Meditations on home

There's no place like home 
-The Wizard of Oz

 I have lived in many houses, but only a few homes. I still refer to my childhood house as home, talking about going to Warrnambool as 'going home'. For that house, I know the way the carpet feels on my feet as I pad down the hallway to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I know the sound of the sea rolling in the distance on a clear night, or the crisp whistle of the train on an early morning. I know the history of the town, the shipwrecks that occurred on the rocky coastline, the story of a ship that could be seen from the top of Tower Hill passed down through our family. This is the home that shaped me, my identity punctuated by moments from that house and our family.

In the first house Rohan and I owned together, we found our life punctuated by two sets of blasting. One at 6.45 in the morning and the other at 6.45 at night, as the goldmine beneath us set off their blasts. History lay under and around us, from the weathered old tree stump supporting the front corner of the house, to the shingles tucked in under the tin roof, to the street that we lived on and which was part of the rich goldfields history.

When we bought this new house, I set about creating an assemblage of home in my head. Drawing on the homes I'd lived in before, the magazines I'd bought and flicked through, the descriptions of homes in countless novels, all of this went into the melting pot as I imagined and visualised what this home might be. I know fragments of the land's history around here, of the timeline of Irish settlement, of the owners of our house and our land, but there are gaps I still need to investigate. Who was it that first planted the pines which grow large and tall around the border of the land? What echo can be heard in the paddocks of the traditional owners of the this land, the Wutherong people?

As I wandered in the shops the other day I came across Great Ocean Quarterly, and in sitting down to read the editorial today over breakfast, I fell totally and completely in love with it.
 If you can read sideways, you might find the line that is one of my favourites 'But something's really happening when we're supposedly doing nothing - we're flat out building memories'. I love this line and it speaks to me of what's been happening here at Innisfree over the last couple of weeks. While we haven't exactly been lying around doing nothing, what we have been doing is building memories and putting the assemblage from our heads into a concrete, tactile form. Suddenly, this house begins to feel like home. It fills with family and friends who drop in for a visit, with our dinner conversations each night, with moments of laugher and discovery as we get our head around this new home. Yesterday the house was filled as we had some of Rohan's family here to celebrate Mabel's 92nd birthday. 

Today, we returned to the old house to grab last bits of shelving, cupboards and odd boxes. We're ready for painting now and this part of the journey is coming to a close. We came home this afternoon and decided it was time to pay homage to the Italians who had owned the house before us - it was time for pasta making! We dragged out our pasta machine that I don't think we had used since we lived in Melbourne. Soon we were kneading and rolling and fluttery strings of pasta lay over the clothes horse waiting for their dip in the water. 

I'd roasted beetroot from the organic farm across the street for a salad yesterday and decided that I'd use the leftover in a sauce for the pasta, mixing it with  walnuts, and then topping the lot with goats cheese (the most amazing Chèvre cheese from the Meredith dairy), and rocket. The pasta was silken and light and fantastic. I declared that I would 'never eat bought pasta again'. Rohan laughed, having heard this about 11 years ago when we lived in Melbourne. Still, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and homemade pasta isn't a bad one to have on the list! 

A salve for the soul

The other day I wrote a Facebook post where I said the farm is like a salve for the soul. Each day I drive home from work, leaving the shadow of one mountain behind and driving towards another. As soon as I get to the bluestone rail bridge I smile as I sweep round the bend and see the organic farm laying like a patchwork quilt across the field near home. Once inside the gates, thoughts of work start to vanish and the minor frustrations of the day start to eek away. The farm demands immediacy, there are things to be done as soon as I get home and I throw old clothes on and head outside, not coming in until the sun starts to drop below the horizon. We eat later and later each night and I find myself going to bed later and rising earlier. 

The heatwave has taken a toll on the plants though and while we had some rain on Thursday morning it hasn't been enough to give the trees in the orchard the water they need. I worry about the olives and how they are bearing up. Their leaves glint silvery grey in the sunshine and on the older, more mature trees, tiny olives jut out on little stalks.

 The irrigation system looks haphazard and is largely destroyed, pipes cut in pieces by the slashing or ploughing of the tractor in among the grove by one of the previous residents. We will have to look at installing new piping, perhaps to the storm water tanks we are going to drop into the hole currently known as the pit of despair which is like an excess storm water pit. Rather than having the pit open and covered with planks as is currently the case we figure the pit of despair would be much better and less like the set of a horror film with some in ground tanks. 

