Down in the farms
This article first appeared in the Weekend Australian on September 9th-10th 2006
Our holidays used to go like this: private villa in Bali, lounge around by the pool, staff cook gourmet lunch, afternoon nap, sunset drink and a spot of shopping. Or playing it by ear across Vietnam. That was BC (before children).
Enter the Australian farm stay. We’re staring down the barrel of four days and three nights of activities and communal dining with 17 families we don’t know. Our eight year-old thinks it sounds daggy. Secretly we agree.
Mowbray Park, 1 ½ hours’ drive south of Sydney, is the closest farm stay to the NSW capital: it’s a place for cafe dwellers and courtyard-reared children to get out among it. The 200-year old property includes the original homestead and gatekeeper cottages and has a speckled past. In 1920 it was used as a Red Cross rehabilitation centre for war-torn soldiers, then Barnados bought it and used it to give children from the motherland a taste of Australian rural life.
For the past 20 years it has been a play farm for city folk such as us. The 200ha grounds, which include a working property, contain a swimming pool with a heated spa, tennis court and archery complex (well, some boards with targets on the back of a shed).
We are housed in Alverna Lodge, a cottage divided in two. Our half has two dorm rooms, with several metal bunks in each, and a large grey-tiled bathroom with three showers and toilet cubicles. We’re talking practical, not beautiful, but comfortable enough.
But the family in the other half of the cottage may as well be in our quarters, with only a closed glass door separating the two sections. The father bellows louder than Foghorn Leghorn of cartoon fame and their children, fuelled on a dinner of chocolate sauce and ice cream, have no interest in sleep until it’s way past our bedtime. Even our children complain.
We’re up early (so are our neighbours) and there’s an ample hot-and-cold breakfast to fuel us for the first of many tractor trips to the animal nursery. The children are delighted by a rabbit enclosure where they spend hours near-strangling the terrified bunnies. They call it hugging. We’re amused by bottle-feeding the pigs, watching our son drink milk fresh from a cow’s teat and our three-year-old hand-feeding an alpaca.
Then, as though we’ve earned it, there’s a lunch buffet with enough fresh and delicious options to keep everyone happy, topped off by one of the best pavlovas we’ve tasted. Later, there’s boomerang throwing and damper making, swagman-style, rolled around a stick and cooked over an open fire.
We laze under the gum trees in the fading light knowing someone else is preparing dinner and start to relax.
The next morning there’s more bunny-strangling and a demonstration of cattle dogs rounding up sheep.
As the day melts into another glorious, golden afternoon, we take a backside-bruising tractor trip to an outer field to feed the lone bull in a field of 40 rather attractive cows. He’s a happy camper and so are we.
Mowbray Park advertises a children’s club but it’s a loose arrangement. A group of delightful local teenagers lead them around on ponies, handing out colouring-in sets and cordial. We’re confident enough to nick off to nearby Picton for a beer at the historic George Hotel, browse in a great antiques store and have a truly awful coffee at a cafe with a bunch of friendly bikers.
All the activities are run by locally born and bred dairy farmer Peter Ray. He uses strewth in most sentences and means it, and is relentlessly good-humoured, knowledgeable and popular with the children. We leave Mowbray Park relaxed, which with four youngsters is miraculous.
In the end, the diverse backgrounds of the families don’t matter. Tractor rides and children are the great levellers.
The four days fly by and the final vote is the ‘best holiday we’ve ever had’. How can we argue with that?