River beauty

After 15 years in their northern Tasmanian garden, Barbara and Colin Atkinson still can’t believe their luck.

Story + Photos Andrew Bain

On a sun-filled day near the mouth of northern Tasmania’s Tamar River, the gardens at Beauty Point Cottages are flecked with colour: bright lupins, peonies, roses in full bloom – even the bottlebrush flowers torn to shreds by the yellow-tailed black cockatoos. But after 15 years of looking over this scene, it’s still the blue of the river that most catches Barbara Atkinson’s eye.

“Coming from a drought-stricken place to a permanent river that’s blue, that was half the reason we bought the place,” she says. The other half, she adds, was the garden.

Barbara and her husband Colin purchased Beauty Point Cottages, with its two B&B guest cottages set among an acre of gardens and lawn, in 2010, moving to Beauty Point from a cattle farm in Boggabri, outside of Narrabri in northern NSW. In doing so, they swapped outback plains for a lush riverbank garden. “Every morning, we sit here and we feel blessed,” Colin says from the deck of the house overlooking the garden. “You wonder how you’ve been allowed to be the caretaker of something like this.”

The block has an unusual shape, with a street frontage of around 80m, tapering down to about 10m at its lowest point by the river. The two glass-fronted cottages and a gazebo stand among the taller trees at the top of the property, looking over the garden to the river, with an old homestead – Colin and Barbara’s home – just below. This house, Lamona, was relocated here in the 1880s, transported by bullock dray from Lefroy on the opposite bank of the Tamar River – an epic task that required the house, split in two, to be carted downstream to Launceston and then back up the western side of the river.