Like lots of other people, Tina Helm and Alex Bennett had some fairly clear but pretty ambitious ideas of what they wanted to do with their lives. She wanted to run a bed and breakfast and perhaps a café; he wanted to set up a recording studio. They were thinking they might do this in New Zealand, where they were both living at the time. Tina’s a Kiwi and Alex had been over there for a few years studying and working in the music studios at Auckland University – but was “ready to get out there and do it rather than be stuck in an institution”.
It suddenly clicked, he says, “that my parents had this building with a b&b and space for a studio” back in Australia. Alex and Tina had been together for two or three years at that time, but he’d never really talked about the house in Campbells Creek where he’d spent the first 12 years
