Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue #23.4 July/August 2020 i Australian Country

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

EDITOR’S LETTER

Well, what a ride we’ve been on since I last wrote. I hope you and your loved ones are all staying well and have found some silver linings in the clouds that have so far darkened 2020. Mine have come from the most unexpected sources: old friends and colleagues have checked in and it’s been lovely to hear from them, there have been video calls with family and friends living remotely and overseas. It’s been wonderful to share perhaps the more mundane aspects of their lives that are usually lost in the busyness of the latest show, movie, concert or event we have attended. With travel off the agenda, it’s been lovely to discuss books we’ve enjoyed, share recipes we’ve discovered and movie and podcast recommendations. Then there have been…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

At home in the Hills

There are some houses money can’t buy. The Adelaide Hills home Glenda Dunlop shares with her husband, Paul Vivian, is a classic case in point. For sure, the late-19th-century bluestone cottage had loads of character thanks to its age and original features. But it wouldn’t be half the showpiece it is if it weren’t for Glenda and Paul’s eye for quirky roadside finds and ability to sift the wheat from the chaff in bric-a-brac and antique stores. In a sense the house found Glenda, as she was hired by its previous owner to maintain the garden while he was doing it up for sale. She’d given up a long career in nursing in Adelaide after she moved with her then husband to a 30-acre (12-hectare) property at Mount Crawford in…

6 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Taste of the Territory

No matter whether you call it impetuosity, following his heart, or arch stupidity, Darwin chef and restaurateur Jimmy Shu has always operated on instinct. It goes some of the way to explaining how, at the bulletproof age of 25, he left all that was familiar and dear in his home country of Sri Lanka and headed first to Singapore and then to Australia. And then, some 20 years later, why he upped stakes yet again and left a successful business in Melbourne to relocate to Darwin. “It’s always been my idiosyncrasy to dive into things,” the owner of Hanuman restaurants in both Darwin and Alice Springs, says. “Then figure out how to make it work.” Make it work he certainly has as Jimmy has now clocked up almost 30 years…

9 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Winter warmers

Onkaparinga Eucalyptus quilt cover, set priced from $119.99, showcases Australian foliage and flowers in a design hand-painted by the brand’s artist in residence. The fabric is a delicate 250-thread-count pure-cotton percale. onkaparinga.com.au Onkaparinga Heirloom Australian wool blankets, priced from $559.95, are made from machine-washable 100 per cent Australian wool. Taking it back to yesteryear, these reversible blankets with a satin edge are available in a light grey to one side and charcoal grey to the other, or a classic check on one side and navy on the reverse. onkaparinga.com.au Onkaparinga’s wool quilt in a Japara cotton cover, priced from $459.95, is made from machine-washable Australian wool. Thanks to its natural temperature-regulating properties, the quilt will keep you warm in winter and cool in summer. onkaparinga.com.au Available in a bold red…

5 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Store strolling

REAL FLAME The Pure Vision Real Flame firebox is designed to be recessed into a flush wall or frame. Available in several finishes, this firebox can include an optional glass back to allow viewing from other rooms or provide an extended perspective in a single space. realflame.com.au COOMBER BROS Coomber Bros has been supplying customers from all over Australia with quality giftwares and hand-crafted jewellery since 1919. This beautiful sapphire and diamond ring is a remodelling of a client’s old rings into a beautiful new piece. coomberbros.com.au REAL FLAME The Element range of Real Flame fireplaces combines clean lines with a beautiful flame pattern and multiple media options. The Element also has Wi-Fi capability with an app enabling operation of your fire from your smart device so your room is…

4 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

WIN A PRIZE

We appreciate your thoughts and in each issue, one correspondent wins a prize. Simply email Kirsty at kmckenzie@ umco.com.au or write to us at Australian Country, Locked Bag 154, North Ryde NSW 1670. We reserve the right to edit lengthy letters before publication. Our favourite correspondent next issue will win a fabulous set of cosmetics from our friends at Charlotte Tilbury. Just send us your thoughts on the magazine and life in general to be in the running for this wonderful prize.…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

HELPING OUT ON THIS ISSUE ...

