Country Style January 2021

I love the beach and being close to the ocean, so it’s been a real pleasure to put this issue together. I think coastal towns are a unique part of country Australia – it’s the lifestyle they offer and the creativity they seem to inspire. Having lived in several beachside communities over the years, I believe residents also have a special link to their environment. Delvene Cockatoo-Collins is testament to this. As a Quandamooka woman, her home is Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island in Queensland) and her connection to country is undeniable. It provides the inspiration and raw materials for her artworks. Read her story on page 24. Going inside Allira and Christian Henderson’s beach shack (see page 46) in Esperance was extremely nostalgic for me. My great-grandparents had a similar home…

CLAIRE Mc FERRAN After falling in love with photography at the tender age of 11, when her grandmother gave her a point-and-shoot, Claire created this month’s stunning cover story for us. “I am endlessly inspired by our wild home of Western Australia,” says photographer Claire, 41, who lives in Perth with her husband David, 47, their daughters Ellie, 13, and Maddie, 11, plus cat Mittens, and chickens Blackie and Goldy. David’s family own a farm in Margaret River, so the family regularly get their fix of the wide-open spaces that Claire loved while growing up. “I had a very adventurous upbringing, spending time in the bush and on the water. Every weekend and holiday I’d be off on some adventure – hiking, kayaking, beaching, sailing, camping – and taking photos of it…

CHRISTMASES PAST I grew up as a city kid but spent Christmas down the Mornington Peninsula in Flinders. My dad’s side of the family all shared a big old house that my great-grandfather built himself. We have so many joy-filled memories of our time at Flinders. We loved exploring the wild garden, sitting on the big creaky verandah and walking down to the beach (and getting an ice-cream from the General Store on the way home). Christmas was a special time for our family, and Mum and Dad went to great lengths to make it an amazing time of year. We always chose a huge tree, decorated it meticulously, sang Christmas carols at the top of our lungs and spent hours wrapping presents. On Christmas morning, we were greeted with a beautiful…

I HOPE BY THE TIME YOU’RE READING THIS I will be firmly installed at our shack for a few weeks of total disconnect. The tradition of going to the shack puts a particularly Tasmanian twist on Australia’s love affair with a summer break. When I moved here from NSW it was not an expression I was familiar with. “Come to the shack for Christmas,” the farmer said. “The shack,” I said. “You mean like a beach house?” “No,” he said, equally puzzled, “a shack.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines a shack as a roughly built cabin or hut, especially of logs or metal sheeting (surely the English way of saying corrugated iron). What the dictionary doesn’t say is a Tasmanian shack is a dwelling born of ingenuity and commitment. Shack communities…

IF THE ELEGANT LINES and immaculate joinery of Michele Diener’s handmade furniture look like art, it’s because she came to the craft via a fine arts degree. An ardent photographer from a young age, she always knew that her future lay in a creative field. Ironically, it was a pin-hole camera that she made in high school that drew her away from two-dimensional art into an exploration of more functional, three-dimensional creations. At university, she embarked on a sculpture degree and soon fell in love with wood. “I loved exploring materials,” she says. “I worked with everything – plastic, concrete and metal. At that stage when you’re so young, you just want to try it all. Then I became more exposed to the formal qualities of how you use wood and…

AN ISOLATED POSTCODE is never more significant than during a medical emergency. People living beyond the certainty of reliable phone reception live with this every day; a stark line in the sand between those who can cry for help and those who may have to wait a long time for a reply. While living remotely never daunted Elisha Parker, having her baby son vomiting blood one night was a stab of reality. “I was just so thankful to have the Royal Flying Doctor Service,” she says from her Clermont home, around five hours west of Rockhampton, Queensland. “I learnt a very valuable lesson as a mum to never give children new foods after lunchtime so you have daytime hours for help. Obviously, living where I did, this was vital.” It turned out…