Discover why the Fleurieu Peninsula has charmed so many
DEVOTEES explain why they’ve fallen for the charms of the Fleurieu Peninsula.
CHILLED out, gorgeous scenery, affordable, and a sense of community – the Fleurieu Peninsula’s mix of country and coastal appeal is making it a popular base for
successful people prepared to commute to work anywhere in the world.
Today we talk to devotees about why they’ve fallen for its charms – 800 Words star Erik Thomson, Sia’s favourite soundman Jon Lemon, actress Eugenia Fragos, and media commentator and former editor Mark Day and wife Wendy, publicist for Nicole Kidman.
Erik Thomson
Erik Thomson is trying not to look at the waves as they peel off near the shoreline at Port Willunga. He still surfs and a good swell on this stretch of coast is rare enough – and here he is, stuck on the beach.
“It’s kind of fickle around here so you’ve got to grab them when you can,” he says.
South Australia’s southern beaches are the adopted home of Australia’s favourite TV dad, 49, who won a Silver Logie this year for his role as Charles Turner in the family drama 800 Words. He came here from Scotland, which he left when he was seven, via New Zealand, where he grew up and became an actor with parts in Xena: Warrior Princess – he played Hades – and Young Hercules with a fledgling Ryan Gosling.
In his late 20s he was in a bizarre melodrama (his words), Pacific Drive, which was filmed on the Gold Coast. The show was crap, he says, but he stayed for the surfing lifestyle and met Jo Porter who went on to produce his star vehicles All Saints, Packed to the Rafters and 800 Words, now in its second season on Channel 7.
“She’s a good friend of mine and we work together well professionally and keep in touch all the time,” he says. “I met a whole lot of people and it was that whole networking thing. Suddenly you can pick up the phone.”
The move to Port Willunga happened in 2006 through the connections of his wife, actress Caitlin McDougall, who played Sandra Todd in the series Always Greener.
McDougall is strongly tied to the Fleurieu, and to Penny’s Hill Winery through the Dowie family. Her grandmother Peg owned the stone hotel on the Esplanade, which is where Caitlin spent holidays. The area was special to her and he fell in love with it, too.
“It’s beautiful physically, it’s chilled out, it’s affordable, and with Caitlin’s family living here suddenly I had a whole lot of relatives,” Thomson says. “I felt like I belonged (in Australia) a bit more.”
When a place came up they jumped on it. It seemed a rash move but they had thought about it long enough and moved quickly when the opportunity arose. Not long after, Thomson was cast in Packed to the Rafters as Dave, the husband of Julie Rafter (Rebecca Gibney). It meant commuting to Sydney but by then the decision was made.
“In this business it’s kind of feast or famine,” he says. “I also think it’s important not to be fizzing at that level too much. People can tire of you and you need to replenish yourself. ”
Port Willunga is far enough away from Sydney and Melbourne to be out of the industry loop but still close enough to commute where needed. They sold in Sydney to fund the Fleurieu move and left behind the stresses of the property market. The move has coincided, too, with the birth of their children, Eilish, who is nine, and Magnus, five. McDougall became a full-time parent while Thomson’s career took off with Packed to the Rafters and now 800 Words.
His role as the grieving husband and father George Turner, who uproots his teenage children and moves to New Zealand, came at a trickier time. The children were old enough to be unsettled by change and the first season needed three months in New Zealand, which meant a separation was manageable. The second season was a tougher ask.
“When they told me it was six months I thought ‘how am I going to break this to Caitlin?’,” he says. “It’s too long to be apart. If we were in Sydney you could conceivably fly home for the weekends from Auckland but South Australia is just that little bit too far.”
So they all went, back to the country of Thomson’s youth, which is still so familiar to him and where he still has friends in the industry. “I just kind of walk around my past in many ways and bring it into the present,” he says. “I was working with actors who have known me since the beginning of my career, since I was 16, 17-years-old. They know my whole story.”
Now back in Port Willunga, his children at school, he is not anxious to repeat such a long break away. He says the trip is playing on his daughter’s mind and he has had to reassure her she can relax and put down roots here. Even if they have to nip off every now and again, this is home.
