Outback coffee van grinds to a halt and finding community on the netball court

Young adventurous and enterprising couple Jess Davidson and Andy Hoffman quit their jobs to follow a dream more than a year ago. The coffee-loving, camping enthusiasts decided they could combine their two passions and take the beans on the road with them, bringing coffee to towns where a good brew was hard to find or where there were no cafes.

There is an old stereotype that paints rural women as ‘farmers’ wives’ who spend their days baking and cleaning while their husbands bring in the income. But spend sometime with a country netball team and you soon discover that’s far from reality.

Grade four students from Burnie Primary School are on an excursion to the far north-west corner of Tasmania where they’re learning from ‘the oldest classroom in the world’ – exploring places that are incredibly significant for Indigenous Tasmanians. They’ll visit the Preminghana Indigenous Protected Area and the nearby Kings Run property, both are dotted with artefacts, hut sites, rock art and other signs of the people who lived in this region hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years ago.

Steve Austin has been training scent detection dogs for more than 30 years. He’s worked with dogs to track down everything from noxious weeds to explosives and narcotics. But it’s his dog whispering skills with the truffle industry that has a crowd of 50 or so growers in northern Tasmania transfixed as Steve shares his specialist detector dog training skills.

ABC AU