Jenny Ackland

I recently had the opportunity to stay at the delightful Springfield estate, to reacquaint myself with my next manuscript. I imagine that it might be hard for non-creatives to understand how important it is to the process and output, to have time away to focus on a project. It’s not just time, it’s also being able to step out of one’s daily routine and devote hours across days to the writing, to the thinking, the problem solving.

Going in circles can seem to be a part of this type of work, for me anyway. I spent the days in residence working through my big plastic tub, in which were stored years of notes, clippings, threads of thoughts, ideas written down, and a few books. I read through the draft that I have and identified the likely places for attention: for slash-and-burn and for gentle development. I answered questions, and found more, and as always, driving up and back from Melbourne was part of the work; long stretches alone in the car is an opportunity to turn the mind towards the work.

The opportunity came in the form of an email, inviting Stella Prize winners and listees to travel to Springfield – a stunning property that nestles in the beautiful Southern Highlands – and undertake a residency. Owners Kinchem and Peter invited myself and the other writer to dinner the first night, where they proved gracious and generous hosts, and we had a lovely time chatting. It’s not true that all writers are hermits, preferring to be locked up in rooms and chained to desks. We can very much enjoy company and especially when it’s so splendid!

Springfield is a dream place and I truly did not want to leave. There are chickens and you can gather their eggs. There are llamas, and you can gaze at them wistfully as you pass them by on the long, tree-lined, very classically evocative driveway. There’s a vegie garden, and I enjoyed potatoes, silverbeet and chard, and carrots that tasted like nothing else I’d had before.

I’m so grateful to Kinchem and Peter, and to the Stella Prize, for making this possible.

Eunice Andrada

I really needed this nourishing time at Springfield. It was so beautiful to spend my days writing, editing, walking around the farm, being with other writers, and being able to relax far away from my usual work routine. Being in the company of other writers, sitting around a fire and talking about our different writing lives and practices was so helpful to me as the work of writing can be so isolating. I didn’t know how much I needed this break until I had it. In between writing, it was so inspiring to just be able to listen to my thoughts and walk around with alpacas and puppies and chickens and plunge into freezing water and eat delicious fresh vegetables from the garden. I was nourished on so many levels here and it was the reset that my mind and my writing needed. I’m so grateful to Kinchem and Peter for the communities of writers that they help nurture through this space, and to the Stella Prize for continuing to support our writing. 

I write poetry and verbosity is not my strong suit so here is a picture of me, the puppy Sweetie, and writer Catherine de Saint Phalle hanging out with the alpacas while they had lunch. 

Thank you!! 

Time, community and support are precious commodities to a writer, and these three things were offered to me in abundance during my time at Life at Springfield. Hannah Kent

Yumma Kassab

I have been to Springfield a few times now and after each visit, I am refining what it is that I find most beneficial about these residencies.

 Firstly, there is the time and space it affords an artist, that these two are priceless in the progression of a project. I have found that the solid block of time of a residency is most useful when I am considering how to arrange a project, that this period of dreaming and thinking requires more space than is typically found in the routine of the day-to-day. 

Secondly, I appreciate the garden and the vegetables, that there are plenty of fresh ingredients to cook an elaborate dinner every night. With friends and fellow writers, this is a special way to unwind, to reflect on the day’s intensity and then more broadly life and the universe, and the conjoined umbrella shared by the two.

For a few years now, Springfield has been providing these residences for writers listed for the Stella, and I am convinced that it is immeasurable in the impact it is having on the literary landscape, that it provides the priceless – space and time – for writers to give their projects more definite shape. To consider my own residencies is to be invited to reflect, and I believe that the impact will show up in a year or two or three, where, upon looking back, I will credit the time at Springfield with helping me to move forward at a critical point with a specific project. 

Hannah Kent

Time, community and support are precious commodities to a writer, and these three things were offered to me in abundance during my time at Life at Springfield. Kinchem and Peter’s generosity to writers extends beyond residency within their home: they are deeply invested in the creative wellbeing of their guests, and intuitive to what is needed by them. 

I was deeply appreciative of the freedom offered to me and my fellow residents to explore their beautiful twenty acres and to find nourishment and peace in their garden. I was also very grateful for the walks offered to the extraordinary Fitzroy Falls and surrounding reserves. Having anticipated that most of my work would be accomplished at the desk while at Springfield, it was a pleasant surprise to find my creative drive renewed through time in nature rather than hours spent in front of a computer. It can be easy to forget that a writing practice must be sustained, too, by awe and wonder. I was gently reminded of this at Springfield.

So much of my writing practice is conducted in solitude, and I took great relief in meeting and sharing a space with others who were cognisant of the challenges and rewards of developing a manuscript. I was inspired, too, by hearing of others’ processes and drive, and enriched by discussion of craft. I left this residency restored and refreshed both physically and creatively.

Bri Lee

This beautiful invitation came through the Stella Prize. One of their initiatives is helping Stella Authors find and make the time and space to work. I’m so grateful to the Stella team for this fantastic program!

The first time I ever came here Kinchem and Peter, the lovely and generous couple who own and run this property, invited me to plant a tree. That was October 2020.

This year marks my third visit as their guest, almost exactly four years have passed, and on Monday Peter took me for a walk to show me how big my tree is now.

I was so moved by this. I’m not normally one for hyperbolic proverbs, but come on. Life had delivered one to me quite literally:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.

