This chef–farmer has filled her life with people, pets and mad projects, and at the same time radically simplified her world. Surrounded by her favourite things, Annie Smithers might just have found her balance.
Words Larissa Dubecki
Photography Lean Timms
FIRST impressions of Annie Smithers’ farm in the central Victorian hamlet of Lyonville will conjure envy in all but the most flint-hearted. Along a long driveway, an ancient manna gum looms in an extravagance of twisting limbs, a wooden swing hanging from its boughs. To the left lies a bijou wooden chapel topped with a bell tower. To the right, the Federation-era farmhouse itself, with its shady bullnose veranda. Off to the side, a wooden gate opens to a glorious English-style garden, bursting with blooms, where ducks and geese wander and a boisterous labrador charges about.
It’s the stage set for a charmed life, you might think: the perfect fantasy farm. But Smithers—farmer, author, chef and owner of acclaimed restaurant du Fermier in Trentham—prefers home truths to romanticism. “You think, gosh, all those people who dream of moving to the country, and they’ve got no idea. A property like this never stops growing or falling apart. The reality is that it can become a
nightmare so quickly.”
Anyone familiar with Smithers’ 2021 book Recipe for a Kinder Life will recognise her trademark honesty, which perfectly reflects the no-nonsense style of cooking that has won fans at the French farmhouse-style du Fermier. A wide-ranging account of life on the land and in the kitchen, it outlined her move to the country in her 20s, her early attempts at being a small landholder, the opening of du Fermier, and the move to Babbington Park six years ago after meeting her wife, Susan Thompson.
They met when Thompson visited Smithers’ acreage with friends for a garden tour and dinner. “I didn’t know who she was or that we were doing a garden tour. Annie gave us Champagne and said she was going to show us around the garden, and I was wearing ridiculous white high-heeled shoes and feeling like a right idiot,” recalls Thompson, clad more sensibly today in boots and a puffer jacket. “Round I totter, about the vegie garden. There were some geese there and I said, ‘Are they Sebastopol geese?’ and she said, ‘Yes, they are.’ In all her years there, no-one had asked her that. That’s where it started. Of course, Annie loves the version that I pursued her – she likes the word ‘hunted’.”
As for Smithers: “I’d just decided to be a bachelor for the rest of my life and this one turns up.”