It looks like we're getting rid of one pit of despair only to find another though. As we make progress in cleaning up in the paddocks closest to the house we could see a fenced off area in the back of one of the groves. We figured it was a very small dam, hidden by the taller grass between the olives. As Rohan cleared the tall grass from the grove, we discovered that it is less a dam and more a creepy pit of despair with makeshift single span rope ladders down each side. We don't know how far down it goes and we're not likely to find out given it is also filled with water. I think we might reinforce the fence so no-one can accidentally stumble in and then spend some time thinking up tales for what has gone on in the murky depths. 

After spending most of the last week of his holidays doing cabling for the internet in the roof, Rohan returned to work on Friday and so it was Saturday before he could get into the orchard to clean up what the sheep had trampled and eaten. The trees in here were really suffering after the heat so he used the open stock trough to pump some water to them, swearing that the leaves bloomed and fattened in front of him as the desperately thirsty trees sucked up the water. The few grape vines we have seem to be doing okay so far and the grapes are getting bigger each day. 



What I think is a nashi tree looks good and the fruit is growing nicely. The peach tree at the side of the house is also traveling well, in need of a drink but the fruit and the leaves look healthier than the one just outside the orchard fence. I can't wait till next Saturday when my friend Tan is riding over on her pushie from her place out past Bunninyong. She's a keen gardener and is into permaculture and is coming to check out our new place. I'm going to quiz her on fruit trees and find out the secrets to hers seeing as she got 16 kilos of fruit from one apricot tree alone. I'd say our fruit trees have been neglected and so I'm looking forward to spoiling them with good soil and water. 

Figs are almost ready for eating 

Grapes are coming along nicely 

Peaches are getting riper 

And I think this will be a Nashi? 

Last night I finally got to give the coconut raspberry slice a whirl. Except this one is coconut blackberry! I'm not convinced by the base - I think it's a bit heavier than what I remember, so I might have to play around with the base ingredients until I get a consistency I'm happy with. This morning I rose early and the only other creatures stirring were the cows in the paddock next door. They munched on their grass and I munched on my breakfast and it was an altogether lovely way to start the day! 

No time for being passive.

 To enjoy the essence of a farm you can't be passive. You have to reach out and embrace it. It   demands engagement. 
                 (Newell, 2000, p. 149).


I love this quote from Patrice Newell's book "The Olive Grove" which charts her journey from city journalist to olive and biodynamic farmer. In these three short sentences she has captured something of the heart of what moving to the farm has meant for me. In writing about this concept of the farm demanding engagement, she writes of friends from the city who want to visit as they see the romantic vision of farm life, of leisurely days looking at views, drinking tea and reading. But farm life is not like that. The day we were moving the hay, I joked with Rohan about this very idea, saying 'Where's my relaxing lifestyle, drinking wine among the olive groves hey? This isn't the romantic, lazy version of pastoral life I had in my head - this is hard work!' There is no idly standing by on the farm, as Newell writes, you have to 'embrace' it, to launch into the mess of it all and begin to learn the quirks and foibles of the land on which you stand. Farm life demands that I get outside and begin to explore the boundaries of this new world. Our new nightly routine after dinner has been to drag on our boots, grab the dog and go for a walk around the boundaries of the two olive groves and the brew paddock. We stop, looking at the growth between trees and the way the land is beginning to respond to our touch. We stare at the sky and watch the way colours mute and inch across clouds, making predictions on the following day's weather. We snap crisp pieces of hay between our fingers, talking of our plans for paddocks and buildings. We clamber over the wire fence in the orchard, rolling the leaves of the apricot, peach, cherry and apple trees between our fingers, trying to diagnose what the spots mean, what kind of nutrients the soil might need to bring them back to their full fruited glory. We squeeze the figs on our way past back to the house, watching as they begin to hang lower and deciding when they will be ready for eating, ripe for picking and perfect for jamming.

Here I know so little. As always, when I don't know something, I turn to books and search for things to read. I've scrawled through websites, skimming information and trying to glean the most urgent parts of what I need to know. Frantic with the fear of spontaneous combustion, the night before moving the hay, I lay in bed, illuminated by the glow of my iPhone, looking at diagrams of the best way to stack hay. I've clicked buy and deliver for books on growing olives and fruit trees recommended by someone on Twitter. And I've been reading Newell's book. I dish it out to myself, page by page, like a treat at the end of a long day. Between her pages, I find myself  reading of things  that I'd previously seen or heard but which lay long forgotten. I read lines to Rohan, exclaiming, 'Listen to this! I love this!'. She reminds me of the significance and mythology around the olive tree:

The Egyptians revered the olive. Hercules' staff became an olive tree. The first Olympic torch was a burning olive branch, and the first Olympians wore wreaths of olive leaves. The Bible's two testaments talk of olives a hundred and forty times, with the white dove bringing an olive branch to Noah's Ark, signalling that the Great Flood was, at last, in retreat. There's the story of Christ at the  Mount of Olives and the tradition that he died on a cross of olive wood. Has any other fruit been burdened with as much legend and responsibility?  (p. 158).

