STYLE QUEEN

Acclaimed singer/songwriter and Northern Rivers resident Sara Tindley had always wanted to try her hand at farming. Being diagnosed with breast cancer galvanised her into action.

Acclaimed country roots singer/songwriter Sara Tindley is bringing a lifelong dream to fruition on her farm at Lindendale.

IN 2012, Sara Tindley discovered a lump on her chest.

“I’ve often had lumps and bumps, but there was one sitting in the middle on my chest that was a bit painful to touch,” she says.

She’d put off having it looked at (“I’m not very good at going to the doctor and doing all that sort of stuff,” she admits), but after losing weight and not feeling well for a while, she finally had it checked out.

“I went to the doctor and she sent me off and sure enough it came back as breast cancer. And because I’d been so tardy in getting it attended to was actually quite advanced.”

Almost immediately after her diagnosis, she was in a surgeon’s office, treatment started within two weeks, and because the tumour was so large, she had to have chemo first to try to shrink the tumour.

She would undergo a year of gruelling treatment, including surgery and chemo, followed by a year of “feeling pretty dreadful and weak and unwell and not really able to do very much”, but remarkably, got through it and was given the all clear.

Feeling better and faced with getting back day-to-day life, she found herself re-examining her priorities.

“The reality of your own demise spurs you into ticking off those things that you’ve wanted to do,” she says.

The singer/songwriter, who moved to the Northern Rivers more than 25 years ago and has lived rurally for much of that time, had always harboured a dream to farm, so when she was well enough to work again (she has always had casual jobs to help support her music), decided to give farming a go.

“I thought, ‘I always wanted to be a farmer and I love growing – I find it really satisfying – so why don’t I go and learn and see what I think at the end of that?’,” she said.

“So, I did. I went to Wollongbar TAFE, did their horticulture production course, (and) as part of that course you plant out a market-garden-sized garden and work it as if it were a commercial market garden, and I went ‘yeah, I’m going to do it’.”

She and partner Mark, who were living on a property at Meerschaum Vale, started searching for land more suitable for growing. Eventually they bought a six-hectare property at Lindendale.

The catch was, it was covered in 1200 macadamia trees, which they had to remove to make way for a house and the market garden, but a couple of years and a lot of hard work later, they can now call themselves fully fledged organic farmers.

They have a stall, Singing Farmer Organics, at Lismore Organic Market every Tuesday and their market garden is thriving.

“I don’t know whether it’s beginner’s luck, but we’ve done all right, especially to keep going through that horrible summer,” Sara says.

The thing she has gained the most satisfaction from, however, is regenerating a patch of rainforest along the property’s watercourse – a labour of love that involved planting a few thousand trees.

“That was really important to me because when we first came here – even with the maca trees – it just felt really dead. There wasn’t much birdlife, so the first thing I did was just start planting rainforest trees,” she says.

“Then only last season a Whip bird moved into the rainforest section, which was like my proudest moment here, I was like: ‘oh my God did you here that?’ it’s a Whip bird!’”

The last few years have also been a fruitful time for Sara’s music. She released her fourth album, Wild and Unknown in 2017, which she toured around the country, and most recently she’s been playing gigs around the country with good mate Ash Bell.

She says the duo, Ash and Sara, began at a time when both were feeling a little disillusioned with the music industry.

“We thought ‘why don’t we do something that we just do because we love music … for the sheer love of singing together?’,” she says.

They recorded an EP, Going Out Clothes, which Sara says has “taken on a life its own, with minimal effort from us” and which has had them play a string of gigs including the Festival of Small Halls, Queenscliff Music Festival, The Planting at Woodfordia and Bello Winter Music Festival.

Eight years since her cancer diagnosis, Sara says she’s managed to put the whole experience in a compartment, at least to some degree, but it has changed her perspective.

“It’s undeniable that that’s what happened to me,” she says.

“I guess I still live with the fear that it will come back, like anybody that’s had any kind of diagnosis like that. So, I’m not positive all the time – some days I just sit on the couch and stare out the window you know, I’m not running around living each moment like it’s my last. That would be exhausting.”

“But I am very grateful, and I’m probably just a bit more fearless in that if there’s something that I want to do I just do it.”