Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 7 i Australian Country Homes

With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, Julie McIntosh says she became a safari operator out of “pure naivety”. The South African-born founder and director of Sydney-based The Classic Safari Company led a peripatetic childhood, joining her parents as they escaped the social strictures of apartheid to Brazil and the US, returning to South Africa for boarding school and finally studying business management at university in Brisbane in the ’80s. Her fate as a perennial adventure traveller was sealed when she spent a year as the president of an international business students group organising cultural-exchange programs. “Of course that involved a lot of travel and I followed that up with a year of backpacking,” Julie recalls. “It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time…

Simon Rowe is practically crowing down the phone from his home at Burra in South Australia’s mid-north. It’s been raining all night at Princess Royal station, where he and his wife, Andrea, and their adult children, Jack, Katherine and Rebecca, have lived since 2000. As the true cattleman he is, to him, it’s the best day so far this year. “It’s been 97 days since we had rain,” he reports, barely able to contain his excitement. “In fact, it’s the first decent rain we’ve had since last September. We’ve all been holding out for this and hopefully this is the start of a good wet season.” In Burra, that means an average winter rainfall of 17 to 18 inches (430-460 millimetres) and Simon says that a good season is like…

The precise reason is lost in the mists of time but when the Tunney family built their homestead at Spring Park, they installed a hallway the size of a cricket pitch. Precisely. The present owners, Lil and Richard Westmacott, who bought the property near Young in the NSW south-western slopes in 1986, understand the hall was designed to be wide enough to accommodate a dray carrying the granite blocks, which had been quarried elsewhere on the property. But surely Jim Tunney, who took up Spring Park in 1872, didn’t let his children play cricket on the 22-yard link between the front door and the back wing and kitchen. Mind you, with a family of 22, he had enough offspring for a team and a few reserves. What is certain, however,…

Toni Smith was your typical inner-city girl, raised in Melbourne, living in Brisbane’s bustling Spring Hill and enjoying a successful career as a project manager in construction and mining when she decided to buy an investment property in the Sunshine Coast hinterland purely because it seemed to be a high-growth area. Searching online, she stumbled upon a little old 1940s timber Queenslander, which had been moved from Brisbane to the Glass House Mountains in the ’90s. Toni was instantly smitten. “I knew I was going to buy it, even before coming to see it,” she says. “It was a cold, windy day when I came to inspect it and that only made me love it even more as everything was so green and lush. The whole area is so fertile,…

The old saying that you should never overlook what’s in your backyard has proven prophetic for Nathan Overell and his wife, Jodie, who are raising their young family in the rich pastoral and dairying country known as the Lost World Valley of southeast Queensland. Nathan grew up in the spectacular hinterland region, which is bounded by mountains of the Scenic Rim, the wilderness of the Lamington National Park and has the upper reaches of the Albert River and Christmas Creek threading through the landscape. His schoolteacher parents, Sue and Rob, moved to jobs in Beaudesert in the 1970s and during the ensuing decades bought land in the Valley on which they established an olive grove and holiday accommodation with a cooking school. They called their home farm Worendo, for the…

As the 19th-century Canadian farmer Nelson Henderson observed, the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit. And so it was for pioneering pastoralist and winemaker Frank Charles Lewin, who in the 1870s established a park-like garden on the property his father owned a few kilometres from Inverell in northwestern NSW. Frank came to Australia from England with his parents in 1854 and seven years later, accompanied his family on the arduous three-month journey by bullock dray to Inverell, where they established a flour mill and bought land on Warialda Road. The Lewins also planted Rosenstein, the region’s first winery, on the property, which Lewin senior later subdivided, giving Frank 320 acres (130 hectares). Frank called his block “Pinehurst” and set…

There have been innovators on Mackerode station near Burra in South Australia’s mid-north almost for its entire history since European settlement. Built in 1872 for pastoralist Gustav Gebhardt on what was then Wildotta station, the locally quarried stone-and-brick, low-slung homestead with its broad encircling verandahs and grand arched entryway was a clear statement of prosperity for the man who had arrived in the colony in 1858 and shortly after set up his shingle as a butcher in the copper mining town of Burra, which had been established a decade earlier. As Burra’s prosperity grew and miners from Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Germany migrated to the town, the surrounding pastoral land flourished. Gustav bought and leased land all over the mid-north, importing high-class Lincoln sheep from the UK and establishing what…

There’s a sign in the kitchen at Moira station that reads: “Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Just take it and make it perfect,” which pretty much sums up the way Riverina Water drilling contractor Rex Watson and his events director wife, Kate Pitt, approach every aspect of life on their property. The land upon which Moira sits is significant in Australian geology, as the Cadell Fault — a seismic shift that began some 65,000 years ago and created a 12-15-metre-high rift that runs from Deniliquin to 13 kilometres south of Echuca — passes through the property. The upheaval had major impact on the course of the Murray and other major rivers and created the Moira and Barmah Lakes and the surrounding red gum forests that are now protected by…

The old adage that you never know what’s around the corner became a reality when, as a newly graduated nurse, Annabelle Toohey took a job at Condobolin District Hospital in central-western NSW. “It was only ever going to be for a year and then I was headed for the bright lights of Sydney,” she explains. “But then I met Paul Riley, a local electrician at the local B&S ball, and here I am down the track with a rock on my finger.” Annabelle was no stranger to country life having grown up a few hours to the east at Eugowra on her parents’ sheep and cropping farm. Paul was a Condo local and had lived there since he was a youngster, so the couple settled easily into life in a…

There are two great love stories in Graham Higgins’ life. One of young love lost and found again, the other a tale of slow-burning passion that led him to his happy place. The leading lady in the first is Nicky Hayward-Wright, Graham’s partner. Nicky and Graham dated in their university days, but both recognised that life was calling and they were too young to be so serious about their relationship. They went their separate ways out into the world — Graham’s career taking him into myriad industries: recruitment, politics, journalism, management and hospitality. Nicky travelled and spent time in the United Kingdom and the United States, ultimately landing in Sydney and later Melbourne as a knowledge manager and university lecturer. Both married others, each welcomed kids into the world. More…

All fired up Set temperatures soaring with these pretty yet practical fireplaces. Winter warmers Cosy up this season with our favourite accessories for the perfect night in.…