ANASTASIA KARIOFYLLIDIS Anastasia is a lifestyle photographer who has been capturing an array of images from interiors to still life, architecture, gardens, landscapes, food and travel for 12 years. She is based on the Sunshine Coast and photographed the feature on artist Emma Nancarrow. KIM SELBY, PHOTOGRAPHER Kim is a multi-award-winning family, wedding and commercial photographer. She is best known for her natural and emotion-filled lifestyle photography. She loves being able to capture those special little moments that abound in everyday life and knowing people will be looking back at their photos in years to come. She lives in the Macedon Ranges with her husband and two beautiful boys, and has generously shared a peek inside their home for this issue. australiancountry.com.au facebook.com/AustralianCountry @australiancountrymag zinio.com pinterest.com/auscountrymag…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Character study

Given her surname, Jane Campbell says it’s entirely fitting that she’s ended up living in the historic South Australian township of Strathalbyn. As one of the few towns in Australia, and the first in South Australia, to be settled by Scots, many of the 6000-strong population can trace their heritage to the founding families who arrived on the Fairfield in 1839 and tramped over the hills from Adelaide to establish sheep stations surrounding the town on the River Angas. Among them were 10 members of the Rankine family, who went on to build the historic Glenbarr homestead, where an annual highland gathering is still held every March. Strathalbyn today is justifiably proud of its colonial heritage and streetscape, where scenes from the movie Picnic At Hanging Rock were filmed in…

6 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Action station

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 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, three years ago, but with typical bush resilience and a lot of community support, they are working together to deal with the tragedy. James and…

7 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Take me to the Prom

Victorians like to keep a few secrets up their collective sleeve. While several million visitors head to Phillip Island every year, either to see the nightly spectacle of the penguin parade or for the annual blast of the Motorcycle Grand Prix, an extraordinarily high percentage of them — almost three quarters — live in Victoria. And, remarkably, few venture just a little further afield to explore South Gippsland. Even the jewel in the region’s crown, Victoria’s largest coastal wilderness area Wilsons Promontory, records 70 per cent of its annual half a million visitors from within the state. These facts remain a source of bewilderment to anyone who has visited this extraordinary pocket of paradise, with its gateway just one-and-a-half-hours’ drive from Melbourne. It’s also bemusing to locals including Sandra Gawn,…

12 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Off the shelf

A COUNTRY NURSE THEA HAYES, ALLEN & UNWIN, $29.99 Thea Hayes qualified as a nurse in Sydney in 1959 and soon after moved to Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory, where she spent the next 20 years as a nurse, wife and mother of four. She has since lived and worked all over, from Toogoolawah and North Stradbroke Island in Queensland to the NSW Riverina, London and just about everywhere in between. This memoir continues the journey that Thea wrote about in An Outback Nurse (Allen & Unwin, 2014). Even though she’s now in her 80s, she says she has no intention of settling down. GLIDE LISA FORREST, ALLEN & UNWIN, $29.99 In 1978, Lisa Forrest swam her way into Australian sporting history when, at the age of 14,…

5 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

For our next issue ...

We’ve traversed Australia from coast to coast in search of some fabulous stories about rural and regional people and their lifestyles and businesses. We start with a handsome homestead in tranquil Toodyay in WA’s Avon Valley and end up on the other side of the country in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland where ceramicist Mel Lumb has a gorgeous home and studio. We head to the country music capital of Tamworth, NSW, where artist Carina Chambers celebrates a different dimension of country life with her works inspired by a childhood spent on a farm surrounded by a menagerie of animals. A bit further up the New England highway we visit Tina and Tom Skipper, custodians of land at Guyra that has belonged to their family since 1838. Then we track south…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Stockists & contacts

