Maggie Beer’s new mission
After more than 50 years as the doyenne of Australia’s food landscape, Maggie Beer reflects on where it all began, her formative food memories and what is still left to do when it comes to her most important mission yet.
For those who weren’t lucky enough to experience Maggie Beer’s celebrated Pheasant Farm Restaurant in its heyday, a hand-written menu, circa 1990, gives a glimpse into this iconic Barossa Valley destination and its trail-blazing owner.
It’s a menu of its time in many ways with a weekend fixed price of $45 for three courses and coffee, and a request that customers “refrain from smoking until 3pm in the afternoon or 10pm in the evenings”.
But equally, this menu memento reveals just how ahead of her time Maggie Beer was in the early days of the ground-breaking restaurant she ran from 1979 until 1993.
The historic menu includes handmade pasta with gum-smoked kangaroo, sundried tomatoes and parmigiano; squab roasted – feet included – with pigeon livers and Mediterranean onions; rabbit scallopine with artichokes, capers, olives and anchovy mayonnaise; and, of course, pheasant breast roasted with baby beetroots and garlic mayonnaise.
Maggie’s ethos was pioneering: using the whole animal with minimal waste, of cooking everything from scratch and using fresh seasonal produce. Gradually, the self-taught cook’s reputation grew faster than the pheasants she and husband Colin were breeding on their rural property. Within a few years, the Pheasant Farm Restaurant was being lauded by locals and tourists alike.
Maggie’s originality, creativity and grass roots approach saw the restaurant take out the coveted Remy Martin Cognac/Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year Award in 1991, a game-changer that set the hard-working restaurateur, author and businesswoman on a path to national stardom.
“Winning the Remy Martin Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year award, it just changed from being a country restaurant with a cult following that was full every weekend, and the other days were fine, to overnight being full every session with people having a different expectation because we won at a level that went with glitzy,” Maggie says.
But neither Maggie nor Colin was there for the glitz and glamour. The Pheasant Farm grew organically out of Maggie’s passion for cooking, matched perfectly with Colin’s dream of breeding game birds. From the start, it was always about the food, never the fame.
The couple, who met on the ski fields of Mount Buller in 1970 and married four months later, moved to the Barossa Valley from Maggie’s hometown of Sydney in 1973.
At first, Maggie, who was yet to discover her culinary calling, worked as a land broker while Colin, who grew up in Mallala, realised his long-held dream of farming pheasants and running a vineyard on the land they purchased in December 1973, which is still known as The Pheasant Farm.
The idea was simple enough – set up a shop to sell the pheasants as well as produce grown and raised on their property, including quail, guinea fowl and the couple’s first gourmet products of paté and pickled quail eggs.
But when Colin won a Churchill Fellowship in 1978 to study game-bird breeding in Europe and the US, it laid the foundation for what would go on to become the Maggie Beer brand juggernaut.
By the time they launched their Pheasant Farm Shop in 1979, Maggie and Colin had two young daughters, Saskia and Elli, and their family meals meant feasting on their homegrown produce.
“Given that we started the Farm Shop when the girls were two and four years old, I was always experimenting, always cooking things for them,” Maggie says. “We cooked a lot of quail because we bred them. We were breeding 1000 quails a week.
“I remember I would cook the quail eggs in the day, buckets of them, and they’d be in this water and vinegar solution. I remember peeling them whilst telling the girls stories, and when I’d break one, they loved to eat the yolk.
“We lived in one big room of the Farm Shop for nearly 10 years and then the cottage we bought nearby also had the best yabbie dam in the district. In summer we’d pull the yabbies out of the dam and cook them, and we would sit at a trestle table outside and eat them. It was just the best thing.
“I remember that food was important to the girls, and they’d eat oysters and I would give them pheasant sandwiches and quail sandwiches in their lunchboxes and they’d swap them for fritz sandwiches.
“And we had a lot of scrambled eggs apparently, that was the fallback when I was busy and they were really little.”
The Farm Shop eventually led to the opening of the Pheasant Farm Restaurant, and both ventures were pivotal in broadening suburban culinary horizons. Customers were drawn to Maggie’s authenticity and relatability; after all, she was a home cook, not a trained chef.
But success came at a cost in many ways for the couple.
“We worked so hard,” Maggie says. “Colin worked the 40-acre vineyard and the birds and delivered paté to Adelaide when we started selling it to our first customers, and front of house, and I did all the laundry for the restaurant and all the food.
“I don’t know how we did it, but there must have been times when one or the other of us was exhausted. But we never stopped to think, ‘this is too hard’. We just didn’t because Colin so allowed me my passion, which was to never stop learning about food and having so much to learn about working with game, it was endless, and I was so driven by produce.”
