From their home base on Cora Lynn station, Steve Lindsay and Dave Johnstone share farm and country town life with visitors to the wide brown lands of the NSW Central West.
Steve Lindsay had a great life in Sydney. A great house, a great job as a sales manager for a multinational hotel company, not to mention a great salary. Yet there he was, sitting in a board meeting dreaming about how he’d rather be sitting behind a mob of sheep on his family’s farm back at Peak Hill in the NSW Central West. And this is how, in 2005, he made the decision to return to his roots and help out his parents who also live on Cora Lynn station, where they run Merino sheep and grow wheat as a cash crop as well as fodder crops for their livestock.
Steve is the fourth generation of Lindsays to farm on Cora Lynn, the 2820-acre (1140-hectare) property they run in conjunction with a neighbouring 1000 acres (404 hectares) they lease across the road. He lives with his partner, Dave Johnstone, a farmer and plantsman who runs a wholesale nursery on his family farm at Tenterfield in northern NSW. As Dave’s work varies with the seasons, he’s able to move between the two locations as demands from both the businesses dictate.
Steve’s great-great grandparents, John and Helen Lindsay, arrived in Australia from Scotland in 1875, the same year their son, James, was born. James was a miner, road builder and early pioneer of the Parkes district. In 1901, he drew the land at Peak Hill in a ballot and named it Cora Lynn for the Corra Linn waterfalls on the River Clyde near Glasgow in his parents’ home country, Scotland. James married Sarah in 1908 and they moved into the first homestead on the farm. The farm prospered so, in 1936, they constructed Steve and Dave’s current home, a low-slung homestead with wraparound verandahs. Sadly, two of James and Sarah’s four children died young, and that left Steve’s grandfather, Ron, and his wife, Joan, to take over the running of the farm. Their son, Robert, is Steve’s father and he and Steve’s mum, Kay, live in another homestead on the property.
When Steve first moved into his grandparents’ home, the layout was quite pokey so, gradually through the years, he’s opened up the rooms to make the homestead more liveable. An inveterate collector of antiques with a keen eye for an online auction bargain, Steve jumped at the opportunity when he saw a lot of Queensland maple panelling that had been stripped from Sydney’s No.1 Martin Place, the landmark former GPO building, and the panelling has been incorporated into the remodelled sitting rooms and hallway.
When Steve and Dave met in 2019, they immediately bonded over their mutual passion for antiques and collectables. Both firm followers of the philosophy “wear the jewellery, drink the wine”, their home is a showcase of fine china, crystal and tablewares, as well as decorative pieces and artworks they’ve collected through the years. When Steve first came back to Cora Lynn, the family decided the existing 1946 shearing shed built by Steve’s grandfather needed an update. The decision was taken to build a new shed closer to power, so the former shed was idle for a while. “At first, we toyed with the idea of building glamping tents near the lagoon,” Steve says. “Then we had a wet period and it was obvious that it wouldn’t be very pleasant for guests to be camping in the rain, so we came up with the idea of turning the shearing shed into a kind of common room. Thankfully, somewhere along the line we forgot about the glamping and, at Mum’s suggestion, turned the shed into a BnB.”
With help from a farmer mate from Dubbo, over the next three years, Steve transformed the shed into a rustic two-bedroom getaway. The Fleece, as the property is now named, is fitted with everything a couple or family might need to enjoy a relaxing detox from city life without missing out on creature comforts. The chutes and overhead gear from the shearing days have been retained, along with the scale once used to weigh the wool bales and even the original wool stencil brand, which is still used on Cora Lynn bales today. Inside, the accommodation is fitted with everything guests might need for an enjoyable self-catering stay.
While The Fleece had a slow start in 2020, with COVID lockdowns disrupting early bookings, gradually, the pandemic delivered a silver lining as city dwellers flocked to the country when they were finally allowed out of their bubbles. “We had lots of guests who would normally holiday overseas,” Steve says. “They loved the fact that their kids could meet and pat the farm animals, and explore the bush with relative freedom. Some of those early guests continue to return for weekends away.” While Steve says his family has never been particularly “horsey” — “I think Dad really saw them as animals that knocked down fences and caused more work” — Steve has been obsessed with horses from an early age. He bought his first Clydesdale mare as an 18-year-old and has amassed a shed full of carriages and wagons through the years. As the current secretary of the Australian Draft Stud Book Society, he’s a big advocate of, and occasional competitor in, the Golden Plough competition, which will be held in Peak Hill when it celebrates its 50th anniversary in May, 2026.
“My great-grandfather and grandfather would have used draft horses to plough the paddocks and I love to see their memory kept alive,” Steve says. It was while working on the Stud Society’s newsletter that Steve inadvertently opened the latest chapter in his and Dave’s careers. “I was searching for a historical shot of an old wool wagon that had been owned by a prominent local family when I came across a photograph of an 1894 mansion in Parkes,” Steve says. “So I went hunting for information about it. In my search, I found it was for sale. As it was a building I’d long admired in town [Parkes is a 45-minute drive south of Cora Lynn], I was naturally interested. We could immediately see its potential as a guest house, and that’s how Dave and I became the owners of The Buchanan 1894.”
The couple embarked on a big refurbishment dividing the ornate former residence into a series of self-contained suites. The revamped dwelling enjoyed a soft opening to coincide with Parkes’ annual Elvis Festival in January this year, and has been fully operational since March. Response to the building, which is handsomely decorated throughout and has an upstairs library and spacious verandah for saluting the sunset with sweeping views of the town, has been enthusiastic, to put it mildly. “I think with the popularity of shows like Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, historic houses have caught people’s fancy,” Dave says. “We thought we’d attract guests looking for accommodation a bit different from, and with more space than, a standard motel, but it turns out The Buchanan is becoming a destination in its own right.”
The building was completed in 1894 as a residence for Henry Haselhurst, who arrived in Parkes in 1872 during the gold rushes. His rags-to-riches story began in 1883, when he sank a shaft into the Dave Buchanan line of reef and nearly abandoned it when he initially failed to find worthwhile gold. However, he later sank another shaft a little ahead of where the first reef had petered out. In a very short period, Haselhurst extracted £80,000 from the mine and, as the local press reported, the “handsome residence” was proof of his good fortune.
What precisely happened to his run of luck is lost in the mists of time, but it is known that Haselhurst sold his mansion just 10 years after he built it and died almost penniless in 1917. The Buchanan was sold to the Howard family who ran department stores in Parkes, Peak Hill and Trundle, and then leased as a boarding house including for a girls’ school. The Freckleton family bought the property in the 1950s and, as its custodians, worked hard to maintain its structural integrity until Dave and Steve took over.
With barely a minute to spare between mustering sheep for shearing and ironing bed linen as they turn the rooms over in the guest house, Steve and Dave say they have never been busier — or happier.
“Mum used to jokingly ask what we were going to do when we had no more room in the homestead for our antiques,” Steve says. “We solved that problem by buying The Buchanan. But, seriously, it’s been an amazing experience. And we love sharing our part of the country with visitors from all over the world.” AC
