Well there's a crazy little shack, beyond the track

And everybody calls it the Sugar Shack

It's just a coffeehouse made out wood

Espresso coffee tastes might good

That's not the reason I got to get back

To that Sugar Shack - whoa

To that Sugar Shack

From the minute I heard the truly joyous news that Red Dog coffee traders had reopened in the tiny timber cottage at the top of town, my internal DJ has been spinning Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs' Sugar Shack. On high rotation.

You see, although it's just a coffee house, made out of wood, Kai and Angel's espresso coffee really does taste mighty good. What's more, they are lovely people who are passionate about what they do - which is all that matters in my book. Actually, there is one other thing ...

Aside from a smooth, robust cup, I do like to sip my coffee somewhere with a bit of soul, a bit of personality, a place that's not - well, wall-to-wall stainless. Red Dog's former digs had such a cosy European ambiance, a laid-back elegance of cobalt blue walls, squishy leather chesterfield and rows of antique coffee cups and grinders. Change, however, can be a good thing, an exciting thing. And if Kai and Angel's old place spoke winter, their new hangout shouts summer: Valencia orange paintwork, freshly-turfed and palm-studded courtyard, white umbrellas dotted about and windows flung open to the cutest little verandah.

Ah yes - morning papers, bright blue Eumundi sky, and Angel pouring you a heavenly cup of coffee. By the time you're out the gate you'll be Walking on Sunshine ...


Red Dog open 7:30 to 13:00, Monday to Saturday. (If your partner hasn't returned from the school run, I'd check there first). As well as serving perfect in-house coffee, you can buy all your take-home supplies from their choice selection of Toby's Estate beans.
By the way, see those herbs in the garden? Angel's growing them so "the locals can pick fresh herbs if they need them."
This is why I love this town.

Yesterday I travelled down a long dirt road, twisting and turning up and down, far into the hills and deep into the forest. Finally, around one last, gravel-crunching bend I reached a familiar fork in the road, and a tiny pink house atop a post: the letterbox of Ms Eleanor Percival.

Through a rusty, paint-splattered gate the forest clears and before you sprawls a grassy plateau and there, there at the end of the track sits her little, moss green house and studio. It's a higgledy-piggledy, upstairs-downstairs house that echoes the quirks and corners of Eleanor's imagination.

Downstairs the sun streams through the windowed walls of her greenhouse bathroom, feeding the twisted tendril leaves of her precious plants, beaming rainbows across her rose pink tub. Upstairs her studio too is awash with light. Canvases at all stages of ripeness stacked against walls. Crushed tubes of paint and abandoned pencils scattered over tables and floor. Walls papered and pinned with torn-off inspiration, memories and afterthoughts.

Meanwhile in Eleanor's pink and plywood kitchen the log fire crackles and the kettle steams. There's time to sit like tiny Alice in a curly-legged, ruby velvet chair and sip tea while the clocks tick time. Step outside, and the cow-chewed pastures roll out before you like an endless carpet; but the forest lies awaiting behind, wrapping its leafy, stringybark arms around the house, and around Eleanor - hugging her tight, connecting her and feeding her dreams.

For Eleanor is a painter of dreams and wild imaginings. Her art refuses to fit the neat grids marked out by style and genre; it flows across the field of vision, dripping off the edges of realism and disappearing through the cracks of perception. "Fantasy Artist" does not do justice to Eleanor or her art. In her canvases you may well find a heart, a flower, a bird - but sometimes too a skull, a raven, a blade, and other dark and arcane things that you somehow know but can't articulate. Eleanor does that for you. Her canvases breathe life and death, beauty and horror, heaven and hell and everything in between.

Eleanor has no choice but to paint. Her art is who she is. Like Van Gogh, she swirls paint onto canvas with a passion that sometimes hurts. Like Chagall, she sees magic in the mundane. Her beautiful mind spills forth vortexes of people, animals and objects that mingle, marry, and fall apart. Cakes sit on heads, skulls nestle in hair, necklets of pagans leap around throats.

But Eleanor's strong bare feet are as grounded in the sweet soil as her head is in the clouds. She puts down her brush and comes down to earth and goes outside and farms. She plants canvases of garden as bewitching as her painting. She mows, she chops wood for her fire, she picks plants and bakes biscuits and brews herbal teas to cure thirst or fever or stress from too much world.

Sometimes she stays too long away from the world. Sometimes she forgets about people. Her wise, brave mother taught her how to paint, and to not fear her own company. And the animals are always there: the cows, the chickens, her beloved black Damara sheep. There's always someone to feed, or shelter, or rescue, or caress, or scold. Her farming is real. It's hard work. It's nature. It's sweet and beautiful and messy and ugly. It's all of life and death - like her canvases.