Annabelle Hickson is the most industrious person I know. Once a city girl, Annabelle started her career as a reporter for The Australian newspaper in the early 2000s. Whilst at the Brisbane bureau she was swept off her feet by a handsome farmer, Ed, and her life quite literally changed forever. She now lives on Australia’s second largest pecan orchard and runs the award winning magazine - GALAH - a cultural magazine that explores life in regional Australia covering the arts, food, travel and design as well as big-picture issues like water, decentralisation and community.
What impresses me so much about Annie is what she has built from nothing. In the last 5 years, she has been a columnist with Country Style magazine, she has co-created a podcast called Dispatch to a Friend that was named one of iTunes Australia’s Top 10 podcasts for 2018 and published a book called A Tree in the House, which has been translated into German, Dutch and Chinese. All from the “middle of nowhere” - her words, not mine..
What does it take to start something from scratch? How do you get motivated when you feel so remote and disconnected from everything? Annie has overcome numerous barriers – including shonky wi-fi – and built success when it felt impossible.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I was always envious of people who had very clear ideas of what they wanted to be. To be sure about anything is something that I still long for. I always liked the idea of being a writer. I liked the idea of being surrounded by books and other people writing.
Who would you most like to be stuck on a desert island with? Why?
My husband, Ed. This is not because he is perfect, and this is not because he's not annoying! The older I'm getting the more I'm valuing what is familiar. I've been with Ed now for 13 or 14 years and I'm really interested in exploring that relationship even more. He might want to run for the hills, but I would be very happy to be stuck on a desert island with him.
What single book has had the greatest impact on you? Why?
Reading has taught me almost everything I know about human beings and the world. So often your interactions with people, they're just the tip of the iceberg of real life. But in books you get a sense of the sea inside us all.
A book that I talk about the most is the series of autobiographical novels by Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård, his My Struggle books. I found them utterly compelling. I think about him and them every day.
The book that's had the biggest impact on me is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It’s instructions on writing and life. I love her analogy of writing and describing it like driving in the night with your headlights on, and that you can only see as far as your headlights shine. I think that's the same way you can't see everything, and you often don't really know where you're going, but all you have to do is just look at that little bit in front of you and then keep going and you'll eventually get somewhere.
When do you go to bed and when do you get up?
I go to bed early. I really like to be in bed by 8:30 and I will read or I will shamelessly watch things on my computer in bed, even though people say you're not meant to, I love it. That's my favourite time of the day. Then conversely, I like to wake up early too. I wake up around five and I love having just a bit of time before the rest of the household wakes up, time that feels like mine.
Can you briefly explain your career path to date?
Despite not studying journalism at university, I decided early on that I wanted to be a journalist. I set my mind to hounding a few newspapers until they let me in the door as a bit of a trial. I ended up getting a cadetship at The Australian newspaper in the general news doing death knocks and fronting up to press conferences. It was such a wonderful experience. I mean the death knocks, not so much, but the whole experience of working with lots of different people I found to be utterly compelling. I thought that was going to be the beginning of a long career as a newspaper journalist. As part of the cadetship program, I moved up to the Brisbane bureau to spend some time working there. That's when I met Ed, a farmer and my life really veered off course.
Coming from someone who grew up in Sydney, I never really thought about life in the country. I literally never thought about it. It felt like it wasn't even applicable to me. Now I live on a pecan farm, an hour west of a town (Tenterfield) with about 4,000 people - from my point of view, in the middle of nowhere. Falling in love with Ed put an end to me being part of a newsroom in an office, because there are literally no offices here and very few jobs that aren't related to agriculture.
When I first got here, I wasn't at all interested in becoming a farmer myself or becoming someone who does the books for the farm or anything like that, it just didn't excite me. It forced me to figure out how to make opportunities that involved writing. I had to sort of make them up for myself. It was a pretty exciting time as Instagram was becoming more mainstream and I saw this as an opportunity to create my own audience. Having access to technology has levelled the playing field between people who aren't geographically close to big hubs who now can access people in a similar way to people in big cities.
