Carina and Nick Chambers manage to combine work and raising a young family from their home in the NSW Central West.
Carina Chambers references a Mumford & Sons lyric from the song Awake My Soul when she describes the country life she and her husband, Nick, have created for themselves and their two daughters, Airlie, aged seven, and Georgia, five. “It goes ‘where you invest your love, you invest your life’,” she says. “In other words, if you’re doing what you love, it doesn’t feel like work.”
For Nick, who is a customer manager with GrainCorp, and Carina, who is the founder and co-owner of Long Lunch Linen, a business that imports exquisite French table linen, that means living and raising their girls on their 1000-acre (404-hectare) farm near Millthorpe in the NSW Central West. Working from home allows Nick to manage their Angus cattle herd, a commercial olive grove and two truffle orchards planted to French and English oaks and hazelnuts, as well as continue his role in grain marketing. Carina is able to look after the creative side of the linen business — the marketing, advertising and customer service — plus her ever-growing career as an artist.
Airlie and Georgia attend a small local primary school, much as Carina did growing up on her family’s cattle farm between Spring Ridge and Blackville on the NSW Liverpool Plains. Carina did her high schooling at boarding school in Armidale, then a gap year assisting at a Welsh-speaking school in Wales, UK. “Welsh is an incredibly difficult language to learn,” she says. “It inspired Tolkien’s Elvish languages of Middle Earth [The Lord of the Rings]. Fortunately, they also spoke in English. So I learnt a little of the language and a lot about life and grew up quickly.” She came back to Sydney where she studied communications, design and international studies at UTS (University of Technology, Sydney), where she met Nick, who was studying animal science. Although he’d grown up in Hobart, he had family farming connections in Tasmania’s north and, even in his teens, aspired to one day own a farm. Nick and Carina have been a couple ever since.
As part of her degree, Carina was required to spend a year in a country where they spoke the language she was studying, which was Spanish. Due to a series of hiccups in a less-connected era — she was back in Wales visiting friends and missed out on the obvious choice of Spain — she ended up in Chile. “It changed my life,” she says. “I went away with five other students from different disciplines. They were all strangers when we arrived, but five days later, a huge earthquake hit Santiago and we were stranded together. We bonded like family straight away and are still best of friends.”
Carina gained a position at an art gallery helping with English translation for communications with North American customers and returned to Australia to finish her degree with more life experience than the average 22-year-old. “Looking for a job after graduation, it was just after the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) of 2007, so there wasn’t much work going for graphic designers,” she recalls. “So I pivoted and amazingly got a job as a digital social media manager, on the basis that I had an Instagram account, I could edit, I could do videos, take photos and write marketing emails.”
Carina spent the next decade working her way up the ranks until she was managing a large team for a Sydney-based company. In 2018, when she was pregnant with Airlie, Nick’s work relocated its HQ to Tamworth, so eight weeks after her birth, the fledgling family made the move back to the regions. “It wasn’t too bad because it meant I was moving closer to my family,” she recalls. “However, there was a hitch in our plans as we had just agreed to buy this farm from my aunt and uncle. We were very lucky that they agreed to a long settlement and it turned out to be four years before we actually made the move.”
Regular readers of Australian County may recall that we first met Carina when they were living in the country music capital, she had just launched Long Lunch Linen and given birth to Georgia in 2020. At that stage, Carina was an enthusiastic watercolour artist and her works inspired a print collection including gift and greeting cards. A turning point came not long after when Nick took parenting leave, and Carina and her mother went to a weekend artist’s workshop hosted by Tina Skipper of My Rural Retreat on Cabarfeidh station at Guyra in the New England region.
“Kate Owen was the resident tutor and it was the first time I was introduced to the world of abstraction and acrylics on canvas,” Carina say. “She opened my eyes to a whole new world of art and now I’m a complete convert. As my desire to paint increased, I was finding managing the business a bit of a stretch, but fortunately — over a bottle of wine, between pregnancies, with Alex Humphries, a Tamworth friend of 20-plus years — we came up with the idea of Alex becoming a partner in Long Lunch Linen. She’s a nurse and the most organised person I’ve ever met. She looks after the inventory, sales and packaging and I look after the creative side. It’s worked out perfectly and the business has gone from strength to strength to the point where I’m proud to say we both draw a proper salary from it.”
Carina says that while the pandemic shutdowns were not conducive for either importing linen or gathering around the table, it did give them time to work out gaps in the market. “We specialise in classic colours that never go out of fashion, and we’ve added round tablecloths and extra-long cloths to our range,” she explains. “Our latest is a 6.4-metre cloth that covers three Bunnings trestle tables end to end seating 24 guests, just perfect for family gatherings and long lunches.” The elegant colours and designs with matching or contrasting napkins are also perfect for garden teas and other outdoor settings.
Another silver lining to the lockdowns of COVID was that it showed the world that people could work from home. “Before that, we believed there was no way Nick could keep working for GrainCorp and live on the farm,” Carina says. “However, in 2022, that’s what we did, moved with the two girls and started renovating the homestead.”
Moving and renovating with two little ones was always going to be challenging, and for a period the Chambers “camped out” in their new home with one power point and only standard lamps for lighting. “We wouldn’t have survived the winter but for ski gear from Aldi,” she says. “But we got through and we were done in time to celebrate a lovely family Christmas together.”
Tragically, Carina’s mother passed away the following January and the family was plunged into the turmoil of grief and dealing with her untimely demise. “I won’t pretend it hasn’t been difficult,” Carina says. “In a way, it’s inspired me to work even harder and with renewed focus on my painting. Mum always encouraged me whatever I did. Not long after we moved here, she said, ‘You’re living in an incredible landscape, you must start painting it.’ She was right, of course, the afternoon sun and winter sunsets are amazing. We also have these beautiful trees, particularly eucalypts, so in a way I feel I’m honouring her memory when I paint the scenery around us.”
