Mist hangs in a soft, pillowy cloud above the lake. Ducks make trails on its grey-glass surface. A timid sun breaks through and drops of silver shine on the leaves of birch trees, planted decades ago by Alla Wolf-Tasker and her mother. Alla arrives at Lake House in the early morning. She knows every tree, every shrub, every artwork (many by her late husband, Allan) hanging on the walls of this Victorian dining institution. She knows the name of everyone who works here. More than that, she knows their families, their histories, their struggles. She knows every dish, every ingredient and the farmers who produced it. She knows where every table should be placed in the dining room, every cushion on every settee in the library. These buildings, these gardens, this lake which she and Allan rescued from swamp and bracken, are the heart of her very rich life.
“Everything, and every bit of everything here has some history,” Alla says gesturing expansively to take in her world. And everyone here is her “tribe”.
The Weekly has journeyed to Daylesford in the foothills of the Macedon Ranges, north of Melbourne, to meet one of Australia’s great culinary pioneers, and to join the birthday celebrations at Lake House, which for 40 years has been Alla Wolf-Tasker’s calling and her life. And in spite of some fears for her health, she’s holding onto that life tenaciously.
The way you expressed love was you shared food with people because you’d come from nothing. We were anything but wealthy, but the fridge was always full in case someone popped in.”
Alla Wolf-Tasker
Alla first came to this lake as a child. Her parents, Katherine and Anatoli, were migrants from Russia via Moldova who had spent the last part of World War II in German labour camps. In Australia, Alla and her mother started their new life in a migrant camp in regional Victoria, while Anatoli found work in a tannery in Sydney. But they worked and saved until at last they could afford a dacha, or summer house in the country, where land was cheap and they could grow vegetables, plant an orchard and put down roots. They formed a deep connection to this place, and they passed that along to their daughter.
“My parents’ friends, all Eastern Europeans, used to come here because of the mineral springs,” she remembers. “We mushroomed in the forest. Dad had a still and made vodka, and he’d barter that with a Ukrainian guy who used to catch eels and smoke them. You made your own pickles, you made cheese, and then you bartered, and everyone had a specialty. Mum was the dill cucumber queen. The way you expressed love was you shared food with people because you’d come from nothing. We were anything but wealthy, but the fridge was always full in case someone popped in.”
Alla found her passion in France
Alla grew up speaking English and Russian fluently, and she was bright. After school, she studied Russian, maths and psychology at university – “a weird sort of degree”.
“Then,” she says, “I took myself off to France and it was a revelation … The specialised charcuteries, fromagiers, patisseries, bakeries, with queues of people after the best Reblochon [a soft, washed-rind cheese], or the best apple tart, or the best sourdough. And it wasn’t a middle-class affectation. Everyone understood about great food and wine.”
Alla had found her passion, her life’s work, not just in good food but in ‘hospitality’ in the fullest sense of the word.
“But when I said to my parents, ‘I’m going to be a cook’, they said, ‘No you’re not’,” she recalls. “They were both great domestic cooks, but for them, as migrants, they wanted a doctor, a pharmacist, a lawyer,
or some kind of real professional. Not a cook.”
Alla adored her parents but she would not be dissuaded. She trained, she worked in kitchens. “I was just learning all the time.” The epiphany came when she visited France’s great regional restaurants.
“They weren’t overblown or stuffy like many fine dining restaurants of the time. They were just very immersed in their location. Roger Vergé in Provence – his restaurant was built around the original olive mill, and I can still remember a signature dish built around a tomato from the garden – just a single element, but beautifully peeled, warm from the sun, really tasting of tomato, with the best olive oil that was made 100 metres away. That whole sense of celebration of local bounty. I loved the connection with the soil, with the location, the relationship with the chef and the producer. I loved all of that. And I came back and I was like, ‘I’m going to do this’.”
A Lake House love story
It was an audacious dream, and one Alla ruminated on for a few years back in Melbourne while she opened a catering college and taught at an alternative school. It was there that she met a handsome young artist, Allan Tasker.
“The first time I saw him coming through the door was not long after he’d been appointed as principal,” Alla remembers with a smile. It wasn’t love at first sight but “we kind of circled each other, and I was pretty impressed with him. He was a great leader, and the kids loved him. Hugely talented, he’d done sculpture and printmaking at RMIT at a time when there were some really wonderful artists teaching there.”