After 14 years, though, the pressure of running the businesses and coping with a growing family took its toll. The couple shut the Pheasant Farm Restaurant at the height of its success.
“Col came in one day and said, ‘this is crazy. It’s either the restaurant or me. You are burnt out’, and I didn’t demure,” Maggie says. “Now, I would never have made that choice, I was so invested and still loving it, but I was exhausted.
“We closed on November 28, 1993. I picked the date, which was the day before Elli turned 18, because she used to say to me, ‘I want a proper mum’. But what I did do was say that I needed time to let everyone know because we had such a loyal following and not just locally. So, for the next four months I gave no choice to anyone, if they wanted to come, they had to have what I was cooking, whether it was stuffed pigs ears or whatever, there was no choice. And it was fantastic.
“We had a great party at the end, the wake we called it, and we had very special people – Nat Paull was my apprentice who went on to be apprentice to Stephanie (Alexander) and then opened Beatrix Bakes in Port Melbourne. Steve Flamsteed, he was with us while he studied oenology and he went on to many things including chief winemaker at Giant Steps. We also had Alex Herbert who went on to create Bird Cow Fish in Sydney. We went out on the highest of highs with customers clambering for more.”
Maggie admits in the aftermath it took her a year to recover from the exhaustion. On her worst days, she found it difficult to get out of bed and says in hindsight she was probably suffering depression.
But two events turned things around. Maggie’s good friend, food identity Stephanie Alexander suggested they all go on holiday to Italy and, in that same week, Anne Summers, then-editor of The Good Weekend magazine, offered Maggie a monthly food column.
“So, she believed in me,” Maggie says. “I got those phone calls two days apart.”
That first foray into the media set Maggie on a path to become one of Australia’s most loved and respected food celebrities. Instantly recognisable with her cropped hair, huge smile, stylish fashions and artsy earrings, Maggie has endeared herself to generations of Australians who feel they know her, trust her.
The accolades have been many including Senior Australian of the Year in 2010 and South Australian of the Year in 2011.
She has shared her passion for cooking on shows such as MasterChef and The Great Australian Bake Off, but it was Maggie’s appearance on the ABC series The Cook and the Chef in 2006, alongside then Hilton Adelaide’s executive chef Simon Bryant, that really gave audiences a sense of this high-profile foodie’s natural humour and warmth.
Simon was young and hip and operated from a trained, scientific base, while Maggie was an old-school cook driven by instinct and heart.
“We learnt a lot from each other,” she says. “It was such a fantastic show because it was so unscripted, what you saw was what you got because I knew enough to know that I couldn’t bear the boredom of things being stopped and repeated. It was very off the cuff.
“We were so different, but we came together on the same philosophy of produce and sustainability, and he was so cheeky and funny. I never knew what was going to come out of his mouth and I loved that.”
Maggie’s natural instincts for cooking developed at a young age, raised in a family where a homecooked meal meant her father catching, killing and plucking one of their feathered friends from the backyard, or dabbing for prawns in Sydney Harbour.
Her parents Ron and Doreen Ackerman ran a manufacturing business that made pots and pans and Maggie and her siblings, older brother Peter and younger brother Robert, were hands-on when it came to food preparation.
“My food memories are about Mum and Dad always cooking things such as chook and goose and brawn and all sorts,” Maggie says. “Offal was our favourite food, and this is back in the day where we only had ice boxes, not refrigerators, and it was always groaning with food. I mean offal would still sit with my favourite foods in the world, particularly brains and liver and heart.
“It was a very unusual upbringing in Australia when I think about it because it was about using every part of the animal, we all helped make brawn from the pig’s head, for example.”
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When asked about her first food memory though, Maggie’s mind goes back to a stay in hospital as a three-year-old, after having a hernia operation.
“I was allowed a piece of chocolate, I remember it was Old Gold dark chocolate, and then my dad put it up high on a wardrobe where I couldn’t reach it,” she says. “Given that I don’t really have a sweet tooth, it was still such a treat, it was always dark chocolate I liked.”
The 80-year-old says she has no memory of learning to cook, the skills were effortlessly transferred from her parents, as if by osmosis or through their DNA. But a career in food was years away for Maggie who, at just 14 years of age, was thrust into the workforce after her parents’ company went bankrupt.
“It was my father really because for him, and in this period it was that way for everyone, he thought that you’re just a girl so you can be a secretary or get married,” says Maggie, who was a straight-A student.