I built up stuff on Instagram and I freelanced as a writer. I also got into photography because I thought I needed to be the full package. I needed to be able to write, take photos and do all that because it was going to be too hard and too expensive to get photographers out here. About a year and a half ago when everyone was talking about shifting from print to digital, I did the opposite and I shifted from digital and the instagram world into launching my own print magazine called GALAH (https://galahpress.com/).
GALAH is a magazine about regional Australia. I was frustrated at the state of lots of mainstream magazines with diminishing budgets and dropping quality. I moved to the country because I was madly in love with a farmer, and I assumed it was going to be hard and I’d have to make sacrifices including those to my career. But life out here has actually shown me completely the opposite. I feel lucky to live in regional Australia and I really wanted a publication to represent that, to represent this sense of opportunity and excitement and innovation and all this stuff I see when I look around.
So that's why I started GALAH and I’m currently finalising our fifth edition.
Annabelle at her home in the garden in the Dumaresq Valley
What is the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome, as it relates to your career or industry?
The biggest obstacle for me was shifting from an institutionalised employee to an entrepreneur and someone who worked for myself. I've always been very good in systems. I was a good student. I was a good employee. I'd worked very hard. I loved to be given tasks and I did my best to do really well at them. Shifting over to someone who creates their own work and creates their own opportunity, that was massive for me. It took me a few years to feel comfortable. I am not a natural businesswoman and I'm not a natural entrepreneur.
What motivates you?
I'm very ambitious. I don't know where that comes from, but I'm certainly very ambitious for work that feels meaningful to me. All I really want in this world is to feel connected, to feel like there's some kind of communal experience going on.
What do you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
That time teaches you a lot. I remember sitting as a cadet sitting in the newsroom and I'd look at some of the older journolists and they would come in and they'd pitch these amazing stories and have these great ideas and passions that they'd work on. I wondered if I’d ever be able to do that and I doubted myself. I knew nothing but you learn things over time and there's no real rush. Life is long and time is valuable. That's sort of a confusing thing, but I tell myself, "Don't worry, you don't have to have it all worked out now."
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Starting a magazine that is commercially viable. For the first four issues, we had no advertising and I cannot tell you how many people doubted me. I heard it all: You cannot have a magazine without advertising. You cannot start a magazine these days, you cannot start a magazine in the middle of nowhere. I feel really proud that I can say, Well, actually you can.
What do you believe has been the key to your success?
Desperation and resourcefulness. My greatest skill is the ability to keep working. I don't think I am the most talented, but I will always keep going.
What is your life motto?
I had a blood test one day and this lovely doctor said, "You'll never forget what blood type you are, because this can be your life motto." Then he said, with this really cheesy grin, "B positive!" I don't know why that has stuck in my head because it's so cheesy. I really value optimism and enthusiasm. It’s so easy to be cynical and it's so easy to think that things are doomed. There’s something linked with optimism that drives courage and a willingness to give things a go. I think the doctor was strangely prophetic.
What’s the best advice you've ever been given?
A friend once asked me if I’d ever considered Lexapro [anxiety medication]. I am not kidding you, I didn't realise I was an anxious person. I thought I was quite cool, calm and collected. I'm not out here to advertise taking medicine to anyone, but my own experience, it changed my life. I had no idea how anxious I was and how exhausting that was and how much time that took up.
Who do you most admire in business? Why?
I've just finished a book by Anne Patchett, the American writer, and it's a collection of essays. One of the essays really moved me, it talks about how she's opened up a bookshop in Nashville. I feel like there's a lot of people saying to me, "Why start a print magazine now?" Similarly, a lot of people would say, "Why start a bookshop now?"
She did it not because she necessarily wanted to be a bookshop owner or that she was a particularly good businesswoman. She was a writer and she felt she had to because there were no bookshops left. What really strikes me is that it's so much more than a bookshop. It's the community that she's built. She's made this place where people who are interested in books can come and connect with each other.
I feel with GALAH Magazine, if it has any chance of surviving into the future, it needs to be so much more than just a magazine and those types of businesses are exciting to me.
As told to Caroline Hugall on Thursday 17th February 2022