In 1979, they married. Not long after, when the school had fallen on troubled times, they began casting about for another mission. “It was just crazy,” Alla laughs. “I said to him, ‘What I really want is a country restaurant.’ And he said, ‘why not?’ There were just so many ‘why nots’ that, had we stopped to think, we would never have done it.”
“The more people said, ‘this is not going to work’, the more determined I was.”
Alla Wolf-Pasker
The ‘For Sale’ sign up on the road had been handwritten on “an old shingle” and nailed to a tree trunk. It had been there for 10 years. Nobody wanted this patch of ground.
“This was the impenetrable part of Lake Daylesford,” Alla remembers. “You couldn’t actually see the lake because of the gorse and blackberry, and then there was a swamp. But I looked at it and all I could see was waterfront land. I remembered, as a kid, swimming in the other part of the lake in a big rubber tube, and we had a rope on the tree and, you know, I loved the place. And most importantly it was cheap.”
Right away, she could imagine her country restaurant there.
Alla denies being an incurable optimist. “I’m not optimistic,” she insists, “I’m stubborn. The more people said, ‘this is not going to work’, the more determined I was.”
Alla’s audacious, trailblazing dream
Alla and Allan toiled away on the property every weekend for four years. He – drafting, designing, building; she – digging, planting, weeding, sowing. And all the while, they were working weekdays in Melbourne. Part-way through the renovation of the old tumbledown house, Alla became pregnant with their daughter, Larissa.
“Then, of course, my mother ran around praying to the saints,” Alla chuckles. “She was worried we didn’t know what we were doing; we were idiots; I was going to lose the baby because I was carrying big buckets of water to tiny plantings. There was a terrible drought, then consecutive frosts. Just about everything perished. Even local peppercorns, which were a century old, were dying. ‘You shouldn’t have bought this,’ she said. ‘Everything’s dying. Your plants are dying. You went to university for this?’ All that sort of highly motivational stuff.
“But she eventually came around. She had an amazing green thumb and a keen knowledge of medicinal plants. We planted trees together. We refer to our birches as ‘Baba’s Birches’. Her lilacs are currently welcoming guests with their heady scent. She also helped care for Larissa. She was part of the bones of this place.”
The Lake House opens
By 1984, Allan had built the first incarnation of the restaurant. It was a cosy 25-seater, with a two-bedroom apartment upstairs for their little family. Alla’s dream of finding local growers and boutique producers was in tatters. Australian agriculture, she’d learned, was a sea of monoculture and Daylesford grew little but potatoes. Her neighbours weren’t interested in fine dining, and city folk had no intention of driving two hours for a feed. By the time they opened, she knew all that, but they opened anyway, to begin with just on weekends.
“Our first visitors were travelling salesmen,” she recalls, “who wanted to stop somewhere and have a steak and chips. ‘Oh, you don’t do steak and three veg?’ But I was determined to do what I wanted to do. So my opening menu included twice-cooked cheese soufflé made out of goat’s cheese, which I made myself. In autumn, there might be a brioche filled with wild mushrooms. We had very little seafood because we were so far from the coast, but we had yabbies and freshwater trout. I love pigeon, so I had someone shoot a few for me around the Castlemaine Town Hall.
“I wanted to cook what I wanted to cook, and I figured eventually people would come, and that’s what happened. We got our first review in The Age. It said, ‘Enchanting Lake House’. People read it and they came. They’d ring us and ask, ‘Where’s Daylesford?’ This was before email, before fax, so we’d send them a hand-drawn map by post.”
Alla Wolf-Tasker’s culinary revolution
And month by month, year by year, Lake House changed the face of dining, of agriculture and of regional tourism in Australia. Alla founded Daylesford Macedon Produce, to connect growers with restaurants.
She joined the local Chamber of Commerce and the board of Tourism Victoria. She was named a Member of the Order of Australia for services to tourism and hospitality.
Eventually, diners became so numerous and enthusiastic that they added accommodation and a spa. And then Alla, Allan and Larissa took a leap of faith and bought another tract of neglected land in nearby Musk, and Dairy Flat Farm was born.
With its regenerative vegetable gardens, olive grove, orchard, vineyard, beehives and bakery, it expanded the notion of ‘paddock to plate’ – which Alla Wolf-Tasker posited more than 40 years ago – into a new and ever more circular vision of life.
COVID, cancer and troubled times
Then, just before Christmas in 2019, Alla was diagnosed with cancer. It came out of the blue and the prognosis was awful.
