

total identification with Sybylla, the 16-year-old protagonist created by a then 16-year-old author. Not as a parent who needs to be reminded of what it feels like to be this age, and advice and assurance that it’s not you and your insistence on breathing that are to blame for the many peaks, troughs, tensions and ecstasies that characterise weekday afternoons.

And it’s not them either.

Eye-rolling; the first time a child uses the phrase ‘no offence’; or a sudden inability to put a schoolbag anywhere except right in the doorway are all developmental milestones, akin to rolling over and first steps, just less thrilling when you are the victim of them.

It’s just the two of you in combination. As Sybylla says on behalf of our teenagers, ‘my mother is a good woman—a very good woman—and I am, I think, not quite all criminality,

but we do not pull together.

I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.’

Her composition is the whole book. Story is neither here nor there compared with the absolute arrest of her rage, and boredom, her insatiable need for attention and simultaneous wish to be left alone, how funny she is, her thrall for celebrity, how convinced she is of being ugly and clever. Her savagery, her sarcasm, which infuses even the title.

Pages in, her mother had a gutful and sent her to live with childless Aunt Helen, who adores Sybylla, despite finding her—these years in a nutshell— ‘very variable, one moment all joy, and the next the reverse.’

And Helen’s methods are very much onion bags full of newspaper: practical, inexpensive, and incredibly effective solutions for babies, 156 months and up.

An example, in Sybylla’s telling: ‘She sat down beside me.’ Helen has come into her

bedroom, hearing into-pillow sobbing from the hall. It’s very late. It always is. And although our acutest wish in a similar moment is to pin this conversation until tomorrow, sitting down is the doing up of onesie poppers in the pitchblack of 15 years ago— a massive task, but also a mandatory one.

‘I impulsively threw my arms around her neck and sobbed forth my troubles in a string.

How there was no good in the world, no use for me there, no one loved me or ever could on account of my hideousness’: the running on of that list

suggesting Helen overrode her desire to cut in with sense.

‘She never … pretended to sympathise just to make out how nice she was.’ Gosh they can smell it, can’t they, our need to be liked. ‘She was real, and you felt that no matter what wild and awful rubbish you talked to her it would never be retailed for anyone’s amusement.’ It requires our higher selves not to post or text the real or imagined agonies to other people, but Helen knows to be a vault. ‘And better than all, she never lectured.’

‘My featherbrained chatter must often have bored her,.’

You have no idea. I mean, just sometimes, ‘but she apparently was very interested in it.’ Active listening or the appearance of it.

Lovely work, Helen, truly.

The only thing Sybylla doesn’t mention is whether that night, or any of the others like it, Aunt Helen came in armed with a bowl of maple crunch. But then there’s no need. If we have been parents for a day or many decades, we know that low blood sugar is the root of all evil.

And that we didn’t learn from a book. n

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artist

PAMELA PAULINE

saving our fragile

beauty

The rediscovery of an ‘extinct’ Australian plant led to Pamela Pauline’s obsession with Australia’s threatened species and her extraordinary art.

Words Megan Holbeck Photography Pamela Pauline, Joe Wigdahl 115

An early morning drive to the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden felt like a trip to another world. The winding road was lined with burnt gum trees, trunks shaggy with new growth: seen through fog and drizzle, punctuated by shafting light, it felt like swimming, not driving. I ran aground on the hill of the garden, where artist Pamela Pauline was waiting, blonde bob shining, camera slung around her neck.

We followed paths into the grounds as the sun won through, burning off the mist. Pamela crouched and photographed plants, exclaiming over the curls in ferns, the colours and light—her American roots evident in her accent, enthusiasm and her large smile displaying impeccable teeth. This grin wasn’t just on the surface, either—she’s immediately, genuinely warm—and we quickly slipped into the ‘why don’t I pop your keys and phone in my bag so your hands are free?’ shortcut to female friendship.

Since 2019, Pamela has been creating composite artworks made entirely of her own photos of threatened Australian flora and fauna. She describes them as ‘beautiful pieces of work that aren’t necessarily literal, but they are actually real. It is a form of bizarre documentary photography.’ She’s made two different series: the 10 works of ‘Fragile Beauty, Rich and Rare’ pay homage to seventeenth century still lifes, while incorporating flora and fauna from each State and Territory, while ‘On the Brink’ comprises eight lush landscapes. To create these works, Pamela has spent almost two years photographing living collections throughout Australia, becoming well acquainted with the country’s botanic gardens. As she guides us through this one, towards the Wollemi pines, she points out where flames nibbled the edge of the grounds.

The conversation follows the fires and the trees deep into the garden’s translocated Wollemi wilderness. One of the world’s oldest and rarest plants, they were thought to be extinct until a remote grove was discovered by bushwalking botanists in

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1994. I venture that these trees are the whales of the botanical world: an iconic species with a great mediafriendly story—trees as old as the dinosaurs, their location still secret—designed to pique interest in threatened native plants.

Later, over coffee, we come back to the awarenessraising potential of iconic species, leading to mention of David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, a documentary and book which Pamela believes everyone should read. We agree that much of its strength lies in capturing the beauty and diversity of life on Earth, then making it personal—all this amazingness destroyed in one lifetime—before ending with hope.

Pamela’s work has a similar purpose: to showcase the beauty around us, its interdependence and vulnerability, and the biodiversity crisis affecting the world. Her artworks are lush compositions of hundreds of photographs of Australia’s threatened species, that look gorgeous, precious, magical. As Pamela says, ‘I want people to see these artworks as things of beauty, and then feel inspired into action when they learn that all of the flora and fauna featured are threatened species. I want them to ask, “What can I do to make a difference?” ’ Pamela has been documenting life through a lens for as long as she can remember. She set up her photography business in 2003, shooting everything from portraits to landscapes to fine art. She’s won numerous national and international awards, is an Accredited Photographer of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. As she moves through the garden, she makes her craft look easy.