The New Zealand shoot was non-negotiable because the setting gives 800 Words its novel, even exotic flavour. Through his friendship with Jo Porter, Thomson became an associate producer and helped steer the production through the hurdle of its New Zealand setting. Thomson says he was emailed a script treatment at the end of 2012; he loved it and wanted to interest Channel 7, to which he was contracted.
“We put together a buzz-reel on it. I did a voiceover in a mate’s car – he’s a sound recordist who lives at Aldinga – and we emailed it back to New Zealand,” he says. “They put it together, flew to Sydney, pitched it with me attached and they loved it.”
There was one reservation. Would audiences identify strongly enough with a storyline set in another country? It had never been done before on prime time. To claw back some balance, it was rewritten to include more Australian characters, so audiences would feel more at home.
“Because it was an Aussie family moving to New Zealand, we kind of brought the Aussies with us so that made it possible,” he says.
“Finally Channel 7 said ‘yes, let’s give it a go’.” The show, whose first season had an average weekly audience of 2.1 million viewers, challenged assumptions in another way. It is rare for a prime time family program to have a male in the leading role. Successful series like Offspring and Packed to the Rafters are deliberately women-friendly and the female leads – Rebecca Gibney, Lisa McCune, Sigrid Thornton – speak strongly to that demographic. Thomson knew this but had also been to a workshop run by an American television writer who was asked if there could be an exception; he was told, yes, maybe if the lead was a widower.
It’s no plot spoiler to say that George Turner has lost his wife, threw in his job as a columnist (who writes 800 words) and moved to New Zealand to start again. “He’s loved his wife to the very end, there’s a sadness there, and he’s left with a couple of kids and that kind of character appeals to a female audience,” Thomson says. “It made sense to me.”
George, through no fault of his own, has to bumble along as a parent and maybe one day, become someone else’s boyfriend and lover. It’s a sympathetic storyline in which viewers can emotionally invest.
“The struggles are real. Him and the teenage kids, they’re all kind of wounded,” Thomson says. “He makes some really bad choices, thinking they are good ones, but they are coming from the right place.”
Now well into its second season it is currently the top drama on television, which means there is a possibility of a third season, although George Turner may have to stay single and miserable for that to happen. He can be happy but not too happy.
“There’s a crack every now and again, and we let that remind the audience these people are still dealing with a big emotional thing,” he says. “You don’t want to frustrate the audience but you want to keep it real and interesting and not arrive at nirvana.”
A third season would mean leaving Port Willunga again. Now Magnus has turned five, McDougall is starting to think about acting again so maybe she will be next to leave. Thomson’s recognition factor from widely-watched, family-friendly shows has rocketed and he is more than happy to spread the limelight around.
800 words is on Channel 7 on Tuesday nights at 8.45pm
Eugenia Fragos
Actor Eugenia Fragos was born in Adelaide to Greek immigrant parents. She studied acting at the Victorian College of the Arts where she met her husband, playwright Andrew Bovell. The couple married in 1988 and moved to Willunga in 2000 with their three young children.
We had always harboured a dream about living in the country. Andrew is essentially a country boy (from WA) and Dad bought and planted their vineyard in the Willunga Basin when I was eight years old.
I had a lot of wonderful memories of those early days on the farm, working the block, harvesting the grapes, picking the olives and making the oil, staying overnight in the old Morris truck when there was watering to be done.
Mum and Dad built their house there after I had left home. So, we had an identity here already. I don’t know if we could have made the move if we hadn’t.
Our place in St Kilda was tiny, only two bedrooms and three kids. We had a quote for a renovation and it was just about the cost of the farm we went on to buy in Willunga.
Our income in those days was very precarious and we thought, ‘Let’s take a step back’. With three kids we were no longer really availing ourselves of the best of what inner city life has to offer anyway, and something atavistic had awakened in me.
I needed my mum’s help with the kids and I knew we wouldn’t starve if we moved back to be closer to family and all the abundance this area has to offer.
We also knew we had a small window to make such a wrenching move before our kids hit their adolescence.
It was important to me that they had a sense of their Greek identity and that was probably only going to happen by growing up closer to their grandparents.
In those early days I thought, ‘Am I just replicating my father’s migrant dilemma by moving here?’.
