A ppearances can be deceptive, so you’d never know from the lush oasis Gayle and Dennis Scott have built around their home that they’ve literally carved it out of a rocky paddock. “The site was bare except for a few box trees,” Dennis says as he surv

When Janelle Marsden graduated from high school in Wangaratta and high-tailed it to Melbourne to study architecture, she never imagined she’d end up returning to north-east Victoria to live. However, that’s precisely how the cards fell and she’s very

When Canadian nurse Deanna Bitar and three friends arrived in Australia, it was meant to be for a working holiday. Fifty years down the track, Deanna is still here, married to her husband, Samih, for almost as many years and with no intention of ever

While most people would have found home schooling three teenagers enough of a challenge during the COVID lockdowns, journalist and author Siobhan O’Brien felt the need to stretch herself just a little bit further. First, she and her husband, accompli

Twenty-year-old Josie Golledge grew up in Australia’s “horse capital” — Scone in the New South Wales Upper Hunter. For the past three years, she has been living and working as a station hand on cattle stations in outback Queensland and the Northern T

As the ancient proverb goes, “fortune favours the brave”. It was a maxim Wangaratta furniture store owners Taylor and Casey McPhail embraced when their business was struggling at the beginning of 2020 as the first COVID lockdowns shut the country dow

As a child growing up on farm in northern Tasmania, restaurteur Hayley Self was notorious for stealing her mother’s Chanel perfume bottles and disappearing into the paddocks to pick herbs and wildflowers in endless attempts to create her own potions

Pastry chef Kirsten Tibballs’ name is synonymous with chocolate. As the director of The Savour School, both online and in Melbourne, she teaches her art to students from all over the world. She has her own TV show and is a regular on MasterChef Austr

Delivering home-cooked meals to time-poor people has never been just business to Gippsland entrepreneur Kirstie Van Den Dolder. Having tragically lost her daughter, Makenzi, at the age of 20, only five months before opening K Lee’s Kitchen, her busin

Stand close to almost any cliff on the Great Ocean Road, and you appreciate the perils of the shipwreck coast, serrated as a knife along the rim of the wild Southern Ocean. More than 700 hulks lie in the fathomless depths of this graveyard beneath th

When Matt White and Britt Howard decided to return to Australia after years living and working in the US, they had a pretty definite wish list for their new home. They wanted to live in the country, but not too remote. It had to be close to the ocean

It has to be one of the most heart-wrenching telegrams in the history of the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS). The year was 1975, long before the advent of the digital radio concentrator system and satellites, which made telecommunications in the o

Edwina Moutray's work was judged head and shoulders above the rest by readers who voted online. Edwina is a former school teacher, now a rural lifestyle photographer, based in the Coddington district of south-western Victoria. As well as documenting

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The spectre of the bushfi res of summer 2019 looms large over the garden at Keewaydin, the home of Rae and Guy Sim at Running Stream in the NSW mid-west. On one dreadful December evening, the Sims watched in horror as fi re surrounded their home on 4

It is dawn on ANZAC Day in Onslow, Western Australia and the new sun appears over the Indian Ocean to pierce the war memorial, blazing through the centre of an arch mirroring its rising. The memorial is built specifi cally to capture these rays on th

Danielle came to Australia from America in 2016 with a degree in art history and stints at California's legendary French Laundry and Chez Panisse restaurants under her belt. She added another notch to that list of accomplishments when she headed up t

Hannah Fredericksen is not normally one to sit still. She chases her dreams, however ambitious they may be. She chose a job far different to that of anyone in her family and practically “stalked” an area of Australia for 10 years, having her heart se