Her recent works are intricate, involved, complicated and beautiful. Each is made entirely from photos, the layers made up of real images rather than paint, applied digitally to make rich, vibrant scenes, as false as they are genuine. Pamela’s blurb describes them as ‘unconventional, allegorical artworks that sit somewhere within conceptual, >

Surrounded by nature, Pamela uses her camera to capture plants, birds and animals, which she will layer into exquisite photographic collages of impossible bouquets and landscapes.

In the way of creative people, all of Pamela’s life has fed into her art.

Critically endangered orange-bellied parrots breed in Tasmania: as part of the ‘Fragile Beauty, Rich and Rare’ series, they are represented here with flora and insects endemic to Tasmania.

Each living thing shown is important both for itself and what it represents.

staged and documentary photography’. Creating them requires more than just traditional photography skills: also needed are vision and intuition, technical computing skills, research ability, an artistic eye and the patience to pull it all together.

Pamela has made a time-lapse film showing the creation of her ‘On the Brink’ series, reducing the 50-hour process to 30 seconds. The sky and water appear first, forming an atmospheric, misty background, rich in lights and reflections, before the plants arrive: a branch here, delicate leaves there.

Then birds materialise, endangered cockatoos disappearing and reappearing, along with flowers spiky and fuzzy, more leaves and plants, colourful birds and frogs. The finished piece is made up of 56 photographs and 113 layers, containing 11 birds, 35 plants and two frogs. Creating these artworks is meditative for Pamela—which is lucky, given the time it takes—and follows weeks researching, finding, photographing and curating the subjects.

In the way of creative people, all of Pamela’s life —her work, travel, passion and curiosity—has fed into her art. A childhood spent exploring the wilds of Wyoming with her family instilled a love of nature and appreciation of the world. Since leaving America in 1988, she has an impressive travel CV, spending time in France, the Netherlands, South Africa, Japan, Indonesia, India and Australia. Travel opened her eyes, but the research skills so crucial for this work came from her Master of Business Administration degree and 10 years working as a market research consultant, while her technical skills began with a computer science degree and digital photography.

She’s always been creative— singing, music, photography—but now that her three children are adults, the caring load has lifted. ‘I feel like I’m really coming into my creativity. I’m passionate about it because I feel like it has taken this long.’

Pamela’s strong focus on Australian natives began with a flock of parrots. Her father died in 2018, the

news received from her mum in the States. She went for a bushwalk to process and was surrounded by lorikeets. After assuring me she wasn’t a crazy bird lady, she said, ‘My whole body just knew that that was my dad saying, “I’m okay. We’re all connected.” ’ This gave her a new appreciation of the freedom and support she had received from her parents, and she decided to focus on where she was, to ‘Grow Where You Are Planted’ as the resulting series was called.

Not long afterwards Pamela read about the Hibbertia fumana, a small, ordinary-looking plant believed extinct until discovered on a development site in Sydney’s south west. It caught her interest, and she began researching Australia’s vulnerable flora. ‘I became so aware of what we risk losing here. The biodiversity crisis is enormous in Australia. I thought, I really want to document all of this in a way that’s not just a boring photograph of an ugly plant.’

She’s travelled extensively to ensure her work is neither boring nor ugly, beginning in 2019 with weekly visits to the Australian PlantBank at Mount Annan, Australia’s largest native plant conservation seedbank. She’s since visited conservation gardens, zoos and rehabilitation centres around Australia to take photographs of their living collections.

Pamela’s upcoming exhibition in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden shows how her art has grown. It began with tiny specimens like those in the garden outside—hanging on despite their vulnerability, easily overlooked—blooming into striking pieces full of wonder and beauty. Each living thing shown is important both for itself and for what it represents: the amazing biodiversity of the world, the interconnection of all things and the importance of doing what we can to save them. n Pamela Pauline’s exhibition runs from 6th to 26th April 2021 at The Calyx in the Royal Botanic Garden, Mrs Macquaries Road, Sydney, New South Wales. Visit Pamela’s website at pamelapauline.com or Instagram @pamelapaulinephotography.

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chapter 04

• the charm of small sheds • a cook and a hall • finding a way in to the family fig farm • dahlias on the dairy • a desert island and reading the Paris newspapers while doing the dishes • what does owning a farm mean?

Lamps, tinware and furniture for The Barn were carefully sourced by Joseph to enhance its rustic atmosphere. His mother Leonie made the soft furnishings.

THE BARN

Garden designer Joseph Corkhill understands the magic potential of dilapidated outbuildings like The Barn.

Photography Lean Timms Words Joseph Corkhill

My very first memory of life is sitting in The Barn at my home, Rockfield, and it is one of absolute contentment. Surrounded by birds and animals, the smell of hay and grain mixed with the old structure of the building itself, brought much excitement to me and my siblings. In the spring of 1968, my father and grandfather were busy erecting a silo and as I sat there and imagined that this was the place where all the animals met up, fed, socialised and went about their daily business. Life could not be better.

The Barn (after being rebuilt in 1926 from a slab house on the river) continued in this vein for many years, nestled among the other sheds, old pine trees, yards and dog kennels. It was not part of the garden as such, just over the hedge, but it was often admired for its rusticity and character.

Throughout my years designing gardens, I’ve seen many such outbuildings scattered round properties and have suggested to the owners that they restore them, even in a basic way. I hope that when they have a little more time to think about it, they will want to use these charming old buildings in the layout of the garden, weaving them into the design and giving it

enormous character. Barns, slab sheds, blacksmiths’ workshops and rusty garages can all be used.