I read this and I look out the dining room window at the leaves of the olives swaying in the breeze and I'm so glad that we came here.

Yesterday I met Leonie for lunch to discuss a professional development session. She handed me another book to signal life on the farm, and there was a serendipity with my previous post.

The PWMU cookbook, what Leonie claims is the staple of country kitchens. Scrawled inside the card are the page references for her favourite recipes, sweet treats I've eaten over the years of working with her. I like the tips and hints for country living, the fact that there is a recipe for my own homemade cough medicine - I can whip up my own elixir with the notes between these pages! As someone I went to school with commented on my Facebook page, 'It's like you've stepped back in time to a bygone era'. In some ways it seems like this, part of it I see as an ironic joke, smiling at the notion that I may need to create my own cough medicine when there is a chemist only 8 k away in town.
Yet, it is all touchingly simple and quiet, it is a different kind of life we are beginning here. Here there is no time to be passive.

Connecting lives, stories and experiences

Sunday morning was 'gloriously grey' as I wrote to my friend Maryann in a message. Cloud hung low on the mountain and it seemed that even nature didn't want to wake up and start Sunday. By mid morning the sun was creeping through the clouds and the day felt like it was starting properly. After a few weeks of moving heavy furniture, prowling around on the overgrown farm, using equipment, clambering over fences, I haven't sustained any injuries - sure a few bruises, a nasty case of hay rash but nothing broken or bleeding. So this morning began with broken toes, one maybe two. How did I obtain these you ask? (Too bad if you didn't, I'm going to tell you anyway). Was it in some act of farming gymnastics as I climbed over a fence or carted water or did something that required heavy lifting or moving? Nope. I broke my toes, wait for it, getting out of the shower. Idiot. Head full of thoughts of what I needed to get in town, I turned and ignored the lip on the bottom of the shower - smashing my toes and hearing a nice little crack. They went red and black almost instantly and as I sit here typing this, I swear I can feel my pulse in them. For the first time, but I'm sure not the last, the great el clumso has struck on the farm.

All of which had me thinking of sedentary pursuits for a Sunday- or if not sedentary, then at least indoors and unpacking type pursuits. I grabbed my gear for today, and in a hint of farming cheesiness chose the free shirt Annemaree had been given overseas and decided I needed.

It seems on Innisfree I become more tragic by the day.

Ah well, you can't fight it so you may as well go with it. Which is why when I was in town, I bought some butter and turned my thoughts to farm baking. I blame Enid Blyton as I'm sure my fascination with food comes from the magic faraway tree and tales of the food they would eat there. Or maybe I associate farm and food with Leo & Anne, friends of mum and dad's who lived on a farm outside of Warrnambool (well Anne still lives there, Leo having died a couple of years ago). Whenever we'd go to visit them, Anne would get out her tins and inside were all sorts of lovely farm food treats tenderly enclosed in greased, waxed paper.  My favourite was her coconut raspberry slice and while I've got the recipe it never tasted as good as Anne's, when munched in a kitchen and drunk with tea made from rainwater.

Today I wasn't making coconut raspberry slice, but instead was thinking scones. More precisely, date scones. I'd seen a recipe in the Country Style magazine I'd bought at the shops the week we bought the house - an heirloom recipe, sent in by a reader and shared with others. Why not give this a whirl?

As is normal for me, I couldn't follow the recipe. Why follow it when I could make a couple of minor additions? What's the worst that would happen? ( A disastrous gloopy mess, but I could live with that). So into the heirloom date scone recipe went the ingredients of hipsters, chia and flax seeds. All in all, they turned out okay for my first bit of oven baking in this new house (although I am cheesily horrified to discover that I took my photo on a red tea towel and hadn't realised the one in the mag was of similar colouring!).

Maybe farm life is making me overly sentimental (yes), but there is something nice about the way that our move has enabled us to connect lives, stories and experiences. Since having the farm, we've shared more with others, both family, friends and strangers. My parents cast their thoughts back to their married life at Tower Hill with small children, and earlier, to their lives growing up in Grassmere and Tower Hill. Rohan's parents share their memories of life at Wattle Glen and of what life was like for them. While times and contexts have changed,  in this sharing of stories we learn more about our parents and more about the things that have shaped us.

