Maggie Beer turns 80, reflects on the fall that will finally make her slow down

Maggie Beer has never been afraid to break from the status quo. Her love story with husband Colin is no exception, turning an argument into a wedding proposal.

There’s a printout that describes the Japanese concept of Yutori taking pride of place on Maggie Beer’s fridge in her Barossa Valley home.

It’s a word the veteran cook, restaurateur, author, businesswoman and television personality is finally learning to embrace as she celebrates her 80th birthday this weekend.

The printout on her well-used fridge explains the psychological state of living with spaciousness and of being in a state of sufficiency and ease. Of being neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed and of having the space in one’s mind and daily life for the things that are most meaningful. For Maggie, who turns 80 tomorrow and concedes she has always struggled finding the balance between work and relaxation, Yutori is the perfect way to both describe her current life situation, and to give herself permission to ease up from the frantic pace that has been her signature since she left school aged 14.

“I guess with milestone birthdays, I’ve found in my life from the age of 40, really significant … being almost like a lynch pin,” Maggie tells SA Weekend. “And this one is absolutely (like that), knowing that there needs to be this change in the way I live my life.

“Knowing that I’ve been a workaholic, and this is going to sound funny, but that I do deserve time to slow down. This work ethic has been part of my life, all my life.”

Maggie Beer turns 80, in her kitchen at Vine Vale, in The Barossa Valley. Picture: Ben Clark

The 2010 senior Australian of the Year had little choice other than slowing down late last year while she was recovering from a fall in August that left her in the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s ICU unit for 15 days.

She had only recently finished filming her latest TV show Maggie Beer’s Big Mission, had travelled to Canberra to meet with Governor-General Sam Moyston and then returned to SA for a training session for her team of chefs charged with improving the diet in aged care homes.

She was, she admits, “super exhausted” when she fell from her attic bedroom all the way to the bottom of a narrow, steep staircase while carrying two glasses of water about 10.30pm on August 16. Husband Colin, 78, rushed from the TV room when he heard the fall and immediately called an ambulance, which took her straight to the RAH.

She had suffered fractures in her neck, back and sternum plus internal injuries and underwent three operations. After weeks in hospital (her praise is effusive for the staff at the RAH ICU and trauma wards and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s rehabilitation centre) she finally returned home where Colin became her full-time carer.

Maggie Beer at home in Vine Vale. Picture: Ben Clark

Maggie Beer and her husband, Colin in their home at Vine Vale, in The Barossa Valley SA. Pictured on December 19th 2024. Picture: Ben Clark

“It’s been traumatic for both of us, there’s no doubt about that … but she’s recovered pretty well,” Colin says. “It’s long and slow but we’ll get there. It was horrible at the time.”

The couple say Maggie’s injuries were more serious than they first thought and Colin has a new respect for professional carers, a vocation he describes as “full-time and unrelenting”.

He says Maggie approached her recovery with the same single-minded tenacity she has approached the rest of her life, but he also noticed a change in attitude and the recognition from her that it might, at last, be time to take her foot off the accelerator.

For her part, Maggie says her husband has cared for her like no one else could. Colin has even learnt to cook – though he knew Maggie was on the mend when she started interfering again in the kitchen.

“We tease Colin about being a curmudgeon, but he makes me laugh every day of my life and he has been so gentle and caring,” Maggie says.

“He’s made me feel I’m never asking too much. That’s a really big thing. No one else could have done it.”

The love and respect the couple have for each other is evident as we chat in the lead-up to their 55th wedding anniversary.

They were married on January 17, 1970 after a 16-week whirlwind romance that started at a party on the Victorian snowfields of Mt Buller. They were both there earning a buck at the Kooroora Chalet, helping look after well-heeled Melbournites on their ski holidays.

Colin, originally from Mallala in SA, was working behind the bar and Maggie, a Sydneysider, was in the kitchen. They shared a common interest in aviation. She had just come from a job as the assistant to the head of Ansett Airlines’ general aviation division. He had just finished his training as a commercial pilot in New Zealand.