Many of the gardens I have worked on over the years had old timber slab, mud or tin dwellings that were saved and renovated, adding that extra element to the garden, creating the feeling they have been there forever. It is a worthwhile pursuit to encourage people to save these old dwellings and to use their skills and imagination to create a place that has both purpose and soul.

This thought, of course, came into play when my mother stated (after looking at the dilapidated state of the building) that she’d like our barn to be ‘brought back to life again’ in memory of our beloved nephew and uncle who had died recently. My father told her it was a hopeless idea and he was about to put a match to it. In the end my mother got her way and engaged my accomplished brother Marty to restore it. I happily became his unskilled, yet at all times enthusiastic, apprentice.

Right from the beginning, the building started to come back to life: it was as though it had been waiting for a someone to give it the love and attention it deserved. Stories started to unveil themselves as The Barn took on a new life. One century-old tale told how Jack O’Connor, who played cricket for Australia, spent his nights camped there when visiting his brother, as there was allegedly ‘no vacancy’ in the main house.

There was no overall plan with The Barn, just as there are often no overall plans for my gardens: it all comes into play as we go along, and the story organically unfolds. Together we imagined, created, rebuilt, then stood back and went at it again. Posts were replaced, a verandah was added and windows, facing north and west for wind protection, made for a cosy winter spot. All family members helped along the way, including my father, who declared, ‘I think that’ll do now, don’t you? It is a barn, after all.’ Yet we ventured on and while my brother tended the building, I worked on the garden layout.

As the structure of the building came together, the character and atmosphere of The Barn itself intensified. The floor, which originally was to be gravel, changed to large handmade cobblestone >

Opposite The portrait of Joseph by Elisabeth Cummins was the product of a seven-hour session with a bottle of wine.

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squares, made by my brother-in-law George, which were aged as they were laid, giving the impression they’d been there a century ago. Pressed tin awnings were found in an old antique shop.

Everything that I sourced needed to have a feeling from a time gone by. Benches, lamps, tables, and trunks all married with the saddles, bridles and old tin memorabilia that had lain about in there for years.

It was good fun collecting along the way. I found many things that most people would throw out, fitting in beautifully with the rustic atmosphere.

Probably the most expensive part of the renovation was the lighting. Wiring had to be brought in underground, with the power points and cables

discreetly hidden from view. The wall sconces and lamps were placed to give a dim candlelit ambience.

The electrician, who did his apprenticeship with the bright-light brigade, found it rather challenging. My father thought this added expense unnecessarily, but later he came to appreciate the atmosphere.

Five years from first starting on The Barn, I often find myself sitting, reading or entertaining our friends here. The atmosphere you create along the way with wine, music and food, just relaxes and enhances the senses of even the most awkward or dull guest. Many good times have been shared in The Barn: stories told and memories made.

We hope to enjoy many more seasons at The Barn.

For me, it has become a sanctuary to escape the chaos of life. Having lived at Rockfield all my life, the restoration of The Barn has been like bringing back an old friend, whose memory was fading and whose bones were broken. Now, with its spirit revived, it has rekindled and threaded together many friendships and happy childhood memories. It has given the house and garden charm and it continues to amaze me how one (lovingly restored) old slab building could bring so much joy and pleasure. @r_ josephcorkhill_country_nsw Opposite A vintage birthing trolley from Boorowa Hospital now aids in the gestation of conviviality.

community cook The School of Arts hall in Burringbar, New South Wales, is the perfect place for Belinda Jeffery’s pop-up cooking school, where all are welcome.

Words Julie Gibbs Photography Elise Hassey

Above Produce from the local farmers’ markets makes Belinda’s shopping easy.

Opposite page Belinda’s famous rough puff pastry makes delicious berry hand pies.

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Belinda and Clive, left, run a pop-up cookery school in Burringbar Hall in the Tweed valley, where the menu might include one of Belinda’s delicious cakes.

‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a cooka in the kitchen,’ declared six-year-old Belinda Jeffery, standing on a stool, stirring a cake at her mother Cooee’s side. As a teenager she immersed herself in a Margaret Fulton cookbook and practised hard, especially the recipes with chocolate in them. ‘I cooked when I was happy, I cooked when I was sad, I cooked when I was in love (and cooked even more when I was out of love). Until finally the great day came when I started to cook for a living.’ And the other great day came when she married her blueeyed sweetheart, Clive.

Together Clive and Belinda bought a café on Sydney’s north shore called The Good Health Café.

People soon came from all over Sydney for her honey mustard chicken wings, caramelised fennel tart and fabulous banana cake.

Eventually they sold their landmark eatery and Belinda went on to work as a cookery teacher, cookbook writer and as the much-loved food presenter on the Better Homes and Gardens TV show. However, a bout with breast cancer forced Belinda and Clive to re-evaluate everything. In 2002 they made their tree change to Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales and found a new rhythm.

‘Life here is just different … kinder, simpler and more how we hoped to live our lives. Perhaps that’s the biggest difference of all: we both feel in our bones a contentment we didn’t have before.’

Belinda fell headlong into the food community.

‘The very first month we were here, December, was the first month of the Byron Bay farmers’ market.

There were a handful of stalls, a little trestle table and that was all. And so we kind of grew along with the market and I became an ambassador.’

She’s now deeply connected: ‘When we shop at the farmers’ market, we don’t just get fruit and vegetables.

We know where our meat is butchered. We get our eggs. We get our fish. We get our cheese. So, it’s having that close connection to how and where things are grown that I love. It feeds my soul and it’s just something I want to share.’ Following Belinda on her Friday morning visit to the Mullumbimby markets is a joy. She arrives with a basket on her arm and goes around sharing warm smiles, jars of jam, bags of shortbread cookies and all manner of loot.

