Australian Country

When you’ve spent your whole life in a small country town where everyone knows everyone and community gatherings are more like big family reunions, pulling up stumps to start a new life elsewhere can be daunting. After growing up together in the cent

Forget beer budgets. Grace and Fernando Ferreira cheerfully admit they had Champagne taste on a water budget when it came to their new home on a semi-rural site close to Queanbeyan and with easy access to the national capital. With an owner-builder’s

On any given day, Simone Williams may be jetting into New York or touching down in Tokyo as part of her day job as a Qantas cabin service manager, but there’s always one place she’d much prefer to be — her sprawling Gold Coast hinterland property, Hi

The European history of the Orange district of central-western NSW goes back almost to the foundation of colony. A steady flow of pastoralists followed in the wake of the crossing of the Blue Mountains as squatters and their stock took up runs on the

Living and raising a young family in a large heritage house in the middle of South Australia’s Clare Valley may sound like a romantic fantasy, but for Alice and Andrew Duncan sometimes it feels more like a cold, hard dose of reality. The Duncans m

It’s shearing time at Tuckokcowie station near Warooka on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, so the little shed on Richard and Lee-Anne Murdoch’s farm is buzzing with activity. The Merino flock, which is spread across the property’s home block and ne

For most people, the word UGG is synonymous with Australia: just like Vegemite and the Hills Hoist, our iconic sheepskin footwear is known the world over. But what most don’t realise is that UGG is not in and of itself a brand, but a generic name for

PREVIOUS PAGES Cheminees has recently introduced a stunning range of corner-view fireplaces such as this Philippe Radiante 873 2V to reveal the full beauty of the dancing fire. Offering a choice of sizes, left- or right-hand-side glass with single- o

Locals like to boast that Stanthorpe, the main town in Queensland’s Granite Belt, is the state’s coolest town. At elevations between 800 and 1200 metres, this energetic farming and winemaking region does experience a real winter — and even occasional

When the paddocks are brown and the lake is dry, there will always be a green patch around the homestead on Alan and Marilyn Wilson’s Oakwood farm near Minlaton on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. That’s thanks to the couple’s combined efforts acro

There’s no such thing as a straight line in nature and Fred Fahey has done his best to follow this inspiration in the garden he has created in the NSW central-west. The Cowra agricultural pilot and his wife, Colleen, have created a splendid park-like

When Bev Ruskey announced that she was opening a tea house high in the hills between Boonah and Killarney in south-east Queensland, the response was unanimous: she was barking mad and the enterprise was doomed to fail. Undeterred, she went ahead and

We’re celebrating the diversity of Australian country living from the city fringes to the outback. We start in central Queensland where Ingrid and Paul Hatton run Santa Gertrudis on Dareen station. Heading south, we take in another historic property