Dad pined for Greece when he was in Australia but couldn’t live there permanently because he pined for us when he was there.
That was my experience for the first decade here in SA, and all my work was still coming out of our Melbourne networks and still does, largely. I didn’t have much work in Adelaide for a good decade.
I still pined for Melbourne, pined for friends and a very vibrant artistic network. I really underestimated how precious those networks were and how time consuming it would be to rebuild them elsewhere.
I can try and rationalise the move this way and that, but really these forks in the road, are often calls of the soul and make more sense with hindsight. So why have we stayed? Because of the beauty and ease of living here.
We planted many trees, we grow a lot of our own food, my mum, God bless her, still plies us with her beautiful olive oil and dolmades, and all my children are very close to her. And I love the community spirit here.
This region is made up of some wonderful tribes: the winemakers, the footy crew, the Waldorf crew, the Willunga High mob. It’s not just one main social demographic as it is in inner cities and our family has been greatly enriched by those friendships.
One time I was working in Sydney on a play and I bumped into an older friend from my youth in Adelaide, Phillip Searle. He now lives in the Blue Mountains and I was telling him about our move to Willunga and my reservations about whether or not we had done the right thing and he said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve just made the move 20 years earlier than most of your friends probably will. Wait till they hit their fifties’.
And he was right. So many of our friends are now preparing places in the country or coast they can retire to, worn down by big city life.
I think Andrew would have moved on from the farm by now if I had been willing, but I’m not ready yet. Every bit of our place feels like home to me. That type of peace is hard-fought and while we have the stamina for our place we’ll stay.
Despite some career limitations it has entailed for me, our farm has been a wonderful haven for us, and has held us while we go off and do our thing.
To anyone contemplating being an actor I say, it will ask a lot of you. I am involved with a few projects next year but there are never any guarantees that they will come to fruition.
One is a project with a company called Outer Urban Projects that works out of the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I am in Greece this month partly to holiday but also to work with a director, Eugenia Tzirtzilaki. The theme is economic suicide – the suicide rate in Greece has tripled since the crisis.
And fingers crossed that we get to tour Things I Know To Be True (written by Bovell for Fragos).
It is a homegrown project and one we are very proud of.
Mark Day and Wendy Day
Mark Day is a former editor of the Sunday Mail and publisher of The Australian and has been a journalist for 56 years, starting at The News in 1960. Wendy Day has been one of Australia’s top film publicists since Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) and has been Nicole Kidman’s Australian publicist since 1989.
I am the most fortunate bloke I know. I am blessed to have yin and yang in my life, sharing my time between an apartment overlooking Sydney’s Manly Beach and a cute little heritage cottage in a valley on the Fleurieu Peninsula – Australia’s best-kept secret.
I have lived in Sydney for the best part of 50 years. It has anchored my work and I call it home. I barrack for the Swans. But in the Fleurieu I find my roots. I am of the Fleurieu.
My wife Wendy and I bought our little cottage more than 10 years ago because, as both our parents got older, we could see the value in having a base in or near Adelaide where they lived. They’re all gone now, but we still spend as much time as we can at our hideaway.
Sydney friends come to visit and we delight in showing them around. It’s almost a well-worn route now, but one we never tire of – poking around the antique shops of Strathalbyn, admiring the stone treasures of Port Elliot and Goolwa, fishing for squid, snapper and whiting from Cape Jervis and cockling near the Murray Mouth.
It’s a food and wine, paddock to plate, heaven. We love lunching on King George whiting with a Coopers Pale Ale at Flying Fish at Horseshoe Bay, selecting fine wines at d’Arry’s Verandah or the Salopian Inn at McLaren Vale, or sharing a dinner to match all but the toffiest restaurants in Sydney at Leonard’s Mill at Second Valley.
Don’t scoff at this, but the culinary treats and choices we have here on the Fleurieu are truly a match for any region in the world. The Wakefield Grange butchery and kitchen shop in Yankalilla, where meat hangs in chillers for 80 days, challenges the best in Sydney.
I never planned to have a second home in the Fleurieu. It just kind of happened, but the karma that tells me it was meant to be is everywhere. My great-great-grandfather came to SA from England in 1854 and settled at Willunga where he and his wife are buried in the Uniting Church graveyard.