“I just went along with it because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was a very obedient child, and you knew you were loved and I was never made to feel that I didn’t count intellectually, but I was still just a girl. I never held any resentment about it, it was just the times, because I knew they were proud of me.”
Maggie took on a variety of secretarial roles as she embarked on a search for her place in the world, including years of overseas travel in her early 20s.
“I was fairly introverted, and it was a great experience going into new places all the time, always learning,” she says. “But I was still searching for what felt right.
“For a lot of my life I wished I’d gone to university, but I think that if I had done that, I would have been pigeonholed to do something that would never have given me the life that I’ve had, with something that I’m so passionate about.”
By the time she and Colin began their business in the Barossa Valley, Maggie was 34 years old.
“The Farm Shop was the moment I found my thing. I didn’t have to search anymore,” she says. “Cooking has always just made me happy. I love to teach; no teach is the wrong word, I’m happiest when I’m sharing what I know and love, and I can see that picked up by others.
“I’m not really a people-person unless I’m cooking for them all around the table. I’ve always been incredibly optimistic, but I’m an introverted extrovert and a loner in many senses.
“My other love is music, it has also been a constant, as constant as the love of food in my life – the two always go together for me.”
When SALIFE visits Colin and Maggie in their Fleurieu Peninsula beach house, Maggie is moving slowly. She is still recovering from a serious fall at home last year that left her with severe internal injuries as well as fractures to her neck, back and sternum.
The couple has been buoyed by the outpouring of love and support from the public and Maggie says she is “90 per cent there” in her recovery, and back in the kitchen already.
The family felt that same outpouring of love in 2020 when the couple’s eldest daughter Saskia, or Sassie as she was affectionately known, tragically and unexpectedly passed away in her sleep.
Saskia was 46 and a food identity in her own right through her Saskia Beer Food Produce company. In honour of their beloved daughter, Colin and Maggie established the Saskia Beer Churchill Fellowship in 2022, supporting others to pursue their passion for food.
“It is incredibly important to us because it was the Churchill Fellowship that gave Colin, and therefore us, our springboard into the farm shop that led to the restaurant,” Maggie says. “Sassie absorbed every bit of the Valley farming life and the entrepreneurial ability, she had it in this big package, so we wanted to do something to make sure that what she did as an individual, not just as our daughter, was honoured and the fellowship was just the most obvious and wonderful thing to do, so we’ve done it in perpetuity.”
Maggie says cooking today helps brings back memories of Sassie, who inherited her mother’s talents in the kitchen.
“She had a much bigger repertoire than me, she loved Mexican food, Asian food,” she says. “I mean food was every bit as important to her in a much wider sense than me. She always used to come to the garden when she was going out to eat and pick a little posey of fresh herbs that she would add to whatever she was having at a restaurant, and she’d take her own salt and pepper.
“Food was so important to Sassie, she just cooked naturally without thinking about it. Elli always used to say, ‘why would I cook with Mum and Sass around?’.”
Elli has worked in various roles within the world of food, including the family business, which currently includes running the Farm Shop, The Farm Eatery and Cooking School and an accommodation offering, Orchard House, all in the Barossa Valley.
Much of Maggie’s focus in the past couple of years has been through her Maggie Beer Foundation, working with her team to improve food and nutritional practices in nursing homes across the country.
With funding from the Federal Government, the foundation delivers education and training to improve the dining, food, and nutritional outcomes for older people in aged care. With her trademark drive and determination for change, Maggie delved into the emotive issue through her documentary series, Maggie Beer’s Big Mission.
“I think we live in an ageist society, and I think that’s part of the problem, as if once you’re old life doesn’t matter anymore,” Maggie says. “We have such a responsibility as a society, all of us, not just the government, everyone has a responsibility to look after our older citizens.
“Through the Maggie Beer Foundation I am hoping to do more training this year with the chefs because even though I’m slowing down, I’m not stopping and when you have a platform you have a responsibility to use it, and I love to work.
“It’s a long journey, changes don’t happen overnight, but there are real things happening and I’d love for people to go to the foundation website to find out about the free training.”
When she’s not working, Maggie loves to spend time with the family, including the couple’s grandchildren, and she enjoys cooking at home to the sounds of her beloved classical and jazz music.
“I’ve got this work ethic that is so inbuilt, and I have to balance it because I have so many things that give me joy; gardening, cooking, friends, family, music,” Maggie says.
“But I would have to say it’s the foundation and the work we are doing in aged care that is my proudest project. I love the delight, I love sharing something that makes someone else feel happy. That’s what keeps me going. If I can bring flavour and goodness to every bite as the norm in aged care, then that’s my legacy.
“But there is still so much to do.”
This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.