Now its time to hunt down that coconut raspberry slice recipe.....

Sheep mustering 101

People in education circles bang on a lot about lifelong learning. UNESCO had a big focus on it in the late 1990s and there are lots of programs aimed at engaging people in different types of learning throughout their lifetime. Given the last few weeks, I think one of the keys to lifelong learning may just be uprooting your normal, comfortable life and moving to an entire different way of living where you have to take a crash course in learning! No abstract, theoretical reading here, just some frantic googling, asking those in the know and admitting my total lack of knowledge about what it is I am doing.

Today we headed into town to look at systems water cartage and pumping. I've been pretty keen since the day we arrived to get a fire pump that can be operated should the power go out and given the heatwave last week, I was even more keen to get this happening. After a bit of quick learning in the store, we headed home with a new fire pump that we can operate from dams or from tanks and a decent length of hose.

Once home, it was necessary for me to get a quick lesson in how to operate the pump and to make sure that I had the muscles to start it as well- turns out it's easier to get started than our old lawnmower in town - who would have thunk it? Our first bit of water cartage was to get some water into the brew paddock (I'm calling it this as I think it is where we will grow some hops/barley for Rohan's brewing), as this was where we wanted to move the sheep. We haven't got our proper water cartage tank yet but we used an old wheelie bin and did some transport from the open stock trough that we're wanting to empty out so that we can move it.

Water sorted and with Rohan confident that I could handle the pump and the hose our next job was a bit of sheep wrangling. They've cleared out the orchard enough that we can safely get in there and we were worried about them stripping the trees totally bare, so it was time to get them into the paddock that had had sheep in it when we first came to look at the house. Rohan had spent the last couple of mornings before the heat struck cleaning up the cattle run, so it was just going to be a matter of funnelling them into the run and down into the brew paddock. Sounds easy hey? In an ideal world, you'd get a dog to help you, but Indy the red heeler was inside sleeping behind my desk and I think her domesticated life has not prepared her for the reality of what to do when confronted with sheep. So, it was just me, Rohan and a couple of big sticks. What could go wrong with that?

It actually wasn't that bad - we only spent a couple of minutes chasing the sheep round the orchard before we both got the hang of it and as the sheep found themselves at the open gate, they looked at suspiciously before creeping in, and then making their run for freedom into the brew paddock. We wandered down and there they were, all three following each other (like sheep?) as they nosed around checking out their new home.

So while we mightn't have taught an old dog new tricks (sorry Indy), it seems you can take a school teacher and an academic and they can start to learn new ways of being and doing. Let the learning continue I reckon!

The sheep mount a coup of Innisfree

When I last wrote I was heading into the first 'heatwave' week of my time here on the farm. It hasn't failed to deliver and all week we've had temperatures in the high 30s and low 40s, with today heading towards another scorcher. The wind has already picked up and is swirling through the trees outside the window, and I'm hoping that our luck continues as it has already this week, with no major fires in our area. Unfortunately for those living on the outskirts of Hopetoun, they've had emergency warnings due to large fires in the area, with Courtney and little baby Ned heading home to family in Colac, while Ben remains behind to fight the fire. There is something so much more immediate about the threat of fire when it is people you know at risk, and when you begin living out of the town areas. While living in town you know it is possible that a fire could spread from house to house, but you tell yourself it's much less likely and that crews would respond quickly. Once you begin living on the land you watch with anticipation, wondering if today will be the day, and if so, how long will it take crews to respond?

Wednesday night was both beautiful and worrying. After a hot day and a couple of small grassfires a few k's away, the sunsets were glorious shades of red and pink, inching their way across the sky and casting a glow through the windows of the house. We wandered around through the olives looking at the work Rohan had done in trimming and clearing between all the trees. It was a magical moment, the trees bathed in the setting sun and the dog padding between us, picking up random pine cones and carrying them in her mouth like a bowerbird getting ready to store treasures.

