Cowbell Creek: A short history.

Welcome to the first Cowbell Creek blog post. Apparently there are marketing advantages to having a blog on your website. We hope this is true but we also hope we can use this blog to build up a useful list of advice and opinions that may help our couples think about and plan their dream wedding. There is quite a bit of generic wedding information available to couples which is a good starting point but each venue is unique and information that pertains directly to a specific venue should in theory be a big help in what can seem a daunting process. Each post will cover something that we think can make a difference to weddings held at Cowbell Creek. We will use this first post as a general Cowbell Creek overview that will inform all of the blogs to follow.

Cowbell Creek is located in Austinville, a small single road in and out suburb in the Gold Coast Hinterland of Queensland Australia. Cowbell Creek has been our family’s farm and home for 4 generations. Originally part of a much bigger dairy farm, the wedding venue sits on the last 200 acres not to be broken off for family members when they left home. The last 200 acres was shared as a dairy farm up until industry deregulation in 2000. From 2000 until 2017 the land sat more or less unused except by the dairy herd that continued to graze the hills. In 2017 the farm was sold to the original owners granddaughter Tracey and her husband Darren, with plans to turn the farm into a wedding venue. Skip forward 7 years and those plans have come to fruition in the form of the Cowbell Creek that you see today.

Cowbell Creek is a wedding venue but it is also a working farm. Although the original dairy herd still wanders the hills we now breed Scottish Highland cows. We call it a working farm because we do all of the work needed to run a 200 acre cattle farm, we just don’t make any money from the farming side of things. For want of a better term the farm is a sanctuary, none of our animals are sold or eaten. We are soft, we treat them as pets. They still get all of the dipping, ear tagging and drenching that regular farm animals get; they just get brushing and treats on top. We may not sell our animals but they all work for their keep, that work just happens to be lawn mowing with some modelling on the side. Our photogenic animals (highland cows, clydesdale and thoroughbred horses, alpacas and chooks) are what make our venue and the images produced here unique.

The goal at Cowbell Creek has always been to retain farm authenticity with a layer of the polish needed to deliver high quality, comfortable weddings for couples and their guests. We are lucky that our setting is beautiful and completely private, the polish though had to be added. This included all roads, earthworks, our wedding barn, ceremony areas and the renovation of all the original farm buildings. You would think starting with a blank slate would ensure we got everything right the first time, we did not. The last 9 years have been a constant evolution, improving areas already built, adding new areas and building new structures to allow us to deliver a wedding experience of the highest quality regardless of changing weather, tastes and budgets. This evolution has no end point, we continue and will continue to build and refine the farm to present the very best wedding experience we can.

From this point on blog posts will cover current projects, issues unique to weddings at Cowbell Creek, our animals, new acquisitions and anything else that we think will help you plan your Cowbell Creek wedding. We will announce new blog posts via our Instagram feed cowbell_creek so you don’t miss them and we get that sweet cross promotion traffic.

Cheers
Cowbell Creek