Clive and Belinda soon found themselves involved with a local drive to raise money to rescue the community hall at Federal. These community halls are the backbone of small country towns, providing a vital venue for people to come together. That led to them starting a pop-up cooking school. Currently

they use the charming Burringbar School of Arts Hall in the Tweed valley, bumping in with kitchen equipment and a huge load of local produce to teach failsafe recipes such as a knockout Basque cheesecake with local rainbow eggs, or a rainbow chard, goat’s cheese and green garlic pie. Belinda shows how to master her famous rough puff pastry (she makes it seem so easy), so that each student can go home to faithfully replicate her ethereal berry hand pies.

This is one of the three great cooking schools in the world, in my opinion (the other two being Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland and The Agrarian Kitchen in Tasmania). On arrival, Clive will twinkle those blue eyes at you and offer good old-fashioned country hospitality with a coffee or tea from your own pot with real leaves, kept warm with a gorgeous, knitted cosy. A long table is set for lunch, decorated with vases of tussie mussies. There is a large stage in the hall, should one feel like tapdancing, and in the pressed metal ceiling a hole made by the resident possum. The windows frame a bucolic scene of dairy cattle grazing on the greenest pasture.

The kitchen is large, light-filled and inviting.

‘We meet such interesting people from all walks of life and, as it always does, cooking together creates immediate bonds and puts smiles on everyone’s faces … by the time the day finishes, cares have been put aside and our table is alive with chat, laughter and swapping of foodie tales. It’s just wonderful.’

Belinda has a way of writing recipes whereby she is the angel on one’s shoulder: guiding, reassuring and troubleshooting at the precise moment you need it. Students can buy one of her many cookbooks (Mix & Bake is the best known) or a set of knives to take home. A complimentary goodie bag might include a jar of tamarillo chutney that’s so good I think Belinda could make it commercially and retire if she wished.

Word about the cooking school spreads from @belindajefferyfood on Instagram. Belinda is in a class of her own when it comes to Insta-kindess and showing the way of genuine engagement. Her inspiring weekly ‘Sunday Post’ now has a dedicated following of 30,000 and sets up Sunday morning for any home cook. ‘People write all the time now saying, “I so look forward to your Sunday post”.’ A few weeks ago a post on a pie brought back this flood of memories to so many people.

Always one to be busy with a project, Belinda promises there will be a new cookbook on the market later this year, based on her Sunday posts. That will solve 30,000 Christmas gift dilemmas. n belindajeffery.com.au

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meet the producer

SUE HEWARD

What do you do when you want to move back to the family farm, but there’s not enough work to support you? If you’re Sue Heward, you use your parents’ figs, the internet and a whole lot of brio to start a premium food brand, Singing Magpie.

Words Annabelle Hickson Photography Meaghan Coles

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Each tree in the Heward family fig orchard in South Australia’s Riverland has been pruned so that there is a way in: a path through the middle of the tree where pickers can find a way to pluck the figs from the upper branches without disturbing it.

So too has Sue Heward found a way back home to where her family has grown fruit for 100 years.

Instead of returning to work on the orchard like her parents, Sue turns their fruit into something more than a wholesale commodity, which has allowed her—and her partner Mark and their daughter Frankie—to leave their city life in Melbourne. And she’s done it without shaking up her parents’ farm.

They haven’t had to buy more acres, or revamp their farming practices or learn how to use the internet.

Sue’s found a way to climb to the upper branches without disturbing the tree.

There’s a chicken roasting in a jammy pool of apricots in the oven. The kitchen bench is covered with bowls and dishes and plates all holding mounds of dried figs and peaches and cakes and slices baked

this morning. Sue’s phone is pinging with messages and notifications and Frankie is playing with her cousin in the grapevine-covered cubby out the back.

‘The chooks are laying like crazy,’ says Sue as she throws together a frittata, puts the kettle on, checks her phone and opens the fridge door in what feels like one fast, continuous movement. ‘I’ve already given away three dozen eggs this morning.’ On cue, an egg rolls out of its perch in the fridge door, but Sue catches it before it hits the floor. She beams.

Next to the kitchen is a narrow room with a large window overlooking the red dirt of this productive farming area on the banks of the Murray, three hours north east of Adelaide. There’s a sparkling stainless steel bench where the figs Sue has dried in the hot Riverland sun are dipped into tempered Callebaut chocolate. Stacks of dried figs, pears, peaches and apricots fill the shelves on the long wall behind the bench. This rainbow of South Australian Riverland produce will be packed into beautifully illustrated boxes and posted out all over Australia.

Above, from left Eight-year-old Frankie plays with her cousin in the orchard; caramel-tasting Smyrna figs; 20 per cent of the jobs in the Riverland are in the agricultural sector, some of them in Ros and Frank’s orchard.

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‘I’M A YOUNG UPSTART FROM MELBOURNE. I’VE ONLY GOT CREDIBILITY BECAUSE I GREW UP HERE.’ At Singing Magpie Produce, business is booming.

What started as a stab at adding value in 2017 has grown into a much-loved food brand. This year Sue has employed three part-time workers to help fulfil the orders and now she has plans to build a dedicated manufacturing shed next to her house. Even a sixhour round trip to Adelaide for chemo each week can’t slow Sue down. She was diagnosed with breast cancer late last year, but she remains positive. The prognosis is good and she has her family around her for support.

Down the road, Sue’s parents Frank and Ros, both in their seventies, work full time on the farm where they grow about 40 tonnes of figs each year: both the big juicy Black Genoas and the yellow, carameltasting Smyrnas. Some are sold to the fresh market, but most are halved and then frozen and then sent to Maggie Beer and Beerenberg and others who use the figs in their ice creams and jams. Given the local

climate and weather conditions the orchard doesn’t get sprayed—the figs simply don’t require it.

Now their daughter is a customer too. Ros initially felt nervous when Sue said she wanted to come home.