Later that night an electrical storm began to pass by, and nestled between Mount Bunninyong and Mount Warrenheip we watched the light splinter through the dark clouds and counted until we heard the accompanying thunderous crack to work out how far away it was. When the light and the crack combined over Mount Warrenheip we nervously checked the CFA app for fire activity. On the emergency Victoria website fires were popping up all over the place, and yet still, we remained lucky with small fires 5 k away that were quickly extinguished. By 11pm the storm front had passed and yet on the mountain we could see car headlights winding their way around and searchlights waving through the sky looking for signs of smoke. There is a lot of telecommunications infrastructure on the mountain top and so it is closely watched by the fire tower on the mountain opposite  - something which gives me a greater sense of calm about the outbreak of fire. We woke the next morning, all was calm and the world continued on, while in other sections of the state, fires bloomed and bleary eyed CFA crew continued to battle.

Meanwhile, life continues on. I went back to work on Monday and was happy to see the email from the boss saying we could work from home if our home offices were cooler than our one at work. Given that my office is on the 3rd floor and has no air-conditioning, it was stifling in no time and so I gratefully decamped to the home office to work. Our first visitors arrived for the week in the form of Joe, Amy, Peyton and the beautiful Harper, only 10 days old and sleeping like the proverbial baby when I returned home from work. We took Peyton out to see the sheep, who were continuing their bipedal work by munching on the trees in the orchard, stripping them of leaves and fruit. Lucky we wanted a good clear out in the orchard.

By Wednesday the sheep were clearly becoming increasingly sentient and deciding that the apples outside the orchard looked better than the trees inside as we discovered baby lamb chop had jumped the fence and was happily munching on the trees on the outside of the fence. On with the gumboots and time for a bit of sheep wrangling as we herded her back over the fence and inside the orchard. When I told my boss that yesterday he said that herding sheep is much easier than herding academics. We decided that meant it was time to clean up the grass in the cattle run so we could run the sheep down to another paddock for new feed. Rohan set about doing that on Thursday while I went into the office for meetings. When I came home he announced that lamb chop had clearly led the others astray and all three had made a push for freedom and for more leafy trees to prune. He'd herded them all back in but the imperative to get them moving to a new paddock seemed greater, although someone did tell me that no matter where you put them sheep will always want to escape to another paddock. Maybe like humans, they think the grass might be greener on the other side of the fence?

Today its back to the old house to try and get the last of the stuff in boxes and out so that we can paint it inside and get it on the market. I want to buy a tractor! That means selling the old house and getting some cash we can use to buy a few more things around the place. Next on the list is cows for the back paddocks. Rohan came home after a couple of hours at Michael's place the other night where they'd been discussing farm life and so now we're on the look out for cows. I find myself reading the livestock ads in the local paper and oohing and ahh-ing over the price of tractors. How has it come to this?

Back to work in a heatwave.

I head back to work tomorrow and a heatwave beckons with temperatures heading into the  high 30s and 40s for most of the week. This may prove to be a challenging week for me on the farm with this kind of forecast. I joke a lot about the farm being dark and full of terrors, but I do find it challenging to live in an environment when I am forced to confront things that are scary - like spiders, snakes and the ever present threat of fire. I'm totally paranoid about fire and know that living anywhere, let alone 10ks out of town on a property like ours, that we are under threat from fire. I've downloaded and filled out the fire ready planning template from the CFA, I have a bag of emergency clothing and those documents and things we might not be able to live without stashed in a cupboard closest to the front door and ready to go, should fire come near our place. Getting out isn't really the thing that worries me, just the fact of having to start again, should our house be destroyed in a summer blaze - particularly when we are just making it ours! Still, this is the nature of life in Australia I guess, and if I want to be able to gaze at Jupiter and the outline of Mount Warrenheip from my bedroom at night as I sleep with no curtain, I need to live with the challenges that also come from country life. We've done much slashing, moving of rubbish, clearing of leaf litter and as we head into the heat wave of the week ahead and the first serious fire threat of our time on the farm, we're as prepared as we can be and ready to go should the need arise. So while I stress about the week ahead we've been busy getting prepared and I've been flat out getting astonishing hay fever!

Friday morning began with going to collect Annemaree from the train station, as she'd caught the bus from Warrnambool to Ballarat and was coming to spend a couple of days on the farm. After a quick stop in town for coffee, she was up for her first lesson on how to drive the mower and then we sent her down near the hayshed to mow the grass down there as it was starting to get a bit longer.

Annemaree getting a lesson where to mow! 

After an hour or so she returned claiming she'd broken the mower - an investigation showed that she'd somehow munched the rubber mat your feet are meant to sit on, better than munching your feet I guess. She then moved into the studio room (as we are now calling it) and began unpacking boxes of books and trying to get some sort of categorisation system happening. This was a job I hadn't been able, nor had time to face yet, so I was happy to let her at it! After a while the bookshelves began to take shape and we had a way forward for the rest of the unpacking.

