Living here

This was the view south-westwards across our block of land a couple of days ago: green, peaceful, and with lovely trees and tree ferns. We've been here for two weeks now and we're coming up to the last couple of weeks of the long summer holidays, so life will slowly achieve a balance and become normalised, so I thought I'd give myself a chance to reflect on the newness and difference of living up here before it all becomes obscured...

















The fact that I'm noticing the heat of the sun and the necessity of using a factor 30+ sunscreen at all times is, I think, an indicator of a different attitude. Up here we're feeling quite close to nature and a lot of what we do is outdoors. Living in a lovely house with a lovely view in Korora we hardly set foot outside unless we were getting into the car to go somewhere. This was partly because we had no functional back garden space for such a long time that we stopped doing all the things we'd enjoyed when we lived at Wakelands Road, such as eating outside or reading a book on the reclining chair... and we didn't have a pool as we had at Wakelands Road either. If we had been able to enjoy the garden space I think we could have enjoyed being outside, but instead we stayed indoors, turned on the air conditioning and isolated ourselves.

Coming up here we've started to get used to being outdoors a lot more, and letting the outdoors in. Over the last couple of years there has been a HUGE change in my attitude about this: I am now perfectly sanguine about ants (big, small, bloody ginormous!), cockroaches and spiders in the house. I don't like them, but I live with them. It's unavoidable and I haven't got the time to spend standing on a chair, screaming. Admittedly, when I bent down the other day and discovered I was eyeball to several eyeballs with a huntsman spider that has taken position on the shower screen I was a little startled, but I let it stay there! Doubtless it has wandered off and will reappear, but I'm shrugging about it rather than panicking.

We’ve had a really hectic couple of weeks. In addition to the joys of unpacking we also had a week of ferrying darling daughter to Bellingen and back for Camp Creative (45km each way, twice a day – about 4 hours a day once you factor in everything), with the added side-effects of complete exhaustion on her part. Plus it was her birthday and we had a family dinner that evening and a beach party yesterday with 20-odd children and a lot of adults. Today has been our first chance to laze around and lie-in, and I have to confess that as I write this at almost 1pm we still haven’t had breakfast, although I have managed a shower!

Dearest husband requested a weather station for his Christmas present, which he duly received although we haven’t set it up yet, and this too is symptomatic of our different lifestyle. I bet there’s a part of both of us that aspires to the compilation of a beautiful and informative diary of our block complete with weather readings and observations from nature, but I’m doubtful we’ll manage it! Instead there’s a more general ‘eye on the weather’ at all times. Rain means water in our tanks but also increased difficulty of access along the dirt track (and nervousness from me as I’m not used to difficult off-road driving, even if our Subaru allegedly has ‘all wheel drive’). Thunder and lightning may mean rain, definitely involve a lot of exciting noise (we have a metal roof and a BIG view). Wind means lots of rattling and the danger that anything not tied down might blow off the hillside which, when there are still lots of boxes stacked around, has some implications... So now we’re firm fans of various websites (although ironically if the weather’s bad we might not be able to access them) such as Country Energy’s storm tracker, The Bureau of Meteorology’s 128km Grafton radar loop and Elder’s forecasts.

Today the sun is shining although there might be late thunder; it’s 29°C inside the house with the fans blowing (we can afford to put the fans on full blast because the sun is shining), and a good 35°C outside in the breeze. I didn’t put our little sensor in full sun so it may actually be a bit warmer than that. I’ve got the sheets washing because it’s a good day for generating electricity and a good day for drying sheets, although there has been added fun getting the whole laundry issue sorted out. If you read my BookArtObject blog you may have spotted the washing machine sharing space with my printing press in what passes for a studio i.e. the garden store at the end of the office/studio building. Of course there’s no plumbing for a washing machine apart from an inlet tap from the rainwater tank, so we’ve rigged up an extension hose to take the laundry water out of the building and into a water butt some distance away. We’re using this ‘grey water’ to irrigate our fruit trees which are arranged along the back of the building where they get sun and some shade. We don’t have a clothes line so we’ve mended a couple of broken clothes airers with wire and they’re sitting outside the garden store, baking the sheets nicely as I speak.

The sheets were filthy for no other reason than the amount of dirt we are tramping around the house. The state of the clay ‘road’ meant it was wise to shovel a remnant pile of sand, mixed with a cement mix, around the house with the idea that after some rain this would provide a better (temporary) road surface that would enable us to get in and out of our block more easily, but in fact we haven’t had any substantial rain so the sand and the clay are being traipsed everywhere. We also have an unsealed cement floor in the office/studio, which is itself very dusty, so our feet are filthy by the end of the day and so is anything (like the corner of a sheet) that accidentally ends up on the floor. We noticed this morning that the water coming out of the washing machine was a dirty red colour, and the sheets look surprisingly white by contrast!

None of this is ground-breaking. The pioneer white settlers coped with much more, clad in severely impractical garments... how women managed to keep everyone looking presentable in the heat and the dust I have no idea and can hardly bear to think about. But it’s the closest I’ll ever come to pioneering and after a cushy life with all the mod cons it is a little different. Once we’ve moved into the house I daresay many of the glitches will have been ironed out; after all, I’ll have a laundry with a properly plumbed-in washing machine, but in the meantime it’s fun to have occasion to reflect on things I usually take for granted.