A NEW START
A successful business has three essential components.
- A good product
- Good financial management
- Good marketing
A good financial manager and a good marketer are never found in the same person. My husband, Eberhard, is a work motivated Introverted, Sensing, Thinking and Judgmental personality/temperament type – an ISTJ. This type are the salt of the earth and make great middle managers, school inspectors or hospital matrons.
I am an Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceptive type – an INFP – a spirit motivated person. Although rare in number this type are to be found in nurturing positions as teachers, nurses and missionaries, but they also have a capacity for creativity and drama as actors or writers.
There are values that Eberhard and I have in common like we are scrupulously honest, but apart from the Introversion of preferring small groups of people over large crowds, we are opposites in many ways. My reading of psychology helped me greatly to understand the motivation of my husband, especially his work related values and how to partner him in a joint business. We developed a clear demarcation of duties, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses that each possessed.
Eberhard managed our finances and the nitt gritty matters of keeping everything functioning smoothly. I am the holistic thinker looking to the future and planning our marketing – a visionary. I chose to call our Bed and Breakfast home Das Helwig Haus B&B - The Helwig House; to provide a German decor, German music and German food. Thus I differentiated it from every Honeysuckle Cottage, Apple Blossom Inn or Camellia Cabin in the district.
Das Helwig Haus B&B
After moving to the Granite Belt my personality began to bloom. Here no one knew my father, my former husband or my children. For the first time I was not seen as a daughter, wife or mother, but as an intelligent, hard working woman to be valued as a person. Already in his sixties, Eberhard had achieved most of his goals in life and was willing to support me while I followed my dreams. In 1995 I was asked to contribute to the tourism community by standing for election as a Director of the Southern Downs Tourism Board.
As a Director my years of training in meeting procedure and public speaking with the Queensland Forum Club was immediately put to use. I discovered I had a talent for brain storming. Most people compartmentalize information, but I have the knack of taking scraps of knowledge and linking them in a pattern. I can see the obvious commonality connecting components.
The question was asked of the SDTA Board, “How can we promote the segment of the Granite Belt with the seven Flanders battlefield names of France and Belgium?” In 1920 about 500 blocks of land had been balloted to returned service men as a way of giving them a new start after World War One. The Queensland railway surveyor named the seven sidings of the new branch railway line to service this community Amiens, Messines, Bapaume, Passchendaele, Bullecourt, Pozieres and Fleurbaix. Seventy-five years later the railway was no longer in use and the siding names were at the Stanthorpe Museum.
I had all the information to see an obvious answer to the question. I knew my history. With Eberhard I had visited Germany and Canada in 1990. In Germany I had delighted in the wildflowers, especially the red field poppy and blue cornflowers growing in the wheat crops. In Canada I had photographed the famous poem by Colonel John McCrae in the Ottawa War Memorial – In Flanders Fields. At Das Helwig Haus B&B I had established a field of wheat, poppies and cornflowers as part of our extensive garden and I observed that if we cultivated that field at the end of June the Flanders poppies would begin flowering by the middle of October and continue blooming until the end of November.
I suggested, “Let’s create a Memorial Drive linking these battle field place names. Let’s encourage people to grow poppies to bloom for 11th November. Then let’s alert the schools so that they can bring bus loads of children to remember the fallen.”
The tourism community and the Returned Services League thought this an excellent idea, but the farmers of the region protested that the poppies would become a district weed and the Stanthorpe Shire Council vetoed the proposal. Those of you who have read my former Travels in Life segments will have realized that I have a strong sense of determination and the ability to think laterally. Like Joan of Arc I had seen a vision of what could be done. I decided to open our garden and field to the Stanthorpe public in 1996 so that the local population could see the poppies. I knew that they didn’t pose a threat as a weed nuisance to the farmers as the seed is only carried in grain or soil on implements. It doesn’t blow on the wind, stick to clothes or be eaten by birds.
This opening of the garden resulted in a number of different things happening, all of which greatly benefited the Granite Belt community, especially our district at Glen Aplin.
- Selectors for the Australian Open Garden Scheme visited our garden and commented that although it was still a young garden, it was inspirational. They asked us to open our garden to the public in 1997 under their banner.
- A jounalist from the Queensland Country Life newspaper attracted by the farming controversy wrote a feature on Glen Aplin. I read that newspaper story and immediately saw the commonality of four red products in the district. At that time there were three Glen Aplin wineries producing red wines, The Bramble Patch Berry Gardens had ripe red strawberries, The Cherry Patch had sweet red cherries and we had a field of red Flanders poppies. I went to these five other tourist businesses and asked them to assist me with a donation and launched a promotion called Red November which still today draws coach tours to the region every November.
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Red wine, strawberries, cherries and Flanders poppies
- One of the glossy magazines the COUNTRY GARDENER sent a journalist and photographer to write a feature story about our garden. The magazine gave it an eight page colour spread and placed a view of our poppies on the cover. This magazine had a readership throughout Australia and New Zealand.
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COUNTRY GARDENER Autumn/Winter 1997
- Don Burke, a famous Australian TV gardening expert, read about the poppies in the COUNTRY GARDENER magazine and came to interview me and film the garden and poppies for a six minute segment on his TV show, BURKE’S BACKYARD. The show went to air on Friday 7th November and that weekend over a thousand people visited our garden and Remembrance Field.
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Fay with Don Burke 1997
- I had charged a gold coin entrance fee in 1996 and raised one thousand dollars, which I had donated to Brisbane Legacy. The Legacy organization sells artificial poppies for 11th November each year to raise money to support war widows and their children. We decided that Brisbane Legacy, along with the Australian Open Garden Scheme would be named as our charity and the entrance fee should be shared between them. With permission from Brisbane Legacy we called our Open Garden day The Legacy Flanders Poppy Festival of Faith – If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep tho poppies grow in Flanders Fields.
- The Hon. Bruce Scott, our federal member of parliament for this electorate and then Minister for Veterans Affairs, attended the Festival and also requested permission to use the photographs of the COUNTRY GARDENER magazine of our poppies on the Christmas cards his department sent out within Australia and overseas. In 1998 he launched a program called Poppies for Remembrance and sent out 10,000 packets of poppy seed to every school in Australia. I believe I threw a pebble in the pond and saw the ripple spread right across Australia.
Technorati Tags: Australia, Australian, blue cornflower, Canada, children, das helwig haus, father, Flanders fields, flanders poppy, garden, German, Germany, Glen Aplin, mother, poppies, Queensland, Red November, stanthorpe, strawberries, tourism, wife, wildflowers, wines, World War One
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