She knew work opportunities, other than fruit picking, were limited. Sue’s brother is set to take over the farm when Ros and Frank retire, and so there wasn’t really a place for Sue, not one that would pay.

‘I was concerned because she’s been in a highprofile job all her working life and we don’t have those sort of jobs out here,’ Ros says, sitting in the shade of the lean-to at the front of the packing shed.

‘But she’s always been a goer, so I suppose I’m not surprised it’s worked out, in that respect.’

Sue buys about five tonnes of figs each year from her parents and dries them on metal racks next to the house where her father’s parents lived, which is next to the house where she grew up. Sue also dries their quinces and buys pears, peaches and apricots from >

other local growers to create products like dried figs in sticky quince syrup and chocolate-coated figs that are snapped up by customers online, from as far as Marble Bar, Western Australia, and by shops in New South Wales and Victoria.

Sue believes there are plenty of opportunities for farmers with good produce like her parents’ to create a brand and vertically integrate. That way they can have some control over the prices they receive, they can protect themselves against the risk of fruit fly (dried fruit does not have to be destroyed in the event of a fruit fly outbreak), they can be flexible and make products that their customers want, rather than rely on orders from distributors, and they can have money coming in all year round. ‘But they are flat out,’ says Sue. ‘We wouldn’t have a brand if it wasn’t for me.

They are just too busy farming.

‘When I first came back I thought, “Why isn’t everyone doing this?” Now I know why. Everyone’s busy. Some are desperate. The last thing they want to think about is talking themselves up.’

Ros, who has farmed all her life, is amazed at what her daughter has created, seemingly out of thin air.

‘I’m not an internet person. It’s not my era,’ says Ros.

‘I’m just staggered at the amount of money people spend. It’s just incredible. The orders keep coming in and coming in.’

Before Sue came home, Ros didn’t have any contact with the customers who ate her fruit. These days she gets a bit emotional when she reads some of the comments coming into Sue’s inbox.

‘One elderly man wrote in an email: “my morning doesn’t start without your quince”. I got so teary. You just don’t think about what other people think about your product.’

This direct-to-customer model is not common through the Riverland. Not yet anyway. Sue describes the Riverland as a productive but conservative farming area where not everyone thinks marketing and brand creation is important.

‘I’m a young upstart from Melbourne. I’ve only got credibility because I grew up here, otherwise people wouldn’t put up with me.

‘But you can see the people who are doing things slightly differently, and it’s often because someone in their family has gone and come back. There’s so much amazing produce in this area. No-one talks about it. Then I came along, with a handful of other

people, and started taking 500 million photographs and people are like, “Oh my god what’s this place?”’

So how do you go about creating a brand on the family farm?

‘The truth is it’s a slog,’ says Sue. ‘You have to have balls and the reality is you’re not going to get paid for a couple of years.’

Sue finally made a profit last year. But it wasn’t an easy year to make to make a profit in. The COVID-19 lockdowns eliminated her wholesale food service orders—about 50 per cent of her business—but Sue’s direct customers ramped up, ordering online from their homes in droves.

‘It takes a while to get there. At first I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never sold a thing before in my life. I had this image that I’d be selling a one kilogram bag of dried figs, that that’s how everything would be sold. But, no, everything is sold in the 100 gram packs. It’s all about price point.’

Sue says that social media, particularly Instagram, has been key to her success. ‘It’s absolutely my front

point. I also put my products into awards—the Sydney Royal Fine Food Show and delicious. magazine. I don’t do any hard selling; it’s all through social media. Last year we had $40,000 in sales from #BuyFromtheBush alone. And now I have a newsletter, with a mailing list of about 2000 people. When I put out a newsletter, sales come in. There are customers out there waiting to hear from you.’ Sue often shares recipes, such as the ones on page 145.

Back at the packing shed, three generations of the family sit around in the shade of the lean-to. Frankie goes out in the sun to play with the dog. Ros adjusts her glasses. Frank lights up a rollie and relaxes back into his chair.

‘I know I’m biased,’ says Sue, flashing a huge smile at her father, ‘but dad grows the best figs in the world.’

Her hands might not be as dirty as her father’s, but Sue’s managed to value the family’s figs in her own way. She’s found the way in and she’s climbing up to the top of the tree, while Frank and Ros steady the ladder from below.

Above, from opposite left Frank Heward holds court in the family orchard; Ros and Frank grow about 40 tonnes of figs each year; Singing Magpie Produce chocolate-dipped citrus and figs.

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SUE’S ROASTED CHICKEN WITH FIGS AND HONEY This is a slapdash, in-a-rush version of a Maggie Beer recipe, and is no less delicious for it.

It serves four, with leftovers for the next day.

6 pieces of chicken Maryland, or two small chickens in pieces 2 red onions a few garlic cloves 1 lemon 5 or so fresh figs, the riper the better 4 Singing Magpie Black Semi Sun Dried Figs a bunch of fresh thyme and tarragon leaves a handful of green olives honey, to drizzle 60 ml (¼ cup) red wine vinegar 60 ml (¼ cup) verjuice 250–375 ml (1–1½ cups) chicken stock

Season the chicken pieces and pan fry, turning, until browned on both sides. Preheat a fan-forced oven to 180°C. Thinly slice the red onions and garlic. Slice the lemon crossways and cut the fresh figs in quarters. I also thinly sliced the dried figs; if you can’t get fresh figs you could use all dried figs, but I do love how the fresh ones caramelise in this recipe.

Lay some of the herbs in the base of an oiled baking tray (I used a large shallow one) and place the chicken pieces on top.

In the gaps around the chicken pieces, scatter the sliced onion and garlic. Then add a handful of green olives. the lemon slices and the fresh and dried figs. The pan gets quite packed, but fear not, it works out beautifully.

Drizzle honey over each chicken piece and then pour the red wine vinegar and verjuice into the pan. Finally, pour in chicken stock and top with a few more sprigs of fresh thyme and tarragon.