The organised library begins to take shape (thanks Annemaree!) 

While this was happening we discovered that Michael had been up early and had done all the baling, and we knew from his estimates we'd have about 300 bales to move from the paddock to the machinery shed (now the hay shed, due to our lack of machinery).

So much hay...

Rohan and I took the ute into the paddock in the late afternoon to get an idea of how many bales we could fit in - I, foolishly, approached this task without a hay fever tablet in my system and 20 bales later we had filled the ute and I was a sneezing, itching, sore throated mess. With only 280 bales to go the following day, I figured it was going to be a very long and very sneezy day!

Saturday morning and I was doubling up on hay fever tablets and getting ready for a day of bale moving. Dave and Woody arrived in the land cruiser so we could attach the trailer, we all donned long pants and shirts and headed down to the paddock to begin the move.

Woody in his hay moving overalls 

 After a couple of loads, it seemed like we weren't making a dint at all- it looked like it was the magic pudding of hay bales and as soon as you moved some, more appeared in their place. Then Michael rang with the good/bad news that there were in fact more than 300 bales, there were in fact, 570. Oh lord, we were going to be here for quite some time to come. By 10.30 we were all getting tired and the bales seemed to be getting heavier or I was getting weaker. Annemaree had spent the week before coming to Australia at a health farm in the Phillipines - I think she was rapidly discovering that this was a very different type of farm experience - and I think she may have been yearning for the health farm, instead of Innisfree.

 Break time! 

A couple of hours after lunch and we were done - all 570 bales moved and into the hay shed where they can stay dry and safe from the elements, and ready for sale or for feeding hungry animals! I, meanwhile, was covered with the most amazing rash from the hay and was basically a body made up of a red itchy rash. When I went to the chemist to get cream for it, she told me to use it sparingly, but I don't think she realised how much of my flesh was covered in this hay rash! Today most of it is gone but I have some amazing bruises in the places were the rash was most severe. Surely there is something not wise about living on a farm and moving hay when you get ridiculous hay fever and rash like this? There must be, but I guess I'm not paying attention to that!

Sunday was a slow start, unfolding our creaky limbs and claw like hands from bed and getting ready to face the day. Annemaree headed back to Hong Kong and onto London, while Rohan and I took to the paddocks with the mower and the whipper snipper in our continued clean up.

I am continually impressed by how beautiful this place is. At times, I catch myself in a moment of happiness- times that seem small and insignificant but which are those moments when I think 'yep, this is pretty good'. Today as I zoomed around the paddock on the mower and Rohan rode along beside me on the dirt bike, I was reminded again of how lucky we are. Let's hope our luck keeps up in this hot week ahead!

Bryan Backyard Blitz strikes

A few days since my last post and yet so much has happened in that time - life on the farm seems to move at a cracking pace during the day, and yet, by day's end, everything slows down a bit as we relax and take in the amazing views this place has to offer. The problem is that at breakfast, when you're gazing at this, it's easy to let the time slip by and discover half the morning is gone!

Annemaree flew in from Hong Kong on Sunday morning and so it was a quick trip down to the airport to collect her before heading to Warrnambool where we had a family get together planned down at the beach. Maybe it was the luck of the Irish (or lack thereof), but by the time we got to Warrnambool there was torrential rain and hail, and thankfully my cousin Scott had lined up a local footy clubrooms for everyone to go to. We headed there and managed to catch up with people which was great as too often we only get together for funerals, so we hope to have many more of these catch ups in the future.

 The extended family!

Mum, Dad, Joan, Margaret and Ray.

While I was home having a family catch up, Rohan was doing the same, with Di coming up to check out the new place and dropping off some perfect gifts - including the bookends for my study which match my new desk perfectly (and were purchased before the desk buying took place!).  I did a spot of browsing in some of the local antique and collectable stores around Warrnambool  - I resisted the urge to buy something, however, was eyeing these labels off for our coolroom, particularly once lamb chop meets the mobile butcher!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Bryan Backyard Blitz was about to begin, with Dave and Neil turning up to do a few things around the place, including putting in the posts for the backdecking from where we ripped down the sunroom, patching a hole in the roof of the studio, getting rid of the last bits of frame from one of the dodgy shed extensions and of course, some more painting! Luckily Rohan took some pics of the two brothers in action!

Copycat poses....

 Now this looks like the serious work.

I'm not sure about the occupational health and safety requirements of our farm, but I don't think this picture below would meet the standards for safe working practice!

