S – “ I was born in Perth and grew up down the south of WA in a little town called Harvey. I moved around a bit, Brisbane, Newcastle and I ended up in Lismore in 1998. My wife Julianne grew up in Casino.”
J – “ I did! Born in Sydney, moved to Wellington then moved to Casino. I moved away when I was a teenager to study then came back and lived in Evans Head for 7 years. I’ve been living in Lismore for the last 10 years.”
S – “ We were school teachers. We met in Casino at the Catholic High school where we worked about 15 years ago. Julianne was an excellent teacher. She won teacher of the year for NSW. I was the low mediocre teacher.”
J – “But the favourite.… By far.”
S – “Julianne taught music. I taught woodwork, metal work, all the fun things. We both got frustrated with how the education system was going. An opportunity came up for us to do something different which is how we ended up at LaBaracca. That was 9 1/2 years ago. Julianne worked her way through University in hospitality.”
J – “My brother was a Chef so I did a lot of functions with him. He was a trained fine dining French and Thai chef so we figured if were going to go into something we need him on board. He was travelling around the world working, lived and worked in Alice Springs and worked at Phoenix in Melbourne.
We hit up the guys that owned this and asked if they wanted to sell. It wasn’t for sale but after negotiating the rest is history.”
‘So Steve, did you know much about hospitality or running a restaurant?’
S – “No I just like eating and drinking. I love talking to people.”
J – “No, he just likes his food.”
S – “We love the coffee side. This was something that was an interest of mine. We did the mandatory three hour coffee course to make you a qualified Barista ( laughs). No Idea about anything ! Seriously, we were stagnant and stale as teachers. If you don’t have your heart in it as a career you shouldn’t be a teacher.”
J – “I fell pregnant so it was more Steve who wanted to get out of teaching. We wanted to take on a business together.”
J – “We now have five children in total who range from 5 to 20 years old.”
S – “The 18 year old has just starting her nursing degree tomorrow in Newcastle. The 20 year old has been down there for 18 months. He’s doing Psychology, Counselling and Chaplaincy. He’s having a great life. We also have a 10, 8 and a 5 year old. The full range.”
J – “I have been off and on with my music teaching. I’m also a Learner driver instructor.”
S – “Julianne is being very modest. She is a world renowned musician. She has travelled the world with The Australian Youth Choir.”
J – “I conducted the Australian Youth Choir, the QLD sector for 6 months. I didn’t travel the world with them. I travelled with the QLD Youth State Wind Ensemble. I’m a classical pianist but I play a few other instruments.”
S – “She plays any instrument you put in front of her. She’s being very humble.”
J – “When you are a classical pianist you can read any music so you can play most things. We don’t have much spare time as we are open 7 days and we work nights too. My brother got out of the business and its just Steve and I running it. The hours are crazy. Our baby is at school now which has freed me up a bit more at home.”
S – “We were ready to shut the doors after the flood. We were devastated by what we walked into.”
J – “At the same time we were refinancing as my brother had got out of the partnership. It all accumulated then bang, the flood. We thought we would never get back from it. It will still take years to get back from where we were. We might look lovely on the outside but it’s still going to take a lot to get back to where we were. Our priority was to keep paying our permanent staff. We lost everything but at the same time we didn’t want them to lose everything as well. Their wages were paying for their homes too. Our staff just turned up and they didn’t want payment. We couldn’t pay our casual staff but we paid our full timers. Casual staff could apply for that money which still took 10 weeks so they were still out of pocket in the end. It was hard.”
S – “We met some interesting and amazing people. We had the Prime Minister here, the Premier and the NSW Business Commissioner.”
J – “ It gave us a lot of coverage because Steve stuck it to Malcom and said : Why would you offer loans to people that have just lost everything? When you did get the grant, if you were lucky we found out that the $15,000 is taxable anyway. It was laughable.”
S – “We are pretty proud of our record here. We employ at full capacity, fifteen people. Six permanent and nine casual staff. You try and do your best by the town and the people who support you and then your own government mocks you. It feels like you get knocked down all the time. The day they came here after the devastation of that flood they offered 350 million dollars to Indonesia and you think, throw just one million this way. Drop it to 299 and help us out. That’s something I struggled with. We are totally up front and clean in business. We pay all our taxes, super, all above board and then when you need it they give you up to $15,000 but they don’t tell you till tax time that it’s classed as income. Only 1% of Lismore was covered for flood and they are the ones that can afford it. It would have cost us $20,000 for flood insurance annually.
It’s a character building experience. It makes you more determined to see Lismore as a whole grow again. In some ways it was a blessing even though it was forced upon us. We’ve done stuff we’ve talked about doing for years. When you have to close for 8 weeks because you physically can’t use the building it makes you get those things done.”
J – “We only had the footpath and the kitchen to use for 8 weeks. We lost our cool rooms, fridges, walls, everything so we couldn’t store anything. Everything was fresh every day so we were only doing breakfasts for those 8 weeks. You have to keep going, keep money coming in or you go down.”
S – “We couldn’t afford to shut. We lost 2 days of trade before we were doing coffee. Our coffee guy came with a new coffee machine for us. People were amazing.”
J – “A lot of it is blur for us. People appeared from everywhere to help, people we’ve never seen and don’t know. At one stage we had 40 people out the back helping clean.”
S – “That’s why we are so determined to see Lismore get back to where it was and more. So keen for all those shops in all the little arcades to be pumping again. We’ve settled here now. We’ve lived all over Australia and I came here with a 2 year plan originally but I haven’t left. Just half hour from the best beaches, an hour from Coolangatta airport, 2 hours from Brisbane. Its perfect, the hinterland and waterfalls on our doorstep. It’s the perfect location to live.”
J – “No other shop is competition to us because we think competition is healthy. We love it when other businesses are busy. That means people are in town.”
S – “We want the town to thrive, get the arcades full again, some are already looking great.”
J – “Our menu is Australian Modern Cuisine. We make everything on site. All our cakes, biscuits, everything. We source most of our food locally. Our seafood comes from Ballina, our meat from a Casino butcher, we use Henrys Bakery, coffee from Maclean. We try and keep it as local as we possibly can. We want locals to support us so we support them. We know the quality and we know the people. We could ring and say : These lettuces have grubs!
And they’d say : We’ll duck down and bring you some more. You don’t get that with big companies.”