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! 

New year, new house, new adventures.

New year's eve was the perfect time to spend our first night at the new place. We don't have much furniture there but with a sofa bed and a picnic table what more did we need for a perfect new year's eve away from people and from the homemade fireworks that seem to go off all night in town. So we got out the cheeseboard that Emery carted round Tassie and then couldn't take home and sat looking at the sunset while Indy continued to explore her new digs.

No new years resolutions made here, just a clinking of glasses to celebrate how fortunate we are to have good health, a great place to live, and friends and family to share our journeys with. So as the new year begins we look forward to whatever lies ahead!

 Our morning view

Indy surveying life from her bed

Good friends and good times.

Work on the farm continues at a cracking pace. Rohan rolls out of bed early each day, unfolding his limbs and easing his feet into his workboots as he heads out to continue cleaning up the yard and the wood/tin from our demolitions. He's also been doing some tree trimming, including the chestnut tree at the back of the house, which has been trimmed a bit so that we have a better view of the mountain from the dining room window. There are a couple of other chestnut trees, so we can still have some to roast!

On Sunday my friends Kim and Jem came to visit Innisfree and it was great to have them at the farm. As the year draws to a close I'm grateful for good friends and both Kimbo and Jems have made me laugh many times this year, including at my birthday dinner with them and Tan, where I went home with a sore stomach from laughing so much. Jems was channeling Annabel Crabb and turned up with afternoon tea ready to assemble, may it be the first of many visits from them!

Monday morning Rohan and I did a bit more exploring in the sheds, looking for ways we can recycle and use some of the things lying around. In particular, I'm thinking of desks for both my inside and outside study (yep, such an academic I need two rooms for working!). We were checking out this bench in the machinery shed, which is currently covered with tin but which has some lovely looking hardwood planks under the tin cover- could be time for a bit of a makeover as a desk? With the old Remington typewriter Dave gave me for Christmas it could be a perfect addition to one study.

Dave and Jeff came down from Trentham for the day to help out and did some more painting inside. Dave has nearly painted all the rooms, and the paint colour has really transformed the interior of the house. While they worked inside, I did some packing back at the old house and then took to the outside room with the spray gun, putting an initial coat of white primer over the blue walls. This will be the outside study/ library/ gym/ extra spare room and while we can't do much about the blue tiles on the floor at this point, we can make it less blue by whitewashing the walls! From inside this room you have an excellent view of the orchard where the sheep were still eating themselves happily through the grass. They were happy to eyeball me through the flyscreen!

So as 2013 draws to a close, I'm grateful for good friends and for the good times that have already occurred at Innisfree - I'm sure that there will be more to come :)

New residents, demolition and painting

A busy couple of days on the farm. We had a relaxed and low key Christmas in Warrnambool strolling along the beach in the morning in the brilliant sunshine and eating multiple helpings of  mum's amazing pudding.

Mum with her pudding recipe.

We headed home so that we could get prepared for Dave, Lily and Woody who were coming up to help out with some tasks around the house. So on Boxing Day it was off to Masters to get some paint made up. We'd decided on 'Chalkdust' as a colour,which basically just means white, but a white that hopefully would make the most of the natural light and give a lift to the internal walls that are almost a railway yellow colour, and a colour name that has a link to our teaching lives! Back at the farm, I jumped on the ride-on for my first spin. I was tentative at first, with Rohan telling me his dad said it's just like driving a tank. Information that wasn't going to be particularly helpful to me! In no time, I was obsessed with the mower and took to the paddocks. There's something quite peaceful about mowing your way through the rows of olive trees with the view of Mount Warrenheip in the background and I could have easily stayed out there for longer than the two hours I was zooming along.

If you come to visit and I'm not around just head towards the sound of mowing, and bring me a drink - I might be thirsty. Mowing was not all smooth sailing however, as the previous owner has at one stage ploughed the paddocks with a tractor leaving some bumpy stretches where my bum flies slightly off the seat and causes the mower to sputter and cough as the safety switch kicks in.


Friday we were up early and ready for a day of painting and cleaning. We got to work with Woody taking to the roof to clean the gutters and spouts of leaf litter and gunk. Inside Dave and Lily were beginning to paint our bedroom while Rohan and I bunked off, heading back into town to grab things we'd forgotten, and I made a quick trip to Bunnings. I'm still not sure of what a double male hose adapter looks like, seeing as I bought two females, convinced that they looked like the dummy ending Rohan had described to me. Maybe next time I'll get it right! It's moments like these I'm glad we're only 10k out of town as it makes being forgetful easier to live with.

 Lily taking the mower for a spin and Woody cleaning up the gutters.

Meanwhile back at the ranch things were progressing well. Masking tape in hand I began taping the floor around the skirting boards, with Dave having seen my painting before knowing that I have more runs than Bradman and usually end up with more paint on me than on the walls. Lily and Dave did an amazing job, finishing off the bedroom, the lounge and making good progress on the open kitchen area.

Outside moves were afoot to open up the house. When we arrived there was a dingy carport at one end, a strange little lean to shed at the other and around the back, a sunroom that was more like a sauna and a breeding ground for all manner of spiders, including some large, chunky and terrifying redbacks. Life on the land is terrifying and I feel like an English tourist terrified that each bug I see is going to kill me. Still, if it is going to happen let it be today when Woody the paramedic is here! Dave, Rohan and Woody took to the sheds and the sunroom, and the difference was instantly recognisable.