In October 2020 when I was here I was finishing Who Gets to Be Smart. I was almost two years into the novel that would turn into The Work. My partner and I had just bought our first apartment and I was shitting myself about the mortgage but one step closer to getting a dog. I’d sent off countless grant applications for Antarctica and been knocked back for all of them. And here I am now. Got the grant for the trip, went in February 2023, and I’ve just emptied yet another pen out into the manuscript for the novel set there.

I walk around the grounds here and can’t help but think about what has changed for me between 28 and 32. I’ve also been spending more time on the University of Sydney campus lately and have been shooketh at how young all the students are. Age is funny like that, I guess. I’ll hopefully finish my PhD next year. I applied for it back in 2019 when I’d just moved my partner and I to Sydney and was panicking a bit about how expensive rent was and whether the move would ‘pay off’.

I’ve got some more big decisions ahead of me. That’s life as an adult, apparently. (Boo!) Even coming away for this week was a bit difficult to justify—juggling work and other obligations—but now I’m here it seems clear: big things take time. You can’t develop something for yourself unless you back yourself.

I’m sure most authors would agree that books always take you much longer, and take a lot more from you, than you think they will when you start out. Garner always said she had to re-learn how to write with every new book. I decided to take that approach literally, and am hand-writing this one, and it has been a profound breakthrough in my creative process. Each sentence takes me three or four times as long to get out, but in going slower I’m going deeper and better and I’m learning. This book is taking something from me but it’s giving me even more.

Emily O’Grady

I’ve always approached residencies with the same motto: productivity over all else. The chance to focus almost exclusively on writing is a gift and it would be wasteful to squander my time resting or (God forbid) reading instead of properly knuckling down. Prior to my residency at Life-at-Springfield, I’d been revising the same passages of my manuscript ad nauseum and wanted some sort of mystical, super-charged gust of inspiration to jolt me into finishing a first draft. Though I set myself a strict word count, my first day of writing turned out to be another day of editing and my word count predictably went backwards.

A few days into the residency, Kinchem was generous enough to lead a truncated workshop on the Story Workshop Method. I was unfamiliar with the process and its methodology, but somewhat relieved to shift all thoughts of my manuscript to the back of my brain for a few hours. For the first time in a long time, I well out of my comfort zone: a student rather than a teacher, sharing my ideas, not polished to perfection, but in their scrappiest version. I’d spent so long avoiding anything creative that wasn’t connected to my manuscript and the freedom to simply play smacked me out of my censorious head. That hour-and-a-half helped to stifle the self-consciousness plaguing my writing practice, and above all, was a reminder that creativity shouldn’t be a punish. There are times when the rigorous churning out of words is necessary, but a manuscript can’t breathe without balance: a different approach; a change of scenery; a few months revising while the sub-conscious figures out what it needs to figure out.

Catherine de Saint Phalle

Through every window you can see the hills, the trees, each in their chosen places, rich of their own shape, extending their branches and surely holding on to each other beneath the earth. You can see marshes and the pools of water with ribbons of reeds in mysterious circles. You can see white seas of clouds stretching out above, over you, over the house, over the heads of black water hens walking like priest in their cassocks, wings behind their backs, holding hidden rosaries. The slope of the fields are sheets of green music, where the notes are traces and footprints of birds, possums, wombats… and others no doubt. 

Peter and Kinchem live here welcoming writers and poets, giving them a precious time for writing only, a time of sky and immense clouds, a time where the hours seem to flower into letters and pages, just like the trees growing into the best meaning they can contain. 

Kinchem took me for a walk in the bush and shared her father’s tragic brush with History and the way her own childhood was impacted by it. Suddenly, as she walked ahead of me in silence for a while, she seemed to be part of the trees, it could have been a trick of light, but I felt as they understood her father’s harrowing story.  

Living here is hearing the earth’s voice, its silent breathing. 

A little mower moves all on its own around the land and nibbles the grass. I found it stuck in a hole where it was pedalling desperately. I pulled him out and he went off again, as animals do when you free them from a trap. I felt a tenderness for it, as if it was trying to do its best, as if it too, was under a healing green spell and wished to help the grass grow with all its might. 

I’m afraid of the dark. Have been since childhood. I always leave a little light on. 

But here, I noticed, I wasn’t. 

I went out too late one evening to get some broccoli and silver beet in the pitch dark with the help of my phone. My steps on the soft grass made no sound, and I could hear every quiver, but imagined no monster, no boa constrictor following me. I wondered why. 

Fear had come to roost – like another bird – in a quiet nest among the trees. 

Biff Ward

My four days in the Southern Highlands were a bonanza in every way.

I revelled in the Blue Room. It’s a really large space, beautifully furnished, with the desk positioned looking down the sweep of the hillside, and onwards to distant tracts of bush and hills. It also had a perfect view of the sunset which was intense reds and golds on the days I was there.

On daily walks, I marvelled at the abundant veggie garden, enjoyed my conversations with the four alpacas and trod the length of the property back and forth past the gallery of espaliered fruit trees. I walked the labyrinth one crisp evening and found the question I needed to ask.

Kinchem and Peter were perfect hosts, gracious, friendly and inclusive, while allowing for maximum use of the quiet writing space by residents. The evening fire in the baronial-hall hearth encouraged warm and engaged conversation for those who wished it.

I completed the key writing task I’d set myself – melding nine quite separate pieces I’d written about my friend Julia Ryan who died last year. I did not expect to achieve my goal completely but in the perfect conditions for writing at Springfield, I did. I arrived home with the 7500word beginnings of an essay that I’m not unhappy with.

MANY THANKS to the Stella and to the Life at Springfield writing retreat!