MEET THE PRODUCER

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 nally 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 rst month we were here, December, was the rst 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 sh. 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- lled 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 nishes, 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 ood 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

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’ gs, the internet and a whole lot of brio to start a premium food brand, Singing Magpie.

Words Annabelle Hickson Photography Meaghan Coles

Each tree in the Heward family g 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 nd a way to pluck the gs 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 gs and peaches and cakes and slices baked this morning. Sue’s phone is pinging with messages and noti cations 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 oor. 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 gs Sue has dried in the hot Riverland sun are dipped into tempered Callebaut chocolate. Stacks of dried gs, pears, peaches and apricots ll 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 gs; 20 per cent of the jobs in the Riverland are in the agricultural sector, some of them in Ros and Frank’s orchard.

‘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 ful l 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 gs 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 gs in their ice creams and jams. Given the local climate and weather conditions the orchard doesn’t get sprayed—the gs 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 highpro le 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 ve tonnes of gs 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 gs in sticky quince syrup and chocolate-coated gs 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 y (dried fruit does not have to be destroyed in the event of a fruit y outbreak), they can be exible 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 at out,’ says Sue. ‘We wouldn’t have a brand if it wasn’t for me. They are just too busy farming.

‘When I rst 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 nally made a pro t last year. But it wasn’t an easy year to make to make a pro t 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 rst 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 gs, 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, ashing a huge smile at her father, ‘but dad grows the best gs in the world.’

Her hands might not be as dirty as her father’s, but Sue’s managed to value the family’s gs 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 gs each year; Singing Magpie Produce chocolate-dipped citrus and gs.