Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 28 i Australian Country Homes

The old adage says that good things, like fine wine, improve with age. Hazeldean’s farming operation, homestead and garden in the Monaro high plains are another case in point. They’ve been a work in progress since the 1860s, when James and Ann Litchfield arrived in the southeastern NSW high country. When James arrived in the colony from Saffron Walden in Essex, England, in 1852, he had a letter of introduction to William Bradley, a pioneering member of the Monaro squattocracy, who built an empire which, at its peak, covered 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) of the naturally treeless high plains. James gained employment as a manager of one of William’s properties, Myalla. With the division of the region following the Lands Act of 1861 under Premier John Robertson, James was able…

By their own reckoning, if Tamara Simoneau and her husband, Marc, had simply stayed in the one place, they could have afforded to be driving Lamborghinis. Instead, they’ve lived a peripatetic life, dividing their time between Marc’s home country of Canada and Tamara’s state of origin, Queensland. These days, the family lives in Sydney, where Tamara is an executive producer for Channel 10 and Marc works as an IT consultant. But no matter how far they roam, they always return to their beautiful bolthole in the lush hills of Buderim on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland. Tamara grew up between Brisbane and Caloundra, the second of four children of school-teacher parents. Her mother’s family came from the land in central Queensland, so she counts herself lucky to have balanced her urban…

As Nicole Gillespie and Stewart Allsop see it, every cloud has a silver lining. The Rockhampton-based couple may have had difficulty recognising the upside when their newborn son, Ty, was diagnosed with a nonmalignant tumour in his airway, but these days they see it as “a massive negative that turned into a huge positive”. “The treatment meant he had to spend six months in hospital in Brisbane,” Stewart explains. “Nicole had just started a new job, so it made sense that I was the one who should accompany him down south. So I resigned from my job and went with him. It meant we had to sell our house, but at that stage, all that mattered was that he got better.” Get better he did, and today Ty is a…

Yallum Park’s stately stone homestead and 20 acres [eight hectares] of parkland gardens may resemble an aristocratic English estate. But to Andy and Annie Clifford, it’s just home, a place where every room and everything that’s in them is made to be used. “It’s where I grew up, where I climbed trees and fell out of them,” Andy says. “The land has been in my family for 106 years. Dad was born in the house in 1917 and lived here for all but the last two years of his life. He passed away in 2013 in a nursing home in Penola, which is our local town and where I went to school.” Yallum Park’s history dates back to the spread of the squattocracy across South Australia and the very beginnings…

Hairdressing is practically a performance art as it requires constant social interaction, attention to detail, creativity and good listening and communication skills. No client wants a stylist to have an “off day”, therefore it’s also a pretty unforgiving profession. So it was hardly surprising back in the early 2000s when Newstead stylists Graham Young and Glenn Rogerson decided they needed an escape from their workaday world. Glenn is a keen gardener, so their search for a bolthole from the busyness of Brisbane led pretty promptly to the rich volcanic slopes of the Blackall Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. “One weekend, we went for a drive to Montville and saw a property,” Graham recalls. “By the next weekend, we’d bought it.” While they were very happy with their weekender in…

Blow-to-the-solar-plexus views pan over a luminous Lake Jindabyne and up to the Snowy Mountains range beyond. A mature, tree-filled garden is golden honeycomb in autumn and rose-scented in spring. Elegant European-inspired rooms filled with furs, antlers and old ski paraphernalia line the walls, juxtaposed with a feminine oddity or arrangement of flowers. This is the home of Diana McInnes, business owner, mother and bon vivant. Diana has a distinct style that spills from what she wears, how she lives and what she sells in her much-loved retail store, Design & Detail. It is located in the old shopping centre in East Jindabyne, set among cafés, restaurants and ski-hire outlets. But it's about much more than your usual shopping fare. “The store features a carefully chosen assortment of new and vintage…

In early spring in my garden, honeyeaters are calling out to one another as they flock to the pendulous yellow flowers on the large kowhai (Sophora tetraptera). Every now and then there’s a tussle and a cascade of yellow flowers fall to the ground. There’s already quite a carpet of yellow. As well as the large wattlebirds, there are several smaller honeyeater species including the New Holland honeyeater and the crescent honeyeater. The tree is also buzzing with bees. This show goes on all day from dawn to dusk for several weeks while the tree is in flower and birds also appear before the buds open. From when the colour begins to show, birds drop by to check on the tree’s progress. It is just one of many trees in…

Allison Bellinger cheerfully admits she knew nothing about running an art gallery when she opened her exhibition space in the centre of Inverell in rural northern NSW. The town is better known for agriculture and gemstones than a passing parade of potential art investors. But the former Sydney lawyer trusted her instincts and long interest in art and aesthetics and, in 2016, launched AK Bellinger Gallery with a sell-out show of works by contemporary Australian artist and three-time Archibald Prize finalist Vanessa Stockard. “I’d bought some of her paintings,” Allison explains. “Through the years, we’d become friends and she generously offered to give me my first show. There was real local interest in what I was doing, and opening night was wall-to-wall with people. Vanessa and her husband came up…

Diversify or die is the mantra in the bush these days, and it’s an approach the Walker family has taken to heart at Camden Park, their 18,500-acre (7486-hectare) property near Longreach in central-western Queensland. Camden Park has been owned by the Walkers since 1962, when James (later Sir James) bought the station. Today it is run by his grandsons, James and Daniel, known to all as Outback Dan. James and his wife, Mannie, and their children Sophia, Chloe and James live in the original homestead, while Dan and his wife, Brooke, live with their sons Harley and Ardie. Dan and Brooke lost their little girl, Willow, several years ago, but with typical bush resilience and a lot of community support, they are working together to deal with the tragedy. James…

When Hobart chef Michael Carnes and dentist Bob Lavis went looking for an escape hatch from their busy professional lives, they found precisely what they were looking for on Bruny Island, which is separated from the south-eastern coast of Tasmania by the d’Entrecasteaux Channel. They snapped up a 50-acre (20-hectare) block of land with sweeping views to Cape Queen Elizabeth and its own private beach on Adventure Bay. The bolthole they named Hiba has grown beyond even Bob and Michael’s dreams. While architect John Button, builder Phil Bosnich and metal worker Lance Hansen went to work creating a 700-square metre house that frames the spectacular views of the Great Southern Ocean, Bob and Michael set about turning “an empty paddock with two rows of blackberries” into a vast parkland garden…