my country childhood
EARLY ONE CHRISTMAS morning, when Ashley Dawson-Damer (then Mann) was six years old, her father, Bill, asked her to look out the window of their home in Bathurst, NSW. Outside was a child-size house with a red roof that he had built and her mother, Judith, had papered with roses and a matching curtain.
“My feet didn’t touch the ground! That was where I spent time with my dolls and reading Enid Blyton books while the rain came down on the tin roof, tucked away in my own little house,” Ashley, now 75, recalls. She is recreating a similar miniature dwelling, also named Cuddle Cottage, for youngest granddaughter, Isabeau, at her 27-hectare property near Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands.
Ashley’s early
