Ange Boxall and Mike Travalia are tackling a huge restoration on Tasmania’s East Coast with equal measures of hospitality and hard work.
By their own reckoning, Tasmanian country singer/songwriter Ange Boxall and her designer husband, Mike Travalia, are about one-third of the way through a 30-year restoration project. They seem unfazed by the task in front of them and cheerfully talk of the return of Riversdale, their 1842 Georgian homestead, an 1825 former flour mill and timber barn to original condition. The couple bought the property in 2014 after returning to their home state following extended time living in London and Melbourne. In fact, they’d had their eye on the crumbling mill and adjacent homestead just north of Swansea on the Tasmanian east coast for many years and had even considered buying it on a previous occasion.
Raised in a hard-working Hobart family — Ange’s dad was a diesel mechanic and her mother a seamstress — Ange inherited her parents work ethic and deep determination to follow her dreams. “My proudest moment was when my mum, who had worked all her life, graduated from the Tasmanian School of Creative Arts with a diploma of fi ne art at the age of 72,” she says. “I’ve never wanted to be on The Voice or expected overnight success. I think fame can lead to debt, both of the heart and the bank account. I live and breathe for my art and that’s formed my entire life.”
Ange and Mike met 30 years ago when they were both studying art at the University of Tasmania. “Mike was majoring in furniture design and I had ambitions of becoming a painter,” Ange says. “However, I’d always played a musical instrument through school. At first, it was a tenor horn, which is like a baby tuba and then I moved onto the trombone in high school. Then I realised my heart lay with the guitar and, by the time I was at uni, I was getting singing gigs around Hobart. I soon realised I could make a buck from it. I kept my Saturday job in a department store in case it didn’t work out, but I was well on my way to a performing career by the time I finished uni.”
Once she reached 20, Ange had also tired of playing other people’s music and discovered the joys of writing her own material. “I found that it was a wonderful cathartic outlet,” she says. “There were so many emotions spilling out onto the page that I probably saved a fortune in psychologist’s fees. I was performing at gigs and festivals all over Tasmania and recorded two albums.”
Always driven by an adventurous spirit, the bright lights of Melbourne beckoned and Ange moved to the Victorian capital in 1998. She recalls it as a “big shift” to the anonymity of an unfamiliar city, but also motivating to be surrounded by so many musicians and artists. “Like many artists before and after me, I got a job in a record shop to pay the rent,” she says. “Although I wasn’t a trained teacher, I had experience in adventure recreation for youth, so I also worked in that fi eld. Mike joined me and we had fun for a couple of years. Mike was able to get work as a retail interiors architect and we lived our best lives.”
In 2000, the pair headed overseas for what was meant to be a 12-month working holiday. “It turned into 12 years,” Ange says. “We based ourselves in London and travelled all over Europe. Mike was lucky to be sponsored by his work so we could extend our stay. What I loved about London was the collision of minds. There were so many wonderful multicultural people and we formed lifelong friendships that are more like family now.” Ever resourceful and having observed her mother at work through the years, Ange gained work teaching textile design in high school, which provided the financial security to allow her time for gigs. Without contacts in the industry, she built her own network, going to clubs and joining open-mic sessions. “Fortunately, I’ve had a good chunk of my career not being paid,” she says. “So I worked my way into the culture and slowly built up my performing scene. We avoided Australians like the plague and never went to the Walkabout [a hotel in Shepherd’s Bush frequented by Aussies in London]. We were there to immerse ourselves in the local scene and that’s what we did. Towards the end, I worked between London and Nashville, where I based myself for tours and spent time co-writing and recording.”
When Mike and Ange eventually made their way back to Australia, they returned to Melbourne and were actually on holiday in New Zealand when they heard that the Riversdale property was on the market. “We came home just before our daughter Harriette ‘Hattie’ was born,” Ange says. “Tasmania was a very different place as David Walsh had opened MONA [Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art] and there was a lot of creative energy about. Tasmanians owe Walshie a huge debt of gratitude as he has really put Hobart on the map and doesn’t charge locals to visit the museum. Plus, he’s a huge supporter of local artists and he’s hands-on — he’s not someone who throws money at a project and goes off on his yacht.”
