We Built The Retreat
We Couldn’t Find
White pants. Soft focus. Aromatherapy. Other people’s unverified opinions presented as gospel. Workshops that cost a fortune and change nothing. Retreats so uncomfortably fancy you spend the whole time worrying about how you look rather than how you feel.
The more we knew — and between us, we knew quite a lot — the harder it was to unsee. And the harder it got to find a retreat that felt genuine, unintimidating, and actually built around strategies that work.
So we looked around, couldn’t find it, and built it ourselves.
Little Farm of Calm is not a resort. It’s not a spiritual experience. It’s not going to ask you to give up anything, believe anything, or wear anything white. It’s a working farm in regional Victoria where the only agenda is that you leave feeling genuinely better than when you arrived — and that everything we offer you has actual evidence behind it.
Jill & Darren
If you have a question at Little Farm of Calm, Daz will already be walking towards you with the answer. He is the concierge, the facilities manager, the person who makes sure the coffee is on, the toilets are clean, and that someone does the emergency grocery run when the almond milk didn’t make it onto the order. He tells dad jokes. He can talk to anyone. He is somehow always exactly where he needs to be.
Before all of that, he spent two decades as an exercise physiologist and coach — working with elite AFL athletes, Olympic lifters, law enforcement and the Australian Defence Force, and a few thousand everyday people who just wanted to stay strong and mobile as they age. He is an Australian Champion Indoor Rower and a StrongFirst certified kettlebell coach. He does not look like a beefcake. He is very unassuming to look at, in fact. He is also stronger than most 25-year-old gym goons and will say nothing about it unless asked.
His approach has always been the same: the fundamentals work. Get strong, stay mobile, don’t overcomplicate it, and don’t sell people things they don’t need.
He is also — and this cannot be overstated — the only person at the farm who can catch a fully-grown kangaroo. Nobody saw that coming, least of all him. But here we are.
- Exercise Physiologist
- Certified CrossFit Coach
- Australian Champion Indoor Rower
- StrongFirst certified — kettlebell technique
- Elite sport coaching — AFL & Olympic lifting
- Self-defence consultant — Australian Defence Force & law enforcement
- 18+ years running gyms across Victoria
- Emergency almond milk procurement specialist
Jill cannot leave a question unanswered. This is, depending on who you ask, either her greatest strength or the reason she has entirely too many degrees.
Starting with Science and Music, she pivoted into Computer Science and completed a Masters at Melbourne University — skills she credits for the analytical mindset that informs everything she does, including (yes) fixing the website. After working in IT security and encryption for Ernst & Young, Verisign and Coles Myer, she discovered Olympic lifting, met Daz, and promptly enrolled in Exercise Science. Then Physiotherapy. Then a clinical thesis on rural healthcare policy. Then aerial yoga. Then clinical pilates. At some point she also found time for two motorbikes.
At a retreat, Jill teaches aerial yoga, reformer pilates, fascial release, paddleboard yoga and guided meditation, designs and leads the entire wellness program, and also does all the cooking. In between classes she is occasionally racing back to Warrenbayne to check on the teenagers — which in this context means young kangaroos and wombats who are almost ready to head back out into the wild.
She is a reforming perfectionist who tries very hard not to check on whether the guest kitchen is up to her standards of tidy. She is, by her own admission, not always successful.
After decades of watching people get sold expensive nonsense by practitioners who should know better, her position is simple: there is no one answer. Every person needs to find what works for them. Her job is to make sure the tools on offer are ones that actually work — as opposed to whatever’s trending on Instagram or the chiropractor who needs to cover the repayments on their BMW X5.
- Physiotherapist (with thesis — naturally)
- Exercise Scientist
- Masters in Computer Science, Melbourne University
- 1000-hour Registered Yoga Teacher — pre & post-natal, aerial, paddleboard
- Diploma of Clinical Pilates — TAC rehabilitation
- Specialist in fascial release & myofascial therapy
- Head chef (self-appointed, non-negotiable)
And Couldn’t Live Without
Jill has been caring for wildlife since she was fifteen. Back then it was a different era — a possum that lived in her bra, snakes that she apparently thought were a perfectly reasonable thing to look after, and a general sense that wild animals and domestic life were not mutually exclusive. Life eventually intervened and the wildlife stayed in Mount Waverley or returned to the wild.
Then 2020 happened. With her youngest starting Prep and the world in lockdown, the obvious next step was clearly to also syringe-feed an orphaned possum at 2am while writing a thesis on rural healthcare policy. And from that very sensible starting point, it grew.
What began as a few possums is now 40+ kangaroos, wombats, wallabies and birds of prey in care at any one time — a dedicated 230-acre release property in Warrenbayne, and Daz, who turned out to have a previously undiscovered but profound soft spot for roos and an exceptional talent for catching large mobile animals that we still cannot fully explain.
In 2025 they finally realised their dream of a dedicated release property. In January 2026, Wildside Wildlife Shelter became one of the few facilities in Victoria equipped to take adult bushfire ground animals into care. It is not glamorous. It is expensive and it is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But to take an animal from crisis through to release back into the wild is the kind of thing that makes everything else make sense.
Every retreat booking directly supports the shelter. That’s not a marketing line — it’s just how it works.
Ready to see what an evidence-based retreat actually looks like?
No white pants required. All meals, treatments, classes and accommodation included. Bring your questions — we have answers that don’t involve purchasing a supplement.
