Te Aute Crossroad S1 E7

Episode 7: The Dreaming

The lemon-scented Gums at Cruden Farm

We have a cookbook in our collection—Maggie’s Table—by Maggie Beer, the chef, food writer, and food manufacturer. It was an inspired farewell gift from Steven Cornwell, the gifted designer and wonderful man we worked with on the Passenger Transport project.

An inspired gift because he had identified the Why. As Maggie writes in her introduction…

It was the luckiest accident of my life that Colin and I settled in South Australia’s Barossa Valley. If I believed in such things, I might say that fate had a hand in it all: it has always felt that it was just meant to be. Whatever the reason, the quality of our life here is so deep and rich.

The vendor at The Brow was a reluctant seller. Even though we’d taken the estate agent’s advice and offered the asking price, it was weeks before he accepted and only then on condition of a three-month settlement. We spent this time in the dreaming: in Aboriginal culture, the period when life was created. For us, the period we spent imagining what our new life was to be.

We weren’t moving for work: we had no jobs to go to. In fact, we were done with work and abusive CEOs and the jungle-gym-scrabble of life in the city. As Steve had divined, we were moving because we wanted to live the dream in Maggie’s gorgeous book…

wandering out in the early morning to choose fruit for breakfast or to walk through the orchard on a summer’s evening, when the scent of the fruit declares its ripeness, to pick asparagus or artichokes that will go into the pot within minutes.

We would have a vegie garden. Within a garden. With an orchard. And lemon-scented gums like those at Cruden Farm, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch¹’s garden at Langwarrin, where we’d been. A garden in the New American style of Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden, or Piet Oudolf; people whose books on garden design I was devouring.

We’d grow olives—or whatever—to make a living, but do some consulting in the meantime, while we renovated the house. And we’d go for picnics, down by the stream on the lower boundary of the property. Perhaps we could do up the shearers’ quarters, and the woolshed, as bed-and-breakfast accommodation?

And we’d bake bread and make pasta with tuna and zucchini flowers from Maggie’s book, and green tomato chutney and fig galette. It would be a simple life.

Of course, we’d probably need a tractor.

With three months in the dreaming, we were able to build some fantastic castles in the air…

1. Rupert’s Mum