Bake, uncovered, for about 1 hour or until it’s beautifully caramelised.

Serve with a couple of fresh figs cut up and fresh tarragon on top to garnish, and some roasted potatoes and a green salad alongside.

ICE CREAM WITH CARAMELISED PECANS AND SUE’S STICKY QUINCE SYRUP Make the caramelised pecans ahead of time and serve with ice cream and syrup in a coupe.

1 cup white sugar 1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped 1 scoop vanilla ice cream per person Singing Magpie Sticky Quince Syrup

Put the sugar into a small non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Cook, tilting the pan back and forth, until

the sugar dissolves and turns a deep golden colour. Add the pecans. Turn to coat. Pour out onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Set aside until firm. Break into pieces.

Place a scoop of ice cream in each coupe, drizzle the quince syrup on top and scatter with caramelised pecans. n

@sue_singingmagpieproduce

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LITTLE HOUSE

Words Harriet Davidson Photography Lean Timms Opposite page The nearly 200-year-old house that Steven grew up in now boasts a garden of Erica’s favourite flowers, which she uses to create arrangements with a great deal of heart, above.

THE DAIRY littleON house on the dairy Growing old-fashioned flowers has helped Erica deal with the challenges of life on a dairy farm.

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Follow the bridge across the creek up to the little weatherboard cottage and you’ll see Erica: her blonde curls pinned back off her smiling, warm face. You’ll see bunches of flowers in a vase in the hallway, egg sandwiches and a jug of iced peach tea on the kitchen table, the children’s bedrooms off the sun-filled hallway with ‘Leo’, ‘Arthur’ and ‘Rose’ on the doors.

This is the life Erica and her husband Steven have built together over the past 10 years in the green hills of Jamberoo, New South Wales, after moving from Sydney to take over Steven’s family dairy farm when his father unexpectedly died. It certainly hasn’t been easy, but here she is, beaming, from the verandah of their little house on their dairy.

‘I didn’t feel at home in the city. It wasn’t a life that I wanted and I didn’t quite know why,’ Erica says, wondering if that was why she was drawn to Steven when they met in a nightclub in 2007. ‘He seemed different, and then I learned he was from the land.

‘I grew up in the city where water comes from taps, milk from the supermarket and rain is a bit of a nuisance if you have outdoor plans. Dairy farming is a way of life; it isn’t a job you can leave at the office or forget for a week as you go off on holiday.’

Erica often thinks of what her late father-in-law said about dairy farm life: ‘You won’t have a lot, but you won’t go without.’

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‘I wonder what he would make of it all now,’ she says. ‘Over the past 10 years we have seen drought, flood, fires and unworkable milk prices put fear into even the most seemingly tough of hearts. Seeing my own husband work though it every day, in spite of it all, has been nothing short of inspiring.’

Last February, Erica and Steven watched as the creek got lower each day, knowing that this was all the water they had. They wondered if they should pack up and go. And then they received a third of a normal year’s rainfall in two days.

Through the ups and downs of farming life, Erica discovered gardening. Time in the garden helped her manage her anxiety and brightened her world. ‘When my life is so deeply rooted in the practical, creating something purely for beauty just fills me up with joy.

It’s like a meditation. After a noisy and busy day, it’s really nice to just do something that’s mindful and purely just because I want to.’

Erica started to grow flowers, and then started to give bunches to friends. And then enquiries from people in the community started coming in.

Two years on, Erica has built a new, larger patch to grow her flower business out the front of their home, still within earshot of the children’s bedrooms so she can be there for her three little ones. Erica spends her evenings here, sometimes with a glass of wine in >

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hand, picking what’s growing and what’s speaking to her for bunches she will arrange the following morning before the school run.

Erica worked on the dairy with Steven, before the children came along, feeding calves and milking cows. She still lends a helping hand around the farm, which currently carries 100 cows as they continue to rebuild after the drought, but life is pretty busy between three children and a growing business.

‘The flowers have been a huge thing for me—and for us—to do,’ says Erica. ‘It’s so small compared to what a florist is doing, but for me and my family, it’s pretty game changing to have something in my purse to be able to take the kids for a milkshake.”

Each bunch feels as if a friend has grown and picked them from their garden just for you. Love-ina-mist peeps out through clouds of hydrangeas, or feverfew sits pretty in among the dainty Queen Anne’s lace with bursts of yellow Helichrysum italicum (curry plant). Erica’s lack of formal training has given her freedom: her arrangements are wild, unconfined and full of joy. ‘Whenever I am really happy or sad about something, those are the bunches people love the most. I think when feeling goes into whatever you do, people respond to it,’ says Erica.

‘I like them to be generous, unrestrained and to be a celebration; joyful, because that’s how they make

me feel.’ The bunches are created with what’s in the garden, which by default is what Erica loves and what’s in season. ‘I’ve had people hug me and cry and that’s amazing—beauty invokes that emotion in people. The joy that it shares and the joy it gives me, that’s what drives me.’

Erica sells the arrangements directly to people in the local community and is about to embark on converting an old wooden barn on their property into a workspace from where she’ll also run small workshops. Erica is just at the beginning of growing this passion into a business, and with it, growing the life she wants for herself and her family It’s hard to imagine a more carefree and connected childhood. Rose rolls down a mound of dirt, squealing with glee, Arthur balances on a rock in the middle of the creek, watching tadpoles, and Leo walks through the flower beds naming the varieties.

Each child has their own dedicated patch in the vegetable garden, opening their minds to what it takes to grow and care for food and for the land.