Belle Couleur Shop 67, 322 Coventry St, South Melbourne Market Vic 3205; ph: 0417 913 192 e: melissa@bellecouleur.com.au w: bellecouleur.com.au Birdsnest ph: 1300 696 378 w: birdsnest.com.au Castworks 57 Industrial Dr, Braeside Vic 3195 ph: (03) 9588 1169 e: info@castworks.com.au w: castworks.com.au Chelsea Park 589 Moss Vale Rd, Burradoo NSW 2576 ph: (02) 4861 7046 e: chelsea@netkey.com.au w: chelseaparkbnb.com Clementine Sleepwear ph: 1800 336 153 w: clementinesleepwear.com.au CoomberBrosJewellery 78 McDowell St, Roma Qld 4455 ph: (07) 4622 1145 e: sales@coomberbros.com.au w: coomberbros.com.au Cotswold InOut Furniture 29/69 O’Riordan St, Alexandria NSW 2015 ph: (02) 9906 3686 e: sales@cotswoldfurniture. com.au w: cotswoldfurniture.com.au Easycraft w: easycraft.com.au EmuWire Industries 2/25 Encore Ave, Somerton Vic 3062; ph: (03) 9308 5599 e: sales@emuwire.com.au w: emuwire.com.au Euro Fireplaces 165 Mount Buller Rd, Mansfield Vic 3722 ph: 1300…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Naturally connected

Given his druthers, Carl Nancarrow would probably be living on a vast cattle station somewhere back of Bourke. His wife, landscape and still-life artist Emma, prefers a more urban existence, close to the art galleries that nourish her soul and the beach where she grew up on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The compromise was somewhere in between, on a 30-acre (12-hectare) property called Springview in the Noosa hinterland. The farm allows Carl to keep one foot in the bush, as he uses it to fatten Droughtmaster steers, and gives Emma space to indulge her passion for gardening with a large vegie patch, orchard and loads of flowering natives. It’s also a wonderful location for their sons, Charlie, aged 16, and Levi, 12, to ride motocross bikes and free-range with their friends.…

4 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Tales from the heart

There’s an unforgettable moment when you drive through Heavitree Gap, a broad rift in central Australia’s MacDonnell Ranges, as Alice Springs reveals itself in all its sprawling splendour. The Ghan railway line and the Stuart Highway that connect the Red Centre with Darwin and Adelaide pass through this great gouge in the ancient rock face and, when it rains, the Todd River also flows through it. It’s an entrance as dramatic as a theatre curtain rising as the desert landscape gives way to outback suburbia. For corporate lawyer and author Tanya Heaslip, driving through The Gap means homecoming. Having spent her childhood on the 1515-square-kilometre Bond Springs cattle station just north of town, she has lived and worked all over the world. Her journey began in Adelaide where she went…

8 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

The Selby is in her place

As existential crises go, Kim Selby’s was slow in ferment, but swift in resolution. With her English husband, Mike, in tow, she returned in 2004 from a decade living and working overseas. Although she’d been feeling increasingly homesick since images from the Sydney 2000 Olympics reminded her what she was missing in Australia, neither was settling into life in Melbourne as well as they anticipated. Kim was working as an office manager in a Melbourne office tower taking minutes for yet another interminable meeting and metaphorically tapping her fingers on the desk wishing it would end soon. As her gaze drifted out the boardroom window, she spotted a sign for a photographic college across the road. “I’d always been a keen amateur photographer,” she recalls. “But in that instant, I…

6 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Out & about

Apple and Grape Harvest Festival The biennial 2020 Apple and Grape Harvest Festival was staged in Stanthorpe at the end of summer, celebrating the grape crush and apple harvest. Thanks to some long-awaited rain on Queensland’s Granite Belt, the countryside was transformed back to a carpet of green, and locals and visitors took time out to relax and enjoy the festivities in the brief window between fires, drought and more recent challenges. Local wineries, apple growers and food producers shared the 10-day celebration, which lifted the spirits of the community. Festival highlights included a celebrity grape-crushing competition, tours of the apple orchards, a street parade and live entertainment. As well as discovering local food and wine at events, including an Italian long lunch and a fiesta in the park, the…

1 min

Australian Country|Issue #23.4 July/August 2020

Mailbag

ISOLATION IN SUBURBIA I’m isolating in my suburban Melbourne home and reading your mag. We love our home and garden including my she shed, Buck Cottage. What a beautiful country we live in. Your magazine is now on my shopping list. Veronica Argus, Sunshine VIC STAYING CONNECTED The striking cover of your April/May edition was a poignant reminder of what so many had been through during our harsh and unforgiving summer. Reading in isolation, like others around the country, allowed me appreciate how your magazine enables us to stay connected and share our many different lifestyles. In these uncertain times we understand even more how important our homes are, as safe places to work and rest, as well as to create and reflect. Janet Mackender, Aberfeldie VIC THOUGHTS FROM THE…

3 min