STAY: THREE HUMMOCK ISLAND

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 owers have been a huge thing for me—and for us—to do,’ says Erica. ‘It’s so small compared to what a orist 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, uncon ned 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 ower 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

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.