Soon, very soon we are being launched (quite voluntarily!) back out into the world. The plans for where to travel, who to work for (Mark), who to write for (me), what to do along the way will be an unfolding adventure. We have been so ‘land-locked’ for several years now here in Australia that we just want to let it f-l-o-w and see where the winds of change take us.

At least we have a starting point and we’ll be headed back to the UK first. But during the Christmas holidays? And with no firm flight reservations yet until we get the proceeds from the sale of our darling house in our hot little hands? We really are trusting the fates!

Mark’s family have a large and very pretty home in Norfolk, so we will go there first once we leave Australia and perhaps have a few weeks of decompression. I have a series of articles that I am pitching to several publications and I’ll keep you posted on those.

These last couple of years have been quite stressful and we’re currently in a state of tightly controlled action, selling a houseful of furniture and 2 cars and 2 trailers and a tractor. Oh yes, and did I mention packing, packing, packing and then putting what we do decide to keep into storage in the nearby town of Ballarat? Whew!

At least there will be no more leaping for the phone every time it rings and then zooming around with the vacuum and sponge because another potential buyer is on the way. Hearing the words “she signed” while we were on a 4 day getaway at the seaside last week gave me an alternating sense of butterflies in the brain from happiness and butterflies in the stomach from nerves knowing that we had to divest ourselves of 85% of our worldly goods in one month!

I’ll be back soon-ish with an update or two. But in the meantime — where is that packing tape???

Had it been someplace cool and green like England, we could have left the paddocks to nature and created a wildflower meadow. That is simply not doable here in Australia where the local shire council mandates a cut-back of any grass that is over a few inches high due to the risk of bush-fires. It is a firm but sensible approach to keeping people alive and I completely agree with it. But it also means that Mark spends hours on a tractor when he would rather be engaging in something artistic or creative. He misses that free time to just let the muse weave spells in his brain and I have longed to give that freedom back to him.

So we signed the listing contract with our new agent last week, the sign went up on Thursday, and the listing went live online today at realestate.com.au.

It’s a beautiful little gem of a house and it’s perfect for a full time resident OR for a weekender property — and the huge art studio makes it quite desirable. The combined size of the cottage-sized house and the art studio make it all bigger (and more sensible given that we have no children in residence) than our previous 3 bedroom, 2 story house down in Melbourne. So now we just wait for the right person to come along and we begin the sorting out process.

And what lies ahead? What kind of house would we like next? As much as we never thought we’d say this, I think we’ll settle for a bog-standard sized lot this time and we’ll look for a nice-ish house to rehab. Then we’ll plant our garden and fruit trees and know that we might actually have the time to get on the train and go into the city for a trip to the theatre or museum without getting too far off schedule back at the property.

Dreams of rural living are one thing — the reality is quite something else — especially when you have two creative and artistic people living under one roof and neither of them wants to sacrifice the creative hours to maintenance issues.

Ah well — live and learn!

Bless your hearts for being either curious or concerned — but please, calm the heck down!

It’s interesting to notice the interpretations that can be drawn from a simple post or two that mention that life in the country isn’t exactly what we had expected (and no, that does NOT mean we hate it here!), that it was more daunting than we had anticipated (and that’s an honest statement of our OWN failure to be realistic!), that a few health issues are creating some reassessment of what to do with our future careers (just letting you know that we might be making some interesting changes), and that we would still like to have a big overseas trip this year (we haven’t seen our overseas relatives for years!). So how in the world did that end up being interpreted as a negative set of statements about life in Australia?

Did I say that I no longer loved it here? Was there even the slightest implication that I don’t LIKE Australia?

I do SO love this place, our friends, the ‘feel’ of it all (in spite of the heat, snakes, bugs and bushfires), and even a long jaunt overseas for awhile will make me miss it. So for those of you who are bombarding me with notes (including some genuine shockers asking me how much I want $$-wise for the lawn tractor or the car!), just knock it off and read what I DID say instead of what you are imagining that I said!

My overseas reading public will be wondering why this post is necessary. Well, it’s because I live in a tiny place — about 800 people — and it’s just like village life anywhere in the world including the village where we used to live in England. A few statements seem to get extrapolated into some extraordinary ‘facts’ that are based on whimsy and not on what was ever actually said.

Ah well…

Stopping for a moment as I added some lettuce to the items on the counter, I simply said, “It’s complicated” instead of my usual autopilot response that everything was fine, just fine.

I didn’t know the woman well and she was simply making polite chit-chat. I had seen her in years gone by at several committee meetings for volunteers here in the village. She was being pleasant and I was being honest — things are complicated.

A very, very big adventure is on the horizon right now — but it’s going to take a lot of planning and the timing is going to need to be just right. Circumstances, fate, the hand of the Universal Consciousness — all of these have conspired to nudge us (no, shove us, actually!) this year into the realisation that some rather large lifestyle changes must be made as soon as possible.