They had noticed each other during their breaks but first struck up a conversation at a staff party, where Maggie says she “made a beeline to him” and they talked all night about planes, runways, airports and all things aviation.

“I had seen her from a distance and I thought ‘she looks all right’ and then one thing led to another,” Colin says more than five and a half decades later.

“Maggie was working in the dining room, making sandwiches. And three weeks later she was running the bloody thing. Six weeks later she got offered a partnership in a restaurant in Melbourne. She was always a goer.”

Maggie laughs as he tells the story. She says his dry wit and ability to make her laugh is the secret to their longevity as a couple. His reply to the same question gives an indication of his sharp sense of humour.

“I just do what I’m told,” he says, eliciting another belly laugh from Maggie, who categorically denies the assertion.

Maggie Beer and her husband Colin. Picture: Supplied

The couple have been inseparable since that Mt Buller party. They had planned to look for work on the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland after the ski season but their car broke down near Redcliffe, near Brisbane, which is where they pledged to spend the rest of their lives together.

Like most of the 55 years that followed, their engagement was anything but textbook. They had an argument one night over the fact that Colin was yet to tell his parents about his new flame, even though they had been together for weeks and stayed with her parents in Sydney.

The next day, Maggie ensured her future in-laws would know who she was by proposing to her beau at the Redcliffe Hotel.

He said yes and they married in Parramatta’s St Patrick’s Cathedral a couple of months later on January 17, two days before Maggie’s 25th birthday.

“It was a heatwave, and the cricket was on, and it was so, so hot,” Maggie says, glancing at Colin as she continues the story. “And I was very late. And you weren’t feeling well – you had a real fluey thing. So he probably thought I wasn’t coming. Did you think I wasn’t coming?”

Colin nods in quiet agreement.

But she eventually did arrive at the church, her parents catered for a reception at the Chester Hill RSL before Maggie and Colin embarked on a three-day honeymoon at Port Macquarie – sharing their accommodation with a couple of friends who slept on the floor.

Maggie Beer and husband Colin trekking in the Izu Peninsula, Japan in 2019. Picture: Supplied

The new Mr and Mrs Beer lived in Sydney for three years to be near Maggie’s parents, who had helped frame her love of both food and music during an adolescence shaped by her father’s bankruptcy after the kitchenware factory he had developed in Greenacre went broke in 1959.

The family lost everything, including their house and furniture. Maggie, the middle sibling with two brothers, was forced to knock back a school scholarship so that she, just like her elder brother, could join the workforce aged 14 to help put food on the family table.

The bankruptcy hit the family hard but eventually her parents, Ron and Doreen Ackerman, picked up the pieces and established a catering business for RSL and leagues clubs in western Sydney.

Maggie says her mum and dad had always been excellent in the kitchen and instilled in their children an appreciation of good food, an aversion to waste and an understanding that fresh, quality produce was the key to producing a good meal.

Even so, it wasn’t until her mid-30s, after a plethora of jobs in a variety of countries, that Maggie realised food was her calling.

In 1973, she and Colin moved to the Barossa Valley and the next year purchased a property between Nuriootpa and Tanunda they turned into a pheasant farm. The venture (and a return to his home state) had long been Colin’s dream.

Colin Beer holding a pheasant in May, 2001.

In 1978 he won a Churchill Fellowship to study game-bird breeding in Europe and while visiting a turkey farm in Scotland, the couple had an epiphany.

The next year they opened a farm shop that sold every part of the quail, pheasant and guinea fowl they were raising. The only problem was none of their customers knew how to prepare the birds, so Maggie started cooking them herself. Before long, they had opened Pheasant Farm Restaurant and Maggie’s journey towards becoming one of the most respected and beloved figures in the Australian food industry had begun.

