Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 28.3 i Australian Country

Growing up on the NSW Central Coast, author and journalist Lauren McKellar was practically born with printers’ ink in her veins. Her builder father and nurse mother were both avid readers and her grandparents ran a newsagency, where Lauren worked after school from about the age of 12. “I was surrounded by books and magazines,” she recalls. “One of the highlights of the week was going to our local bookstore with my dad. He would pick up his latest fix of horse racing thrillers — often by Dick Francis — and I'd get another dose of my favourite genre, which at the time was fantasy.” Lauren grew into a “nerdy kind of teenager who went to a selective high school and did four-unit English for the HSC [Higher School Certificate]”,…

As Tasmanian businessman turned regenerative farmer Mathew Routley drives through the lush paddocks on Riversdale, his 1000-acre (405-hectare) farm midway between Launceston and Hobart on Tasmania's east coast, it's hard to imagine that when he bought the property in 2017, it was a dustbowl. Mathew explains that after two centuries running sheep on the property at the confluence of the Swan and Wye Rivers with Bluemans Creek, the land had degraded through soil compaction and generations of pesticide and fertiliser use that reduced pasture diversity. These days, after almost a decade of natural sequence farming — a landscape regeneration method that relies on retaining water by controlling and enhancing natural water flows and allowing weeds to improve soil quality and add diversity to livestock fodder — the land is recovering…

Willie Huch is praying. It's a lilting song of longing and belonging performed at the edge of the wild river that thunders through the core of the North Island in New Zealand (Aotearoa). The Whanganui River (known to Māori as Te Awa Tupua) is the longest navigable river in the country and Willie Huch is a river guardian up to his knees in water. A posse of young kayakers is clinched tightly into bright safety jackets preparing to tackle an 88-kilometre, threeday canoe expedition considered to be one of New Zealand's Great Walks (albeit on water). “You only know where you are going by knowing where you have come from,” Willie says. “The song speaks to our ancestors, our connections from mountains to sea, it tells how we are one…

Sally Grundy and her husband, Colin, are the fifth generation of Colin's family to run Mundoo Island station, a sheep and cattle operation on the Coorong in South Australia. In 1997, they opened an ecotourism operation to allow locals and visitors to enjoy the unique environment that encompasses the saltwater of the Coorong on one side of their islands and the freshwater of the Murray River on the other. Three of the five barrages traverse the property and, apart from their guests, there is no public access to the islands. At certain times of year, the Grundys offer farmstays, Coorong camping, birdwatching and historic station and photography tours. Sally says their guests have enabled her to see the property from a different perspective. She caught the photography bug and now…

Midnight in Tasmania has a way of sparking curiosity. For Alan Townsend, it led to an extraordinary discovery in his 1850s heritage home near Kempton. Driven by a restless curiosity, armed with scraper and ladder, he ventured into one of the front rooms expecting to uncover what he believed would be red flock wallpaper mentioned in historical records. Instead, beneath decades of paint and paper, he found something much more remarkable. Three layers of original wallpaper had been perfectly preserved. At the intersection of wall and ceiling, an exquisite French design emerged — delicate gold patterns on a blue background — printed on thick cotton rag paper. “It was just beautiful,” Alan recalls. “Straight away, I was struck by the idea of putting that paper back in the room.” What…

It was meant to be a downsize. When Janine Cullen and her partner, Gordon Critcher, set out to look for a new home after decades of living in the Wollongong beachside suburb of Woonona, they were looking for a small house with a view and less maintenance than their family home. Their search took them from Forster on the NSW Mid-North Coast to Cairns in far-north Queensland. Having rejected every place they visited — too hot, too busy, too isolated — they were on the way back to the NSW South Coast when they stopped at Lennox Head for lunch with friends. “As it turned out, our friends’ parents were moving from their hinterland home, so we went to have a look,” Janine recalls. “While we were up there, we…

Melana Bradley candidly admits she didn't know an annual from a perennial when she married her stock agent husband, Simon. The former nurse from the New Zealand North Island regional centre of Taumarunui, population 6000-odd, clearly remembers her mother-in-law asking her what she was going to do with two tiny beds at the entrance to their country cottage. “I just looked at her and said ‘I have no idea’,” Melana recalls. “Her response was ‘we're going to the garden centre’. From this inauspicious start, Melana has gone on to build a showpiece garden on their farm a few kilometres south of Taumarunui. These days, it's open every day to visitors, more than 600 annually, who come to enjoy the tranquillity or take a birdsong-filled break on the drive from Auckland…

MEASUREMENTS Width 20cm Length (approx, excluding neck) 29cm PATONS TOTEM MERINO 8 PLY 50g balls 1 ball each: 1st Colour (C1 – 4443 Paris Pink) 2nd Colour (C2 – 4429 Catkin Green) 3rd Colour (C3 – 4442 Blazer Blue) 4th Colour (C4 – 4411 Burnt Toffee) 5th Colour (C5 – 4441 Hazlemere) 6th Colour (C6 – 4416 Burnt Orange) 7th Colour (C7 – 4396 Cerulean) Use only the yarn specified. Other yarns are likely to produce different results. HOOK AND EXTRAS 4mm crochet hook or size needed to give correct tension 4 buttons wool needle for sewing seams standard 2-litre hot water bottle TENSION Rounds 1 to 5 inclusive of Cover Panel to measure 11cm across, using 4mm hook. Check your tension carefully. If first 5 rounds are larger than 11cm…

JULY 12 (NT) Nt Irish Music Festival Expect a day packed with music, dancing, and unbeatable craic when the NT Irish Music Festival returns to the Darwin Ski Club with an epic celebration under glorious dry season skies and legendary Darwin sunsets. Enjoy foot-stomping live music and high-energy Irish dancing, indulge in delicious traditional Irish fare and raise a glass (or two) of Magners and Guinness to keep the festivities going. ntirish.org.au JUNE (NSW) Storyfest Stephanie Alexander, Candice Fox, Richard Glover and Markus Zusak will headline Milton-Ulladulla's dynamic storytelling festival with a who's who of contemporary Australian authors, journalists, musicians, chefs, poets, broadcasters and thinkers. The festival will take over five iconic venues including Ulladulla Civic Centre, the historic Milton Theatre and local foodie favourites Milk HAUS and Cupitt's Estate…

When Glenda Dunlop and husband Paul Vivian bought property in South Australia's Mundulla, the almost 300-kilometre drive down from the state's capital didn't faze them. So much so, Glenda makes the three-hour drive about once every 10 days, between trips to her house in the Adelaide Hills and picking up the grandkids from school in the city. The couple bought the Mundulla property five years ago and, while it's Glenda who has roots in the small town, it was Paul who initially wanted to buy there. “My parents lived there most of their lives,” Glenda says. “So I grew up there until I was 18, then I moved south to Naracoorte for two years to do nursing, before deciding to move to the big smoke [Adelaide]. My mother was in…

Brewing beers and serving tinnies wasn't always on the cards for South Australian Tom Freeman. Like most teens who move from their hometown (in this case South Australia's Renmark) to the big city (Adelaide) for schooling and university, he had no real plans for the future. “Playing cricket for Australia was never going to happen,” he laughs. “Even wine marketing [which he studied at uni] was more of just an interest.” Little did he know that studying wine marketing would eventually serve him well. Fast forward 12 years to 2005 and Tom's parents had called a meeting to discuss the future of the family property, Wilkadene. “They had decided to put the place up for sale,” Tom says. “I didn't want to see that happen, because of all the fond…