Although family and friends were initially concerned when they heard about the Swansea property, Mike and Ange were undaunted by the task. “They thought we’d bought a rambling rat-filled house and a mess of a mill,” Ange says. “But Mike and I could see through the dump.” They immediately set to work making the house more comfortable by rewiring and installing new plumbing and making the kitchen and bathroom more useable.
The mill was built by Scottish millwright John Amos for early farmer George Meredith. John and his brother, Adam, and George had arrived in the colony on the same ship in 1821 and became the first European settlers of the Great Oyster Bay district soon after. Descendants of both families still live in the region. The house was constructed after the mill for George’s son, Charles, when he married his cousin Louisa Anne Twamley. English-born Louisa Anne made her mark on colonial Tasmania as a writer and illustrator and left an exquisitely illustrated record of her time in Tasmania with books including a diary, My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years, Tasmanian Friends and Foes: Feathered, Furred and Finned and Some of my Bush Friends in Tasmania.
Ange and Mike believe some of the trees in their orchard, which include heritage apples as well as mulberries and other bountiful fruit trees in the rambling English-style garden, may date from Louisa’s tenure. While they continue to “plug away at the house”, they’ve moved on to working on the mill, which will open as an event space later this year. Meanwhile, Ange tours and performs, and Mike has morphed his work more into the branding side of design, developing wine labels for the ever-growing wine industry on the east coast. Ange too has found work in the wine industry, supplementing her income by working at local cellar doors.
In their “spare” time, the couple launched The Splendid Gin in 2016 and their brand is now one of 100 distilleries on the Tasmanian map. Eventually, they hope that the black timber barn that was the original stables will become a cellar door for The Splendid, and possible guest accommodation will follow.
Ange also finds herself as an unofficial ambassador for the east coast, a role she considers no hardship as she says it’s always been her “spiritual home”. “Mike and I have been coming up here since we were first together,” she adds. “Even though there’s a very dark side to the early colonial era, there’s a lightness to the landscape. My heart sings when I’ve been in Hobart for meetings or am returning from touring, and I drive over the hills at Mayfield and see the landscape before me. Being home is like being on holiday.”
Another aspect of “giving back” to the region has been the establishment of the East Coast Harvest Odyssey, or ECHO Festival, which began in 2019 as a celebration of the bounty of the region. “The idea started one night when we were sitting around a fire in Blunnies (Blundstone boots) and lumberjackets, drinking an excellent local Pinot Noir sharing music and yarns,” Ange says. “We came up with the idea of a festival celebrating the simple pleasures that the region affords along with the natural attributes that make it such a great place to live.”
These days, Ange finds herself not just the founder but also creative producer and occasional marketing manager of ECHO, which is held in March each year. The boutique festival, which now attracts up to 500 visitors, combines local music, food and drink along with Tasmanian First Nations storytelling, knowledge and culture, contemporary handcrafts, traditional arts such as blacksmithing and woodturning, with a side measure of sustainability and caring for coastlines.
“It’s basically a tribute to everything we love about living here,” Ange says. “The older I get, the more grateful I am for everything Tasmania has to off er. We settled so easily back into living here, partly due to Hattie being little and making friends through her school network. But we’ve also found a great group of friends and we’re always socialising together. We have a lot of fun together with lunches and barbecues that seem a lot more spontaneous and frequent than they ever were in the city.”
While Ange and Mike add that they’ve an eternity’s worth of work to go on their restoration, they’re determined to keep at it. “It will all come together in due course,” Ange says. “The ultimate goal is to return the property to its former glory, with a touch of modern convenience. We’ll just keep at it, one job at a time, and hopefully we’ll be open by the end of 2025.”