Daughters Saskia and Elli grew from babies to teenagers as their parents built Pheasant Farm Restaurant into one of South Australia’s finest. In 1991 it won the Gourmet Traveller Remy Martin Award for the best restaurant in Australia. The country-style menu with an emphasis on fresh, local produce had tapped into a nation’s new desire to broaden its culinary horizons. Maggie had no formal training as a chef and was never taught to cook but inherited from her father an innate and innovative instinct for creating flavours.

The restaurant’s success came at a cost. The days were long and weekends non-existent. They were working 15-hour days and Colin delivered an ultimatum – it was either the restaurant or him. He could see his wife was exhausted, unable to delegate and feared the workload was sending her to an early grave.

Maggie Beer holding plate of her pheasant pate in 1997.

And so they closed the restaurant in 1993, the day before Elli’s 18th birthday, while it was at the peak of its popularity.

“I was burnt out, but I wouldn’t have seen it – I really wouldn’t have stopped (if not for Colin’s intervention),” Maggie says.

“It was really hard, but it was very exciting as well and I was driven by it. And it took me probably a year to recover from being burnt out … and depressed, because I didn’t have that thing to wake up to that was going to consume me. That was a really hard time.”

They turned their focus into creating an export kitchen for fine food and in 1999 reopened Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop on the original Pheasant Farm. Their produce eventually morphed into a company called Maggie Beer Products, which they sold in two stages in 2016 and 2019 for a total of $25m to ASX-listed Longtable Group.

(Longtable Group changed its name to Maggie Beer Holdings in 2020. Maggie remains on the board of the company for which 2024 was a tumultuous year – losing both its chief executive and chief financial officers and in August announcing a $28.2m annual loss.)

The Beer family still own and run Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, The Farm Eatery and Cooking School and nearby accommodation venue Orchard House.

Saskia and Elli both followed their parents into the food industry.

Saskia started her own food company Saskia Beer Farm Produce in 1997. Elli opened The Farm Eatery two decades later.

Saskia died peacefully in her sleep in February, 2020, aged 46. Maggie’s voice softens as she recalls the daughter fondly known as Sassie and five years on from that tragedy there are still some things she can’t bring herself to do.

Maggie Beer and Saskia Beer. Picture: supplied

“I want to read all her papers and her speeches but I can’t yet,” she says.

“But we celebrate her all the time (by talking about her), and things do get easier over time. You don’t think they ever will but finally, they do get somewhat easier. When it’s so raw for years, you don’t think it ever will but it does.”

Maggie and Colin announced a Saskia Beer Churchill Fellowship in her memory in 2022. The fellowship supports food lovers like Saskia in pursuing innovative, artisanal, sustainable, regenerative and community-focused approaches to food production.

There is, of course, a wonderful synergy in the Beers giving back to the Churchill Trust – an organisation that had set them on their path to success nearly 50 years earlier.

It was Saskia’s decision in 2005 to turn down an offer to appear on ABC television show Beat The Chef (inspired by Japanese cooking show Iron Chef) that opened the door for the most public chapter in Maggie’s life – television.

Saskia told the ABC producers she wasn’t keen on appearing, but suggested her mother might be a good fit.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Maggie proved a natural in front of the camera – so much so that the next year the ABC teamed her with prominent Adelaide chef Simon Bryant to create The Cook and the Chef, the show that would thrust her into the national psyche.

Maggie Beer and Simon Bryant in 2020. Picture: Matt Loxton

“For me, it was just a lark – it was so much fun,” Maggie says when I ask about her move into television.

“I never took it seriously. I had always known that I had an ability to make people feel comfortable about food and have them have a go. And so it didn’t matter if I stuffed something up, because I knew how to fix it up.”

She says the old idiom of “what you see is what you get” sums up her philosophy in front of the camera and looks back at the four years (2006-2009) and 150 episodes of The Cook and the Chef as one of the most important times in her professional life.

