About Us

Welcome to our website, my name is Susan Hartwell; I was raised on a property near Texas Qld Australia and now currently live in Warwick Qld.

Our prefix name Sonshanley is made up from our 3 son’s names (Mason, Shannon & Riley). I am a registered member with the QFA.

Our middle son Shannon was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome in 2003, and suffers a lot from night terrors, anyway someone suggested getting a cat to see if it would help calm him at night. So we purchased a Siamese/Manx, which Shannon calls Dash, not only did she help calm him at night, his school work and confidence has improved.

Dash was the one who inspired us to breed cats, so we set out to find a breed that we where interested in and it was actually the Birman that first caught our eye, until we spoken to Marie Mahoney who breeds both Birman’s and Siberians.

When talking to her about the Birman’s, she also told me about this new breed she had just imported, the Siberian. My Husband and I didn’t know anything about the Siberians or what they actually looked like, so we took a look at Marie’s website, and just fell in love with them instantly.

Shorn and I then made plans to go to a cat show at Ipswich to meet Marie and her cats in person, they where just beautiful.

We purchased our first Siberian female from Marie Mahoney in September 2005, her name is Miakoschka Anya and she is a black tortie tabby. We then went on to purchase a red classic tabby male called S*Stimics Taro from Mikael and Stina Polvi in Sweden. He arrived here in Australia in December 2005 along with his half brother S*Stimics Baloo, who can be found on Marie Mahoney’s website www.miakoschkasiberians.com

We purchased our second female from Marie Mahoney in March 2006 called Miakoschka Sabina, she’s a red tabby & white, also in March 2006 we had our very first litter of Siberian kittens from Taro & Anya.

We are currently one of two breeders of the Siberian cat here in Queensland. Marie Mahoney is the first breeder to import this breed into Australia in 2002, followed by us in 2005 when we imported our first male Siberian from Sweden thanks to the help of Marie. There are currently four breeders in Australia now, Marie Mahoney in Brisbane (QLD) and Susan Hartwell in Warwick (QLD), Chris Soult in Sydney (N.S.W) and Jeanne Wheeler in Perth (W.A).