Their dogs, kittens, chickens and rooster all make appearances during the afternoon as we wander the property. ‘We thought about having a fourth child, but I think the garden is going to be my fourth.’ n @Little_house_on_the_dairy; littlehouseonthedairy.net

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stay

THREE HUMMOCK ISLAND Words Kate Shannon

It was London, 1949, when—over a lunch of oysters, caviar and champagne, Eleanor Alliston agreed to leave the security of the civilised world.

The same morning, she had stood beneath the glittering chandeliers of Buckingham Palace and watched King George VI present her husband John, a retiring naval officer, with prestigious war medals. Lunching together at The Berkeley later that day, they decided on the wilds of Tasmania to begin their new life. The juxtaposition of the pomp, opulence and glamour with their dreams of remote island adventure must have etched this moment deeply in Eleanor’s memory.

‘Incessant partings, so much a feature of life in the Navy, had made us want to cut loose and search, preferably to the ends of the Earth, for somewhere permanent,’ wrote Eleanor, explaining that they were determined to create a life where they could be together, work hard and raise their family ‘in rebellion against a bumper-to-bumper existence’.

‘That day we made our choice between Chile, Tasmania and New Zealand, all on the 40th parallel, with a similar climate, one which was particularly favourable to living, loving and working.’

Two years later, Eleanor and John and their two children moved to the isolated paradise of Three Hummock Island, a granite island in stormy Bass

Strait, more than 30 kilometres from mainland Tasmania. It was a place that fulfilled John’s dream of living on a farm with a river, a mountain, a house on a slope overlooking the sea; and Eleanor’s desire of being at the ends of the earth. Its landscape was stark and windswept with granite boulders, waterfalls and dense bushland, and the island brimmed with multiple species of birds, penguins and wallabies. Even today the area is known for having the purest air in the world.

John had visited the island on an earlier reconnaissance mission, reporting that the house was an old white weatherboard. ‘Rather neglected, but could be nice.’ As such, Eleanor had visualised a picturesque Cape Cod cottage, which would need just a few clever touches here and there to get things to her liking. When she arrived she saw something else.

‘Yes, white weatherboard it was. But inside there was such a conglomeration of murky furniture, articles of farm equipment, dark layers of linoleum, and a general airlessness that my heart sank.

I could not see where I should begin, if I were to retain the essentials and discard the rubbish. This was my inheritance. Two wallaby carcasses hung from the ceiling. Flies abounded.’

The interiors were the least of her worries when, less than a week after their arrival, their sevenmonth-old baby nearly died with a blockage in >

Opposite page, clockwise from top left Eleanor Alliston lived on Three Hummock Island for more than 50 years; family snaps more often than not show Eleanor outdoors, where she loved to be; the island is in Bass Strait.

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his bowel. After a desperate day spent lighting bonfires to attract a passing fishing boat, Eleanor and her son were picked up from the jetty and taken to a doctor. Her baby survived but it was clear remote island life was not all paradise.

Eleanor did not shy away from the hardship.

Armed with only a well-thumbed copy of Home Doctor to refer to for advice on treating ailments, the dangers of living in such isolation faded as Eleanor’s confidence grew. She gradually lost that consuming fear of accidents and sickness in the wilds. ‘I was beginning to believe that I would be given strength to deal with them.’

Eleanor and John raised four children on the island: Venetia, Robert, Warwick and Ingrid. The children were educated by correspondence and then went to boarding school in Victoria for their later school years.

While living on the island, the family experienced many challenges including witnessing shipwrecks, losing beloved animals and making dangerous sea journeys. They relied on infrequent air and sea dispatches for supplies and medical assistance.

Although Eleanor was in charge of the house, she preferred being outside. She wrote that she ‘regarded a house merely as a place which one must enter after dark, the mind and body still hankering for the skies and the hills and the lovely living earth beneath one’s feet’. She often came

home at 3 am with flounders slung over her shoulder after a solo spearfishing expedition. Her daughter Ingrid recalls that her mother did not like housework very much. From her Hawthorn home in Melbourne, Ingrid said that Eleanor thought ‘life is too short to worry about the dusting’.

Eleanor would read the Paris newspaper as she did the washing-up. She got the whole family learning Spanish via Linguaphone courses while they ate their meals. They listened to symphonies while weeding the carrot patch and absorbed some of the latest in poetry and literature as they waited for the billy to boil on the camp fire.

Eleanor wrote two books about the family’s life on Three Hummock: Escape to an Island and An Island Affair. She dictated romance novels while walking on the beach and typed while standing at a bench, decades before standing desks were a thing.

A quest to live a remarkable life, instead of an ordinary one, was what called Eleanor and John Alliston to Three Hummock Island. And it was a quest realised. Eleanor and John Alliston lived on Three Hummock Island from 1951 to 2002. Eleanor died in 2003 and John the year after.

Today the island offers eco-accommodation and is accessed only by charter flight or boat. It’s an experience for those looking to escape the ‘bumperto-bumper existence’, if only for a few days. n threehummockisland.com.au

Opposite page Photographs from the family’s album show the kind of life that the island offered, farming livestock and having adventures in their windswept and isolated haven from a ‘bumper-to-bumper existence’.

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RESTORING THE LAND PART 1 of a series for Galah about Jim Osborne’s journey to create Yambulla:

Words Jim Osborne Photography Charlie Maslin; Hugh Stewart

a socially, environmentally and economically sustainable property on a remote block he inherited in the far south of New South Wales.

Ten years ago my sisters and I divvied up Nungatta, a 5000 hectare cattle station that lay about midway between Bombala and Mallacoota, as the crow flies.

My family had owned it (yet never lived there) since the late 1940s.

I hived off about 1500 hectares of the remotest part of the remote property. The girls sold the rest.

The part of the farm I chose to keep, paddocks known as Top and Bottom Yambulla, was the most unspoilt. It had a romanticism: a valley, surrounded by mountains I didn’t know the names of.