“Simon has the same sense of humour as Colin – I never knew what was coming out of Simon’s mouth and I never know what’s coming out of Colin,” she says. “We were so at ease with each other and learned from each other. And generations of kids with their parents watched it from all over Australia.

“We shared this love of cooking and never stopping learning. We were so different – I run on instinct entirely and Simon runs on science and could explain it, whereas I could feel it and do it, but couldn’t explain it like Simon could.

“Just let it be said that that was an extraordinary time of life. How we ever did it, I’m not sure but it meant a lot to a lot of people, including ourselves.”

Maggie Beer on MasterChef, with judges Andy Allen, Melissa Leong and Jock Zonfrillo. Picture: Network Ten

The success of The Cook and the Chef sparked a myriad of television appearances ranging from MasterChef and The Great Australian Bake Off to a cameo as herself on Kath & Kim. She is also the author of about a dozen cookbooks.

Her appointment as Senior Australian of the Year in 2010 was the catalyst for her next major passion – the Maggie Beer Foundation, an organisation with an ongoing mission to improve the diet of Australia’s elderly, especially those in aged care homes.

Maggie returned to our screens last year for Maggie Beer’s Big Mission, a series that tracked her and a team of experts as they transformed the meals and dining experience at an aged care home in WA. She admits now that the process of filming the show was gruelling and is hesitant to commit to a second series – certainly not one based outside SA.

And after more than a decade campaigning to improve the diet of our elderly, last year’s fall was a chance for her to experience first-hand the menu and some of the dietary issues facing aged care patients.

“They had to feed me through a tube for a long time and after they took the tubes out I had no appetite, and the difficulty was getting enough nutrients in by myself,” she says.

“I’ve always known it but it was a real education that if you don’t have beautifully presented food and the scent of real food, you’re never going to get your appetite back.

“The big thing was getting enough protein in me every day to speed the recovery. It was everything I talk about in aged care.

“I actually experienced having no appetite but knowing that I needed to eat to get well. It was really interesting.”

Maggie Beer serves lunch to resident Fay Reese at the Barossa Village Residency last year. Picture: Tom Huntley

Friends and family bought food such as cashew cream to add to porridge or congee with chicken stock filled with ginger to “tempt” her to eat again. Another friend brought in fresh truffles from his farm in the Adelaide Hills.

“The whole experience reinforced everything I’ve been speaking about for 10 years,” Maggie says.

She’s on track to make a full recovery but her fall (and tomorrow’s 80th birthday) has given her a new perspective on how she will divide her time moving forward. One suspects her six grandchildren, ranging in age from 10 to 28, will feature prominently.

“I think Colin and I both see the first signs that I will start to slow down,” she says. “Not for a moment do I plan to give in or give up the things that are really important to me. But I’ve seen the beauty of not having deadlines, and I love the garden so much. And, you know, just being is something I’ve never taken time to do.”

I ask her if she has any regrets.

“Of course, of course, of course,” she says. “I’ve been too much of a workaholic, but that was because we had nothing. We started with $300 and a three-day honeymoon. We worked so hard and put everything back into our business because we were on this journey.

Elli Beer and Maggie Beer at The Farm Eatery in 2018. Picture Matt Turner

“Our girls worked with us but I worked every weekend of our girls’ lives until Elli was 18, because, in hospitality, weekends are the peak time.”

Elli is now 49 and in the wake of her mother’s fall and father’s move into full-time carer has stepped up to take over the seven-day operation of The Pheasant Farm, Farm Shop and Eatery. And the Maggie Beer Foundation is in the safe hands of new chief executive Jane Mussared – though Maggie insists, of course, she will always be involved.

But she knows the time is right to strike a better balance in her life. To carve out gaps in her schedule to think, create and recharge. To resist the urge to fill every moment with activity. To take heed of that Japanese word stuck to her fridge – the concept of Yutori.

Originally published as Maggie Beer turns 80, reflects on the fall that will finally make her slow down