Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 11 i Australian Country Homes

Some of us just aren’t wired to live in suburbia, with fences for privacy and neighbours within earshot. It can work for a time, but the call of the country seems to always prevail. Wayne and Marie Stewart first bought their patch of rural paradise in 1980. In the lofty green hills of Peachester, overlooking Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, it was untamed bush — wild and rambling. Teachers by trade, with two boys in tow and dreams of a new home and flourishing orchard driving them forward, they began the mammoth task ahead of them. “We cleared some areas including a road in,” Wayne recalls. “Then we built a shed near where we lived in our caravan for 18 months while we built a house.” In time, they planted custard apple,…

The plan, as much as Roz and Peter Seppelt had one, was to take Peter’s family’s hobby farm and transform it into a business. But as is always the case, there were a few unexpected twists and turns along the way. Nonetheless, after more than a decade of hard slog, the Seppelts now have an enterprise that both perpetuates Peter’s family tradition of hospitality and takes it to a whole new level. Peter is a fifth-generation scion of the house of Seppelt, which was founded in 1851 when Jospeh Seppelt, a migrant merchant from Prussia (now Poland) arrived in Australia and established a vineyard and winery called Seppeltsfield in the Barossa Valley. Today the Canary Island date palm-lined driveway leading to the splendid bluestone winery buildings are a landmark on…

As Rowan Peart sees it, back in the day, everyone had cousins in the country and most likely visited them frequently. But with increasing urbanisation that is no longer the case, and the country-city divide is at risk of developing into a chasm. So Rowan and his wife, Maddie, and their extended family are doing what they can to bridge that gap from their home base on Sunnyholt Station in the Arcadia Valley in Queensland’s central highlands. Sunnyholt has been owned by the Pearts since 1964 when Rowan’s father, Wally, and his brother, Robert, both drew blocks in a ballot designed to tame the “tiger country”, which was covered in brigalow scrub, and had no permanent water and famously poor soil. “The Queensland premier at the time, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, released…

The white Carrara marble bowls from Kandili Pty Ltd are the perfect way to enhance the sense of opulence in your home. Made from 100 per cent Italian Carrara marble, the vessels are unique, with no two patterns the same. Choose from four different-coloured lids and a wide variety of scents that will help you relax and bring a calm ambience to your home. kandili.com.au Add warmth and texture to your bedroom or living space with the hand-knitted Brighton throw and cushion cover from Eco Down Under. These cosy additions to your home are knitted using a generous classic cable-stitch pattern in the Pantone colour of the year for 2020 — Classic Blue. Each item in the hand-knitted Brighton range is unique and handmade by women in rural India. Supporting…

A western NSW farmer who can talk about furniture designer Mark Tuckey as confidently, and passionately, as about agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere, Moree’s Andrew Ball is fascinatingly contrary. Pinterest, his go-to for inspiration, reveals expertly curated folders on architecture and design, seamlessly coexisting with pins on rugby and cars. His large farmer’s hands swipe, and the fact that he even has a Pinterest account speaks volumes. “My mother had a beautiful eye for design and style,” he reflects. “It’s quite amazing — you never forget those things that were ingrained into your childhood.” Nestled in a leafy local street, Andrew and his wife, Barbara, have restored one of the town’s most stately properties, the type passers-by crane their necks at in anticipation of a glimpse beyond the perfectly manicured…

Melissa and Andrew Kidd were roughly 16,000 kilometres apart when something life-changing popped into their respective inboxes. “Melissa and I emailed the same land to each other,” Andrew explains. “She’d returned to Australia a few months before me, while I finished an assignment in Frankfurt. While apart, we’d share property ideas. I was excited to see it as soon as I got off the plane.” An unbelievable coincidence or a sign from somewhere beyond, no matter how you look at it, it seemed it was meant to be. “We loved the area and had lived around here in our teenage years,” Melissa says. “So we couldn’t believe it when this block of land came up for sale.” It seemed to tick all their boxes — rural, close to the beaches…

They say to be born into the Turner family means to be born in the saddle. While that’s not strictly true, the Turner women all started riding almost as soon as they could walk. Gendy Parry Okeden, the oldest of the three Turner girls, started riding at the age of two and was back competing just three months after her twin boys, Sam and Tom, were born. “My mother, Beth, is a veteran eventer and horse riding coach and trainer,” Gendy explains. “She grew up in New Zealand where everyone rode and hunted and then she met my father, Warwick, who was also into horses. They came back to his family farm at Oberon where, naturally, my sisters Nicky, Jamie and I grew up not really knowing that horse riding…

Local lore around the twin towns of Echuca-Moama on the Murray River has it that you can trace the fluctuating fortunes of Australia’s rural industry through the buildings on Perricoota Station. There’s the imposing double-storeyed, nine-bedroom brick homestead, built in the 1860s as the HQ for pastoralist James Maiden, who had established a 120,000-acre [48,562-hectare] sheep and cattle grazing property on the NSW side of the Murray in 1843. The sprawling shearing shed, although no longer part of the station holding, also dates from this time, when the economy was booming thanks to the gold rushes and the wool industry, and wages for working men reached world-record levels. Perricoota was sold in 1865 to wool brokers Kirk, Row and Goldsborough, founding fathers of what would become agents Goldsborough Mort, which…

If the walls could talk in the homestead on David and Cheryl Hunt’s Ivybrook Farm at South Australia’s Maslin Beach, they’d be telling tales that go back almost as far as the foundation of the colony. They’d doubtless recall the arrival of the Reverend Charles Hall, a congregational minister for the parish of Aldinga and how he moved into a two-bedroomed cottage with an underground cellar in 1851. He then set about extending the house with a second storey and an outdoor wash house and man’s room. It’s not known what the somewhat dour-looking gentleman would have made of his neighbours, John Reynell and his former employee, Thomas Hardy, who had planted the first grapes in the district in the 1840s and thus founded the now celebrated McLaren Vale wine…

You could have heard a pin drop. As Sarah Crooke tells the story, she and her husband, Stephen, were sitting in the classroom for the world’s leading ice cream course at Pennsylvania State University in the US, surrounded by food chemists. As the talk swirled around stabilisers, emulsifiers, food dyes and flavour powders, Sarah raised a tentative hand. “But what if,” she asked, “we used fresh raspberries?” While everyone looked at her as though she’d announced she was planning on making ice cream with dish water, she certainly attracted the attention of the lecturer, who came to her after the class and shared whatever knowledge he had about the radical concept of making her product with fresh fruit. The Crookes and their son, James, and daughter-in-law Iris are the makers…

When Robyn and John Oliver bought Clear View in the Adelaide Hills, they became not just the eighth family to own the property, but also the custodians of a century-long tradition of owners who were not afraid to get their hands dirty. The Olivers bought the three-quarter-acre block with its main residence and guest cottage in 2010 after only one inspection. “I’d surreptitiously been looking for a few years for a place in the Hills,” Robyn explains. “I found it on the net on Easter Monday; we inspected that day and by the Friday we’d bought it. I must admit, there was a bit of a feeling of ‘what have we done’ but we moved in by June and then the work began.” Although she says the block had been…