The signs were there, drifting in the wind on more than one occasion in the three years since we moved up here into the country from Melbourne. But this had been the dream — to have a small piece of acreage with a view of some kind on which to build a little eco-conscious cottage upon, to have a separate art studio, to have fruit trees and an olive orchard, a veggie patch with fresh, organic goodness at the doorstep, a charmingly landscaped set of shrubbery beds around the cottage. All of those things are finally in place right now except for the landscaping around the cottage. And although we are still under construction at the back of the cottage where a large new diningroom and study is being built, we are within months of finishing!

What has truly given us the greatest amount of joy is the abundance of close friendships that we have formed since arriving here — the kinds of friends that would do anything for you — and you would reciprocate for them at the drop of a hat. And my darling Mark was relieved to not have to drive an hour or more each way in peak hour traffic each day to go to whatever building site he was working on. Working here, mainly in the village proper or the surrounding farms has been a joy since he can get into his little van and toodle off through the glorious countryside on his was to and from work each day. That is certainly more blissful that driving on a multi-lane freeway that is wall to wall with traffic!

We certainly got the view as well. Mt. Beckworth is off in the distance and our sunsets are glorious since they face straight out to the back of the property.

Certainly we are not made of the sturdy rural-living stuff that the locals are — the ones who have lived in this district for generations and who shrug off every sign of disaster or adversity — fires, floods, drought, insects, whatever — as they do what my late mother used to always advise, “Pull up your socks and just keep moving!”

The amount of maintenance on a place this size — 7 and 1/2 acres — is more daunting that we could have ever expected. I will admit that I had seriously blinkered eyes when we came up here for a look-around almost 6 years ago, and I take complete responsibility for that. What spread out before me were beautiful green fields and a splendid view — but neither of us gave a thought to who was going to mow the grass on 7 and 1/2 acres, and unfortunately that falls to Mark 99% of the time. I feel tremendously guilty for suggesting that we purchase land instead of a normal sized lot with a house in the village, but Mark too was starry-eyed about having our own piece of country heaven. If we had only known what all that would involve.

It isn’t as if we can allow the paddocks (the Aussie word for fields) to just naturalise into a wildflower meadow the way we could if we still lived in England. The dangers of bushfires racing across unmowed grass was brought home to everyone in Australia last year when hundreds of people died right here in Victoria. And the Shire Council requires that the grass be kept cut short — a mere few inches short. So for months at a time, Mark spends whole days on the lawn tractor mowing and mowing and mowing.

Now — about snakebite, construction, fires, health, and more — Part 2 continues tomorrow!

Two days ago it was so hot that the act of exiting the air-conditioned house was akin to opening the door of a blast furnace and feeling all the pores in your body expand in unison. Some odd combination of heat and summer strangeness brought a cloud of frenzied flies through our area and these larger-than-a gnat yet smaller-than-a-housefly creatures plastered the exterior walls of every building in the village and zoomed into the house at lightening speed every time you opened the door. And as cat owners, there’s a lot of door opening around here.

The sheer amount of aforementioned flies dancing about on the ceiling and swinging from the light fixtures that night was quite offputting and resulted in a toxic spray-down followed by a floorscape of hundreds of tiny carcasses to sweep up. Yuck!

The very next day the temperatures plummeted and I had to do the wardrobe shuffle and move from the thin linen attire of the previous day back into track pants and a turtleneck. No one could accuse the Weather Gods of Central Victoria of not having a sense of humour!

With that cool change came the 1 AM arrival of Peter (or is it Penelope?) Possum for a spot of roof dancing. This was a completely surprising event since, unlike our last tree-embraced residence, there are no trees anywhere near this newly constructed cottage except for the saplings out front that are easily 3 metres or more from the house itself. So how did PP get up there?

I was working late, just as I am now, and heard the banging, scraping, and scrambling sound as PP clumped across the tin roof. What the — (expletive deleted!)???

It may be a mere week until Christmas, but I was not the least bit inclined to think that Santa’s reindeer had arrived 7 days early for a quick Aussie holiday prior to braving the icy northern hemisphere. And I recognised that sound from previous adventures at our former house.

Grabbing a small torch (translation – flashlight for the North American folks), I ventured out to the new room addition and banged on the edge of the window sill. Slowly — OH so slowly — the possum came back down the drainpipe and began to lope in slow motion across the grass. I opened the back door, heart racing the entire time, and hissed, “Shoo!” at it. But it completely ignored me and the expression on it’s smug little unconcerned possum face never changed. It simply turned and began to amble at a possum-ish pace towards the horse barn in the back paddock.

It’s been peaceful tonight thus far — but wait — I spoke too soon! The donkey in the neighbour’s field began his hee-haw routine just now at 2 AM. Why he feels the need to vocalise in the middle of the night I shall never know since he’s completely silent throughout the daylight hours. But perhaps he noticed one of our slithery-snakey critters. Let’s just leave that thought unexamined so I WILL be able to sleep tonight — shall we?!