When I got home from Warrnambool, more of the backyard blitzers had arrived, with Jane and Rosie cleaning windows, Woody outside, Lily behind the paintbrush again and soon the outside studio/gym/ library was looking a lot less blue! By the end of the day the bookshelves were in, now it's just a matter of unpacking all those boxes.....

Woody was  turning all lawnmower man, and realising, like me, just how good it is; 'I could stay out here all day', he proclaimed when I went to say hi. I like the strange singing, the calls for 'Cup of tea boys!', the cheerfulness and the extensive help that family have invested in our new place- what would we do without the Bryan crew? While the Bryans  toiled around the top of the property, in the back paddock our neighbour Michael was doing the much needed slashing in preparation for baling. We're going with square bales which will be easier for us to move than round ones given our lack of a tractor. It's still going to be a mighty job once they're done and I'm thinking I could advertise it at the local gym - forget boot camp, come to farm hay baling camp. You'll move all day and ache all night. I can yell orders like the best of them surely?!

Last night we took Indy on what will become one of her new daily strolls to the mailbox and I think she was pretty chuffed with the fact that all the cows in the neighbour's paddock came trotting along after us as we walked down the road to the mailbox. I was feeling pretty lucky right about now to have the chance to live here!

This morning we went for a run to the bluestone rail bridge- a short loop but one with a few hills and a few cows for Indy to growl at as we run past. Now I'm tackling some more unpacking, and Rohan is installing the new inverter for our solar panels as the old one had given up the ghost. With this new one installed we'll be able to get 27c back for the power we generate and we'll hopefully install some more panels after we sell our old place so that we can feed a lot more power back into the grid.

I watched Kevin McLeod's man made home last night on ABC and while I'm not about to dry mackeral to make my own fish lamps, this move has reminded me that there is much I can do to think more carefully and consciously about what I use, take and give back to the land on which we live. But that's for another post - I've got boxes to unpack!

PS. Thanks to those who have been reading and who aren't totally bored yet - we appreciate you taking this little adventure with us :)

Happy holidays...

So while lying in bed the other morning, stretching out the lay in minute by minute until I needed to get up and think about packing, I grabbed my iPad and began reading Twitter. Suddenly the academic holiday tweets began. Many of them used the #ECRchat hashtag or the #academiclife hashtag and usually began with ‘Happy Holidays’ and then went on to share/ brag/ disclose/ confess the stupid amount of work completed over the holiday and university shutdown period. For example:  ‘I completed a paper and my book proposal :D’, or ‘Two papers written!’, or ‘Worked on my grant application’ or ‘Finished 3 chapters of book over Christmas period’. REALLY? All of these are written in a self-congratulatory, smug tone that makes me want to smash my screen.

So you did all of this work – IN YOUR HOLIDAY BREAK? Well, I’m sorry, I haven’t done any writing (other than this hokey little farm blog), as I’ve been too busy with plum pudding in one hand and Christmas cake in the other and that makes it a little difficult to type or hold a pen quite frankly. I’ve also been busy doing the following: walking on the beach over Christmas while wrangling the dog, sitting in a chair in the new place just gazing at the mountain while clutching a cup of tea, zooming over the paddock on the ride on mower (occasionally getting bogged and always getting hayfever), packing boxes and dreaming about how I will unpack those things in a neat, tidy and orderly fashion where there is a place for everything and there it shall remain, in an oasis of calm and organization. Despite the pile of new books I ordered and had delivered in the post, I have barely turned the pages on them (including the one on using qualitative data with a variety of theoretical approaches which I’m just itching to read). Instead I’ve flicked through the pages of Country Style, In style and Real Living. The only book I’ve spent some time doing any serious reading of is on my Kindle app and it’s Matthew Evans’ ‘The Dirty Chef’ as it documents his journey from food critic in Sydney to farmer in Cygnet, Tasmania and gives me hope that becoming an accidental farmer and landowner will turn out okay!