My grandfather was a chemist at Victor Harbor and my father worked on the barrages at Goolwa during the Great Depression when he met and married my mother. I was born in Victor and our cottage is halfway between Willunga and Victor among olive groves, vineyards, orchards filled with almond blossom and rolling hills dotted with hay bales. It is Provence and Tuscany rolled up, down under.
Sydney seaside apartment life is a no-no for anyone who fancies their green fingers so I spend my time in SA as custodian of our National Trust-listed 1859 cottage and curator of the surrounding four-acre garden.
Winter is yielding to spring and I cannot think of a more satisfying way to enjoy the twilight, nor a more delightful place than SA’s Fleurieu. It is, as the new roadside signs say, “Made by Nature”.
Jon Lemon
Jon Lemon is a live sound engineer in demand worldwide from music stars like Sia
You have to move fast to catch Jon Lemon at home. At least, that’s been the case this year. For the past six months, he’s been travelling almost constantly, on tour first with alternative American pop artist Lana Del Rey and then Sia, the Adelaide-born singer-songwriter who’s now so huge she flies everywhere in a charter jet and plays to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands, who don’t mind the fact that they can’t see her face.
When he speaks with SAWeekend, his suitcase is packed and sitting outside the door of his Port Willunga studio, ready for his 4.30am pick up next morning. Lemon is off to LA, having cut short his two-week break back home because Sia has added more dates to her US tour.
“I met Sia two days after I met (my wife) Jane and she was only about eight or nine months old,” says Lemon. “She’s been a friend for life and it’s fantastic to see her at the top of her game, and I’m there with her. It’s been an exciting year all round.”
Lemon has worked as a live sound engineer since his teens. From a weekend job with an Adelaide PA company, to the pub rock scene on Australia’s east coast in the 1970s and ’80s and the top level of his profession, he has crafted the sound for performers as diverse as Liberace to The Cure, Depeche Mode, Brian Ferry, INXS, Pink Floyd, Tom Waits, Christine Aguilera … and those are just a smattering from a resume that reads like a rock ‘n’ roll hall of fame catalogue.
To have built a reputation as one of the best in the business, anywhere in the world, would be notable for anyone in his profession. That Lemon has done it despite having been legally blind since his late teens is remarkable. He suffers from a rare form of macular degeneration, Stargardt, which afflicts one in 10,000 people, is hereditary and results in loss of central vision from an early age.
“They didn’t really know back then but it probably started when I was seven or eight,” says Lemon. By the time he was aged 10, the formerly high achieving pupil was beginning to have difficulty in the classroom. At 15, he was delivered the shattering news that he would be “profoundly blind” by the time he was 20. “That changed things,” he adds.
When his world fell apart after his diagnosis, he dropped out of school and hit the hippy trail in northern NSW and Queensland, working with bands to fund his travels. At 21, he returned briefly to Adelaide, met the woman who would become his wife and worked with local R&B act Rum Jungle.
Before the year was out, he was signed up by Stephen Cummings from The Sports, and he and Jane moved to Melbourne. He was on his way. A job in Sydney followed, then several years in London. By that time he was so well established he could live anywhere. A house on the west coast of Ireland became the couple’s home base but he travelled constantly to the US and Europe.
Meanwhile, his visits to Adelaide happened only if it was on a tour schedule. In 2003, he was working with Sia, who was planning Christmas in South Australia.
She said why not come too?” recalls Lemon. “So we rented a place in Port Willunga and got slightly hooked.”
He and Jane started coming back regularly and, in 2009, they bought the house that’s now their home.
At the end of 2013, they moved back permanently after a five-year stint in Chicago. “I think so many people living here still do not get how incredible this area is, from a world view,” he says. “It’s more than just food and wine and beach, it’s community.”
Last year, during a lull in his touring schedule, he threw himself into the local scene, and accepted an artist-in-residence position at the Elder Conservatorium.
“I only want to work touring six months of the year but I get bored so I need to be involved with our community, whether it be mixing songs for people or helping young kids by talking to them about music, about what it’s like out there in the wider world of music,” he says. — Deborah Bogle