“It was stage four,” Alla explains. “Underlying uterine with ovarian cancer over the top. I was told I had about a year.”
Five days after the diagnosis she had major surgery. And following the surgery, she was told it was clear cell cancer, “which tends to hang about”.
“I think, you were in shock. For everybody, I think there was an element of shock … ”
Larissa Wolf-Tasker
“I didn’t even have time to think,” Alla says. “Two weeks before, I’d been at Margaret River at the food festival. And two weeks before that, I was in Japan. It had been a really big year. And then bang, that happened. But I wasn’t rattled by it. I just went wherever I was led. I assumed everything would be okay. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.”
Larissa, who is sitting with us in the library at Lake House, looks across at her mother and says: “I think, you were in shock. For everybody, I think there was an element of shock … ”
There were treatments and complications. A massive dose of immunotherapy devastated Alla’s liver. Just as COVID broke, she began seven months of chemotherapy, then steered the business through two years of lockdowns. “We would close 353 days in total over the next two years. I was worried we would lose everything.”
As the lockdowns lifted, Alla tested negative and the Wolf-Taskers were just scrambling back to situation normal when Allan was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was devastating.
“He was diagnosed in early August ’22 and he died five days before Christmas. Whenever he was in hospital, I was there every day. So it was seven or eight weeks of that. And then he was gone, and I was just comatose.”
There are tears in Alla’s eyes as she adds: “My heart remains sad. We were supposed to be living our best life now. Al and I worked very hard all our lives expecting that we could sit back a little to enjoy all this. And you know, he’d just finished a beautiful new studio and was working on a new exhibition … I’ve just completed the children’s book that we both began 40 years ago, before Lake House took over so much of our life. I miss him terribly. We were real partners, involved in everything together – everything. I miss him every day.”
“I have so much to do and so much to live for. “
Alla Wolf-Tasker
In February 2023, another scan came back positive and Alla was admitted to hospital again for surgery. People comment on her resilience but, she says, “I’m really not, you know. With clear cell, they say the maximum is five years, and I’ve already had five. So, the stats are against me. But I have so much to do and so much to live for. Lake House is my rock and then there are the twins,” Larissa’s little ones, Maya and Alexei, aged five, who bring so much joy. And Alla has proved the stats wrong before.
When The Weekly visits Lake House, Alla has just had another blood test. She admits she’s nervous but says that, regardless of the outcome, she wants no more invasive treatment. “There is nothing they can really do other than put me on more terrible drugs, and I saw what that did to Al. So I just have to try to live my best life. And take advantage of what we have. The fresh air and the clean food we produce. The strength of this small village community and the strength of our own wonderful ‘tribe’.”
A precious family tradition
It’s a community that Alla and Allan helped build, and have shared with Larissa, her husband (Lake House food and beverage manager) Robin Wilson, and Maya and Alexei. Larissa went away to study fine arts, to travel and stretch her wings, but she’s back now and as Brand Manager, a rusted-on part of the tribe.
“Here,” Larissa says, “you’re either in or you’re out, because it’s all-consuming. We live and breathe it every single day, so you can’t be one foot in. There was that point after 10 years or so where I thought, ‘Okay, this is what I’ve grown up with, this is a legacy that has been created with my parents, I’ve contributed to it also, and now I want to help take it to the next level’.”
“I love having her with me,” says Alla affectionately, “and I love seeing her do great things within this place – any mother would feel that. What I also love is the fact that we’ve succeeded in creating a multi-generational hospitality business in Australia, which is rare. When I was younger, I didn’t realise how precious that is.”
In recent years, for the Wolf-Taskers, Christmas has involved an element of loss, but it is also a time to look for hope and find comfort in the community they’ve gathered around them. And that continues to steady Alla on her journey, which is far from over.
A Lake House Christmas
This Christmas, three generations of Wolf-Taskers and their extended tribe will celebrate with breakfast and gifts around the Christmas tree before opening for business. They have a proud history to celebrate.
And Larissa’s decision to be ‘in’ – was it for whatever that future brings?
“It was,” says Larissa. “I’m still in. Still all in.”
Alla is the author of three books on food and good living, and she and Allan have published a children’s book, The Tale of Felonious Frog, proceeds from which fund bursaries for young enthusiasts in the arts, hospitality and regenerative agriculture. To learn more, vists Lake House.
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