This is why this farm is a perfect antidote to a working life that I love, but which has some weird quirks. In academia, people see it as a badge of honour to talk about how much they worked over the holidays, how many papers they wrote, and how many grant applications they toiled over. The spoof account of ‘Shit Academics Say’ on Twitter captures it perfectly ‘I am on annual leave and will not be responding to email. Although I will probably still check it and respond within a day.’ The social media academic brigade post photos of their ‘vacation to-do lists’ and lest you wander onto Twitter on Christmas day you will see them there, arguing about terminology and methodology with others, while presumably their families (if they have them) sit wondering where their husband/ wife/ daughter/ son/ mother/ father/ brother/ sister has disappeared to. Never fear, you’ll find them in a quiet room, hunched over a laptop or illuminated in the glow of a screen, unable to let the dialogue (which is more often a diatribe) rest for even a day. I’m strangely fascinated by this lifestyle, intrigued by it and bemused by the way that when I read these ‘holiday tweets’ I’m both sickened by them and yet, feel slightly guilty that I haven’t done any work. When those feelings of guilt try to elbow in, I remind myself of one of my DVC’s who cheerily signs off from Twitter and email declaring that he is on a break and who asks for holiday reading suggestions of fiction. So the farm becomes the break from a job that can become all consuming if you enable it to, and the landscape outside the window reminds you that there is much more to life than the next paper, grant application or book.

So meanwhile, back at the farm, things continue to progress. New year’s day saw another day of work with Dave and Jane coming down from Trentham to help out yet again – what would we do without all our helpers? There is no way we would have been able to achieve this much in a short amount of time, and by now, I probably would have become paralysed with the thought of all of the work to be done! Dave and Rohan kept working on the painting of the hobby room, while the sheep looked on through the window, intrigued by what was going on on the other side of the glass. Jane began cleaning the windows and I continued to scrub cupboards until I feared I may scrub off paint. Ever since Sam our neighbor from down the road said the previous owner had chickens in the house, I’ve been slightly paranoid that he had them living in kitchen and bathroom cupboards, visualizing a house, where when you open a cupboard door, chicken feathers fly out and wild squawking ensues. Unlikely given the fact the cupboards were dirty, but not dirty enough to suggest that chickens had in fact been housed there.  Friday saw Dave, Rohan and Woody hard at work moving all the big stuff, while I continued to pack stuff into boxes as fast as I could while they grabbed them and put them on the trailer. As we sat in our emptier lounge room last night, Rohan pointed and said 'Hey remember when we got married in that corner?' All of a sudden I was weeping at the memory. Our 'surprise' wedding occurred in the first house we bought together as a housewarming and Rohan's 30th birthday celebration. In packing up the house I've been sorting through the memories of all the good and the challenging moments of life over the last 10 years, filing away the things I want to keep to mark the journey and trying to rid myself of the detritus of other parts. It's tiring and emotional work!

Thursday was internet day. Yahoo! Thank you national broadband network. The guys came and clambered over the roof, installed the box in our laundry and now we have the internet – and superfast internet at that! We also put a big, new shiny fridge in the kitchen, deciding that our old fridge which we’d had for nearly 20 years and which was kept shut with a piece of Velcro could go to fridge heaven and so we purchased one that is bigger, and which will hopefully store lots of home grown goodies. I said to Rohan Thursday night ‘I feel like we’re becoming proper grown ups, with a proper grown up house and a proper grown up fridge’. See what happens when you turn 40? Maryann called over after work to check out the new place and was the first person to identify one of our mystery fruit trees, telling us that she knew the name and it would come to her later. Sure enough it did and at 10.30 Thursday night she sent through the text telling us it was a medlar. I’d never heard of it but with Mr. Google as my friend I was able to discover it. This article from The Age (Strange Fruit) suggests that it may be a fine line between fruit that is good for eating and resembles rotting fruit, and fruit which is actually just rotting and therefore disgusting. Here’s hoping I can find the balance or it may be a short lived love affair with the medlar tree when it comes to fruit ripening/ rotting season.

I also realized that I had failed at the very first hurdle of a new farm challenge. With my new found love for the Weekly Times, I’d got not one, but two, rainfall charts and I vowed over Christmas that I would fill out the rainfall chart religiously so we knew how much rain was falling at Innisfree. Rohan (he of little faith or astute knower of my personality depending on how you look at it) was convinced that I wouldn’t make it through a month. Turns out I didn’t make it through a day. New year’s day and the rain came tumbling down. Did I collect any rainfall so I could measure how much fell? Nope. Did I fill out the rainfall chart? Nope. As I sat eating breakfast on Thursday I looked at the rainfall chart lying in pristine condition and muttered a hearty ‘shit’. Rohan meanwhile began grinning like a cheshire cat and fistpumping in the air. Maybe this doesn’t bode well for my life as a farmer or a farmer’s wife, but the Catholic in me believes that there is always hope for redemption.

Today our neighbour Michael is going to begin slashing our paddocks for our first lot of hay and I'm setting up my inside study - can't wait for this to be done!