There's still a bit of cleaning up to do around each of these areas and some painting of the posts, but it is looking so much better.

 Dingy carport before

The side of the house with the carport gone.

 The dodgy side shed.

With the tin gone from the side shed.

 The closed in sunroom

Sunroom opened up. 


On Saturday we set about cleaning up all the tin, wood and laser light from the sheds and sunroom, putting it all in a shed down the back henceforth known as Masters supply on Kiely's.

While we did this Dave the painting machine continued his painting bonanza. Nam arrived at about 11 with our new residents, the three sheep, informally named, Lambchop, Roast and Cutlet. The sheep headed into the orchard where the grass is long and spent all day happily munching their way around. We discovered an existing resident today when Rohan came across a snake near the water trough - I think the snake was more surprised to see that people have moved back to the farm- although I'm hoping I don't come across one anytime soon!

So things are coming along at a cracking pace, thanks to the family who have volunteered their time to help us out. With the changes to the sunroom in particular I'm really looking forward to sitting out the back watching the sun set at the end of the day!

 Sheep waiting to enter their new home!

 Happy as larry in the orchard!

Farmer Quach comes to visit

We had our next visitor to Innisfree with Farmer Quach (otherwise known as Nam-Ha) dropping in for a visit yesterday. I turned up to see him and Rohan clad in matching pants and surveying the back paddocks. Michael and Jenny, our neighbours, drove down to the boundary fence with Michael saying he can come in and round bale our paddock as we had been asking at the Christmas party about who might be able to do it. He's done it before for the previous owners, so we figured he would be a perfect person to get in to do it before it gets any longer and before the weather gets any hotter!

After they headed off, Nam-Ha suggested we go check out the boundary fences and our back paddocks in his 4WD ute. While Rohan and Nam-Ha leapt out to open fences, I stayed within the safety of the ute - I wasn't testing my short boots with that grass!

We piled into the cab together and set out through the bumpy paddocks, discovering dams, gorse that will need to be ripped out and the remnants of the lake that existed in the back corner of our land. When I chose 'Lake Isle of Innisfree' as a poem to guide the name of the property I was figuring it was a stretch to say the dams were lake, but it turns out we did have a lake at some point and so the name becomes even more apt!

Thanks Quachey for the adventure - it was nice to actually get to all corners of our patch of earth!

Getting to know the new place

After a final week of stress as banks and lawyers were having difficulty talking to each other, lawyers were closing for the Christmas period and I was picturing not getting our house until everything re-opened in January, our settlement finally went through on Friday at 4.45 and we had the keys in our hand just after 5pm, just in time for the lawyers to close for the festive period.


We trundled straight out to the property to see how much work was waiting for us. The grass was overgrown close to the house and Rohan had seen that on his pre-settlement inspection, meaning that we took a trip to the local mower place to buy a more heavy duty ride-on, figuring that his little greenfield in the shed wouldn't quite cut it (pardon the pun). The first couple of days have been spent in a haze of grass cutting, whipper snipping and cleaning up inside ready for painting the yellowy walls and grey skirtings a crispy white.

We welcomed our first visitors on Saturday with Dave and Jane coming up to check out the new digs, and then Terry, Liz, Laura and Thomas came out on Sunday to have a look as well. It's great to have family coming over straight away and we look forward to having family and friends here a lot. We don't want the redback spiders that were visiting in the back sunroom/greenhouse and so we have killed them off (sorry spiders) and are planning opening up that section to be an open verandah area rather than a closed in hot house that is perfect for redback living! The patch of dirt in the corner where tomatoes were growing well in the greenhouse environment will be perfect for some kitchen herbs within easy access. So far we've discovered chestnut, peach, cherry, lemon, apple, mulberry and fig trees around the house and in the orchard and we're keen to see what else we discover! I think there may be a pear tree or two lurking as well. I've become at one with my new workboots and had my first spin on the ride-on when Rohan bogged it yesterday and we had to take the ute down to the back paddock to drag it out!

Last night we went to the local community hall for the Christmas Party and to meet our new neighbours and community. Everyone was friendly, welcoming and assured us what a great place it is to live. Our next door neighbour, Michael joked about the size of the snakes and also figures that the sandy deposits in the back corners of his and our paddocks are remnants from a lake hundreds of years ago.

Already there is something beautifully peaceful about driving out the road from town, turning at the bluestone bridge and heading up the road to our place. The view from the kitchen window with Mount Buninyong in the distance will improve the experience of washing the dishes I'm sure! As I sat out the front yesterday just gazing at the view, rosellas flittered past and into the trees in front of me and the wind whispered through the pines. So life at Innisfree is good, there's lots to be done, but when we look out at the views surrounding us, almost anything seems possible!

 View from our bedroom.

 Our first visitors!

 Learning how to ride the mower

 Dave enjoying taking it for a spin :)

Getting the mower out of the bog!

 Figs in the orchard

 This is one of my fave views

 Farm life may be sending us mad!

 More fruit trees in the orchard.

Rohan surveying his paddocks and then getting geared up to
do some clean up.

 Happy farmers! Merry Christmas from us to you :)