The idea landed while Dad and I were doing his last muster, he at 82, me at 42; just the two of us, poking after cows on horseback.

I remember marvelling at the contour of the land. It felt sculpted by a giant’s hand. A few years later, after his death, as I dragged my belongings over the hills and into the Yambulla valley, I’m quite sure I was unaware of how much this land would change me.

For the past 200 years, Nungatta had been home to farmers, but also to Aboriginal massacres, hardship, alcohol, grit, boom, sweat and decline. My urban husband, George, gently (and wisely) encouraged me to consider a new beginning rather than grimly holding on to a chequered past that we didn’t relate to. Together we wondered how we could look at this land differently.

To say that I had a vision at that point undervalues the evolving nature of this project. The only sustainable way I could see to keep cattle was through cell-grazing.

This would require investment in fencing and water infrastructure.

And the more I looked at this wide expanse of valley before me, the less inclined I felt to criss-cross it with fences.

I decided to build a house. Left to my own devices I perhaps would have built something a bit more ephemeral, an encampment, but George gently guided me into something more substantial. It’s as if he knew how important it would become to bring people here.

Making them comfy, dry, warm, well fed and valued was essential to them coming back—the house couldn’t be a tent.

For eight years I busied myself building: felling and milling trees for timber; camping in a tent, then a shipping container, then a shed; hiring and firing architects and builders; staring down growing debts. My sister Catherine says we all have one ‘build’ in us; I seriously admire anyone who has more.

What we ended up with is a spread; a series of five connected timber pavilions with six bedrooms set along the contour so every room faces north and embraces the wonderful landscape.

Aside from a few planted courtyards there is no garden, >

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the house sits on the edge of the landscape with no delineation between it and what is beyond, allowing you to be a voyeur into myriad lives. Our first summer there we watched a dingo bitch teach her pups how to hunt kangaroo right outside the kitchen window, honing their skills over those hot months. Particular animals became familiar: ‘Was it Gammy [legged] or Stumpy [tailed]?’ we’d ask, about the goanna in the laundry.

These years absorbed in building the house kept me from doing much else on the land. I started dealing with the blackberry infestation—I have hundreds of hectares of it, that bastard plant— and shot dozens of feral pigs. But more importantly, by spending time on the land without taking any major decisions or big moves to change it, I evolved a capacity to see it differently.

The native vegetation changed significantly since destocking.

Pioneer plants such as Cassinia and Phragmites began to colonise areas and I felt alarmed and conflicted; my European roots told me I needed to act, put on my Fat Controller hat and do something.

Instinct told me sit tight; the land will tell me what to do.

Before long the Cassinia grew into small trees and I began to walk through spectacular mallee forests

full of emu-wrens, Richard’s pipits and rufous whistlers. Destructive pigs became a memory. The blackberry-control program, which had caused me such frustration, began to be effective.

Somewhere along the way I started to see this place not so much as something I owned but as something I was entrusted to protect for future generations.

And despite my accountant pestering me about profits, returns, balances, I was fortunate enough that it was not my primary motivation. Yes, economic sustainability was a goal but, importantly, the bottom line didn’t define my thinking; that could come once I’d made room for it.

I felt that one antidote to the property’s remoteness and its brutal colonist history was to provide food and shelter where friends, thinkers, experts and folk who thought differently about the land could congregate and share their knowledge; create a social sustainability.

Making room for seeing differently has been half my life’s work. Launching into a new paradigm of acting differently is shaping up to be the second act: discovering how this land can become economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.

To be continued … n yambulla.com.au

Opposite page Yambulla’s six-bedroom solar-powered lodge brings modern comfort to a remote part of a remote property. The four interconnected buildings, along with a natural water-tank pool, overlook the sweeping valley below.

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THE BETOOTA BRIEFING with ERROL PARKER, Editor-at-large The Betoota Advocate

LOCAL FARMER’S WIFE FILLED WITH JEALOUS RAGE AFTER SEEING HER NEIGHBOUR HAS A BIGGER RUSTIC OVERSIZED WALL CLOCK THAN SHE DOES

A grazier’s wife out on the Betoota City Limits was under the impression that she owned the largest rustic wall clock in the postcode, until she learned this week that someone else does.

Walking into her neighbour’s recently renovated homestead, Julia Coleman politely smiled as details of paint and finishes were explained to her. Her neighbour, Sally Driscoll, knew exactly what she was doing.

And after leading Julia through the eggshell-white hallway into the robinegg-blue living room, Sally started talking about her new wall piece.

‘It’s 3950 mm wide, the biggest clock they had at Jumbled,’ said Sally.

‘We had to DynaBolt it to the wall. It’s like the one you have, isn’t it?’

Julia nodded.

‘Mine is only 3500 mm,’ Julia said. ‘And we only used a handful of masonry screws.’

Sally smiled.

‘Well, this clock is actually from France, I think. We got it through Jumbled because, I dunno, they just have such great stuff there. They only had one, though. They actually couldn’t deliver it because of the size, so I got in the car and went down there,’ she said.

Julia nodded again, staring at the giant timepiece.

‘We were so lucky we got the roof rack option with the new LandCruiser.

It would’ve been so annoying if I had to tow the horse float all the way to Orange and back.’

Julia had seen the new Landcruiser in the driveway as she parked her three-year-old Prado under the peppercorn tree out the front. It was another kick in the teeth: she might as well have turned up in the beige AU Falcon that her adult stay-at-home son drives around town.

‘The whole clock actually weighs close to half a tonne,’ Sally continued.

‘Which is a lot, when you think about it. What do you think?’

The lies that Julia had told herself about her own clock had already started to unravel. If she didn’t own the biggest rustic wall clock in Betoota, who was she?

‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Julia. ‘Just wait until Diane sees this, she’s going to scream.’

More to come. n betootaadvocate.com

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GAL AH .

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