About Billie
When she was 10, Billie wanted to be a writer or a vet. She was already an advocate for animals and nature, being a highly-sensitive girl living in the tough rural bush.
Journalism was the first career which took her into the discovery of natural therapies, and while she didn’t become a vet, she studied natural healing and now has a great many modalities at her fingertips with which to help animals. She draws on these daily to help the sanctuary animals.
Billie was an early vegetarian and then vegan, lived a self sufficient lifestyle in the bush, and then plunged into the entertainment scene in Sydney, becoming a playwright and stand-up comic. This led her to meet American improv comic Andrew Einspruch, who she promptly married in 1987. Animal rescue started not long after.
The couple were involved in the natural horse scene in the early 1990s and rescued many horses in need, moving to the Southern Tablelands from the Blue Mountains to accomodate the animals, and to write children’s books, as well as for film and television.
Billie also explored indigenous cultures and wisdom from around the world, including Ireland where her roots are, and used her innate gift of telepathy to communicate with and help animals in need around the globe. She was in demand as a speaker and teacher, always championing the right for every animal to live their precious lives naturally and fully, and helping humans understand the Universal Language to understand, and thus treat, animals better and more kindly. In 2008 she wrote and published her signature book Secret Animal Business, based on those years.
After three decades, she “retired” from that to keep up with the demands of the growing sanctuary and the animals in her care. In between tending, animals she still loves to write about animals, nature and the unseen, and take photographs of animals and nature, which she hopes will uplift and inspire others and make a difference to how they see the world.
Though the Deep Peace Trust, Billie continues to advocate for the rights of animals to live their lives in peace, and building a world where they already can is her focus — and this is A Place of Peace.
About Andrew
Andrew grew up in Texas with one cat, Boots. A computer nerd and improv comedy whizz in Atlanta, Andrew moved to Australia for good after he met Billie in 1986. They married in 1987, performed together, and took on an expanding family of animals in need. He’s also a decades-long vegetarian turned vegan.
Andrew and Billie worked together in film and TV and Andrew wrote over 100 children’s book for the education market.
Today Andrew is the farm manager, fixer of leaks, tractor driver, and main hay feeder, and still manages to juggle (not easily) writing an award-winning humorous fantasy series, The Western Lands and All That Really Matters, and holding down a full time “day”job, which he took on to help support the sanctuary financially during the drought. To be honest, he would much rather be fixing fences, feeding out hay, and conjuring stories as he goes. Of course, in Andrew’s books, the animals are all equal to humans and he draws a lot on his sanctuary life as inspiration.
About Tamsin
Tamsin has never eaten animals and voiced that preference to the wider family as soon as she was verbal. Home-schooled, she participated in the family excursion into film, starring in Finding Joy (which Billie wrote to address some dog issues like deaf dogs and dogs on backs of utes), and 7 Days with 7 Dogs, in which the family took their then seven rescue dogs on the trip of a doggy lifetime. Today, in her mid-twenties, Tamsin still contributes to the daily running of the sanctuary, and loves to world-build and write.
Sanctuary and Family Life
This is the story of a family of three who have a huge heart for animals. The sanctuary is a way of life, demanding 24×7 on-call care, and it’s not for the faint-hearted. So many carers are constantly exhausted and shocked to find they lose friends and careers along the way, and we are no exception. During the drought and fires we had no government support, but were grateful for friends and community support to provide us with human food when every cent of ours was going on hay and water. The challenge to find the thousands of dollars we needed every week during this unprecedented time, was incredibly stressful but for us, the animals came first.
Our motto is “Giving up is not an option”, and we’ve been through some really challenging times to build a save haven for the animals we love, knowing that it’s success was an act of advocacy and social change in itself. It hurts to see animals across the world suffering because people haven’t shifted from predators to partners, and have lost their connection with animals and nature. To us this is the root cause of a lot of the problems in our society. But life as a service to animals is deeply enriching on levels that really matter. It’s those connections that make life the magical poetry it is. In the moments, are the magic — from witnessing birth, to helping animals grow in confidence, to supporting them through a peaceful transition. There is a kind of deep spirituality to even the humblest of chores, when you are serving others.