Blame Mabel: A Design-Lover’s Daydream in Rural Victoria

I was never meant to find Blame Mabel. 

And yet, the more I reflect on this happy accident, the more I’ve wondered if Blame Mabel might have found me. 

Our story takes place in the small town of Anakie; a remote plot backed by the tangled tree-tops of the Brisbane Ranges, bumping along the horizon like a sleeping croc. We’d taken the 50-minute train to Anakie’s nearest station, Lara, from Melbourne’s steely-blue CBD. It was on this railroad out west that the colours took a turn: Chartreuse-green spilled into grassy verges, wheat crops rolled out in their dirty blonde droves, the stumps of stark white gum-trees gnarled upward, as if electrified yesterday.

We would drive 30 minutes from the station further into Victoria’s sheep-shearing, cattle-grazing country. Our final destination was an acreage called home by two delightful, dum-dum cattle dogs, Bella and Pip, who we’d be looking after while their parents vacationed in South America; a fabulous scheme that gives Australian pet owners a free sitter, and nomadic travellers like ourselves a place to stay. As I poked around the area on Google Maps, signal waning by the kilometre, Blame Mabel would appear to me as a lone pink pin, floating down the road from our pseudo-doggy daycare.

A quick Instagram search later, and I realised Blame Mabel might be the most beautiful B&B in all of Australia, and on the off-chance that it was the most beautiful B&B in all of Australia, I should probably go and find out for myself.

But first, the middle of nowhere had much to offer. Days flew by breezing along the Great Ocean Road, in the quaint towns of the Bellarine Peninsula, visiting nearby wildlife sanctuaries and hiking the hilly trails of the You Yangs Regional Park. And then there was Geelong, the closest major city to the south, home to a waterfront punching far above its second-city weight. 

With our time running out in Bella and Pip’s kangaroo kingdom, Blame Mabel was now or never. I jumped in the car and drove, fuelled by petrol and curiosity. On my left, the Anakie General Store, where shelves of marshmallows and firelighters smelled like my childhood spent in campsites around the north-west of England. In the car park, a lone gas pump made of shiny chrome. On my right, nine giant butter-yellow letters high on the hilltop, like if the Hollywood sign had drunk too much coffee: FAIRY PARK. A mystery for another day.

Blame Mabel’s signpost appeared – appropriately enough for this rescued vineyard – as the head of an old wine barrel. Beyond it, a sweet little sprawl of brick-built, butterfly-flocked buildings: three dinky one-bed studios, a three-bed farmhouse, and a communal cabin here out front – home to a shared kitchen, board game-laden lounge, farm shop and cellar door (weekends only). Mel, our sunny owner, bounds out from the latter, where she’d been unboxing the farm shop’s latest addition: lanolin-based goodies from The Peeping Sheep in north-east Victoria, including some adorably sheep-shaped soaps. 

I tell Mel I’m a nosy, if temporary, local who reviews hotels for a living. She is seemingly stunned that I would take any interest in Blame Mabel at all. Mel is what Gen Z would call a humble queen – charmingly candid with dirt smudges on her cheek from planting and pruning and all the other roll-up-your-sleeve jobs that she and husband, Gareth, single-handedly perform – all while working full-time in nearby Lara. 

“There have been a lot of tears to get to this point,” she says, tempering my praise as I gawk at the achievement of it all. “It’s been overwhelming.”

When Mel and Gareth, two Anakie locals with a dream, bought the property in late 2020 it needed – in Mel’s own words – “putting gently back together”. The land had been left to die a death, and so too had the vines. “Some of these looked more like trees when we first arrived,” she says, gesturing to the now neat rows of cordons, canes and shoots. A parcel of these would produce one of the finest Rieslings that I (and my wine-savvy boyfriend – whose praise on this subject is much harder won than mine) have ever tried. 

It was when Mel showed me inside the first cottage-core cabin – the kind you could imagine Taylor Swift recording a new folk album in – that I knew I needed to come back. It would happen again when Mel scooped fresh, speckled eggs from the hen coop, ready for her guests’ breakfast; when I first clapped eyes on one of the many claw-foot bath tubs (accompanying salts handmade with lavender and roses from the garden); and when, of course, I met Mabel, Mel’s sassy boxer pup, after whom the whole venture is named. 

Returning a few weeks later felt like slipping back into a story of which Mel was undoubtedly the author, and I, an aspiring main character: someone who made dinners using freshly-picked rosemary from the garden and started her days stretching with a hot coffee on the sun-baked porch. We were calling the three-bed farmhouse home, and walked in to find the afternoon light streaking through sheer, tawny curtains, every room unravelling like an increasingly photogenic Architectural Digest spread. That Mel has no interior design background is still one of the wildest things I’ve ever heard. “There are little stories tucked into every corner”, she says of her reclaimed, vintage design aesthetic. “I think guests can feel it.”

As easy as it would have been to stay inside, my Blame Mabel alter-ego was an outdoors girl. So, we grabbed a picnic basket from the farmhouse, packed it with cosy blankets (plus the welcome plate of brownies that had been left for us), and made for Mount Anakie – a gloriously easy expedition. Mount Anakie is a small peak that can be reached almost exclusively from the property’s backyard, a trail marked by Mel and Gareth using little arrowed signposts in the land. The summit unfolds into waves of almost Tuscan-looking hills and eventually the city of Melbourne itself, appearing as a thicket of high-rise towers rendered hazy by distance. On the way back down, we’d stop to relax on the pair of Adirondack lawn chairs (Muskoka chairs, if you’re my Canadian boyfriend) stationed overlooking the vines. The shrubs beside us rustle. A kangaroo hops out for a staring contest. 

The evening that follows is a perfect Pinterest board of herbaceous G&Ts from the honesty bar, long chess games and a full playthrough of John Mayer’s Continuum. All night long, our well-fed fire roared and crackled, illuminating the pages of our respective books. We’d drink the cold, aforementioned Riesling, which lent us just the right amount of courage needed to take a bath in the outdoor tub. Since light pollution was nothing but a distant rumour here, something that happened to other places, the Milky Way bloomed above us as prominent and purple as I’d ever seen it.

After a night wrapped up in crisp, heavenly sheets (designed in the nearby Mornington Peninsula by Sunday Linen), a Blame Mabel breakfast came together on the outside patio. From the fridge, bottles of orange juice and milk. From the stovetop, fresh eggs scrambled with garden herbs and teeny tomatoes picked from the vines beside our bedroom window. Plus, jars and jars of dried apple slices, currants, sunflower seeds and granola to top bowls of cold, tasty yoghurt. As curls of steam escaped the snout of our freshly brewed teapot I wondered, not unseriously, if Mel might be open to a rental agreement. 

The verdict? Not so easy to find, but impossible to forget.

Blame Mabel can be booked direct or on Airbnb from $150 per night. You can also keep up with Blame Mabel on Instagram.

All images credit to Sarah Miles Photography.

The writer of this article was hosted by Blame Mabel for a complimentary stay. All opinions expressed are based on the author’s personal experience.