STORY BY MAHMOOD FAZAL, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

Mara Ripani is in lockdown home-schooling her children, “It's such a roller coaster because on the one hand I get to spend time with my child in a way where I get to see how she learns,” Mara pauses as she looks out over her 15 acre farm in Blampied, “and then other times, like today when it's really sunny, I just want to be outside doing my work.”

Mara’s work is a holistic project titled Village Dreaming. It thrives on reviving the displaced community of her Italian heritage through the things that made her grandmother's hometown so special; hosting, cooking, baking, preserving, and foraging workshops.

Until the age of nine, Mara lived in Italy with her grandmother. "The strongest memories were the outdoor markets. The voices, the vendors calling out the prices, the colourful displays and the feeling on the street,” her voice rises with excitement. “I remember the houses were right up against the street and people would literally open their windows onto the market.” In comparison, Mara’s experience of Australian supermarkets was a cultural shellshock. “I dislike supermarkets in comparison. I dislike the fluorescent lights. I remember thinking, ‘This is a dive!’ Going to the markets in Italy was a theatrical experience!”

In her 20s, while living in a share house in Westgarth, one day a German boy called Ralf knocked on the door with a delivery of sourdough bread, “And from there my new life began. Now with Artemisia and Ahlia we are creating our new home just outside of Daylesford.”

Over the past 15 years, Mara’s partner Ralph has worked as a Water Sensitive Urban Design Officer for a progressive City Council and as a Wetlands Projects Manager for Australian Ecosystems.

“Ralf was raised in the south of Germany and migrated to Australia when he was 9. He visits Germany regularly to visit family, and after visiting various family orchards, was inspired to set up a small mixed farm in Australia.” The roots of the couple's inspiration springs from within, “My grandmother was a post-World War mother. After she had her third child, her husband died. She had to work so hard to bring up those boys - all on her own. And she lived with us all my life, so she never wasted anything; ‘Turn the lights off! Turn the water off! Don't waste! Don’t waste!”

Mara studied a course in Environment at RMIT and spent years working with a variety of environmental organisations. “Incrementally and without knowing it, my time in Melbourne would lead me to a great passion for greening cities, growing food, permaculture, preserving and baking bread, sowing seeds, and a desire to study horticulture.”

In her early 20s, Mara studied with David Holmgren, the founder of permaculture, in Hepburn Springs. “And that made me fall in love with this area as well.” When asked about the most important lessons she took away from that revitalising experience, Mara quipped, “How meaningful this life is, how rich! There’s a very, very, very different type of wealth that is not celebrated and that isn’t understood. The whole concept of gifting changes in this way of life. Teaching skills becomes the most amazing gift. Showing someone where the fungi grow, which are the edible, which are poisonous - that becomes the gifting.”

Fifteen years later, with Ahlia and Ralph by her side and seven-week-old baby Artemisia in her arms, the family met with friends at Barbialla; a farm in Tuscany. “There we shared the morning's work: baking bread, tending the vegetable garden, stirring quince paste, before coming together to cook, feast and chiacchierare.”

It sparked Mara’s imagination. “I spent probably a good two years dreaming; what will I do on the property? Who will I be? And then it became obvious that I would continue what I was doing, but from my home and from all that environmental education, all the skills I've learned over the years...I would share them on my property.”

The result is Village Dreaming, where the gift of life is all about planting the seeds of how to live well. “We've got accommodation, and we've built two kitchens here. There was plenty of scope for me to teach preservation, to teach harvesting, to teach workshops on permaculture gardening, to talk about biodiversity and land management and regenerative farming,” reflecting on her achievements, Mara has realised her dream of piecing together a village of her own. “All those concepts that I've been teaching in an urban context, I can now paint through a rural context.”

Village Dreaming 0425 749 300 villagedreaming.com.au