Long Road Home – Danelle Bergstrom

As an artist renowned for expansive Australian landscapes, it makes perfect sense for Danelle Bergstrom to be living in Hill End, the picturesque former goldrush town in NSW’s central west that has long inspired painters. We find her pottering in the garden of the rundown miner’s cottage she has called home for the past 18 years. The charming 1890s house that Danelle shares with her artist husband, John Firth-Smith, sits at the end of a dusty road. Life moves slowly in Hill End. A small mob of kangaroos lazes in the sun on a nearby grassy patch — and Danelle says she and John are in no rush to finish renovating. Some of the uneven floor is still covered in original lino, and the décor is sparse but authentic, right down to the wrought-iron beds in the front bedrooms. But few miners’ cottages would have had art-covered walls like these, enjoyed by city visitors lucky enough to flop into its comfortable lounge chairs and be warmed by one of its two crackling open fires. Danelle, 58, fell in love with Hill End after spending an Easter with John, a leading abstract artist, in his wattle and daub shack in 1997, when her daughter Alexarndra was 11 and son Shannan was 13. The children stumbled upon the family’s future home as they wandered through the village. “The freedom they experienced was just incredible... and then they came across a house for sale, and came back and said ‘Mummy, can we buy this house?’ ” Danelle says. She immediately tracked down the owner and made an offer over the phone — without having ever ventured inside. “I knew it would be pretty rough,” she says with a laugh. Having renovated a house in Sydney over 15 years, Danelle jumped at the chance to start again in the country. “We had an outside toilet, no showers and a funny little bath that had collapsed under the white ants.” But despite the primitive conditions, Danelle looks back on this time with fondness: “All of the things we valued before had gone, and what we valued more was sitting on the verandah watching the sunset.”