RURAL LIVING
Reflections of a newbie Hinterlander All the gear but no idea. After relocating from Sydney we gained a paddock, a septic system, a rainwater tank, a bore, a dry creek bed and a rainforest – all the essentials for our new Noosa hinterland life. But absolutely no idea what to do with any of them.
They tell me I’m lucky because we have a bore on our land. I do feel particularly lucky when switching on the various irrigation schemes across five acres of gardens. This involves walking 3km to 16 different bore taps to switch them on and then the same again to switch them off. Lucky indeed when a madcap idea of a new garden bed results in a six-foot-high water geyser and a $200 emergency plumbing charge. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth however I love the dry creek bed except for the 100m stretch of native palms and 20 years of discarded fronds. The latent housewife in me finds them messy at best and a bushfire hazard at worst. Many hours and pairs of shredded gloves later we remain barely able to see from one side of the creek to the other.
Let’s start with the paddock. It needs mowing regularly particularly if you don’t have grazing animals to keep the grass down and/or have a family paranoid about snakes which I’m told love to lurk in lush grass – not the family, the snakes. This was solved after spying on a neighbour driving a zero-turn mower. Isn’t this what your child-within dreamt about? A lazy afternoon spent spinning around the paddock on a snazzy ride-on mower? A quick trip to the local mower shop and tick, paddock sorted. The septic system was more tricky and reluctantly I changed all the fancy detergents we had lugged north. The teenagers moaned that the laundry didn’t smell fresh anymore but they just needed a reminder of how lucky they are I still do their laundry! Now the argument is about the vanishing toilet roll – can’t teenagers use two sheets not 10 to wipe their behinds? Rainwater tanks were easy though surely. After all, people have them in Sydney too (not us of course). The teenager freaked out after finding a dead mouse in the tank filter and our house still reverberates with shouts of “Turn off the shower,” and “Don’t run the tap while brushing your teeth”. 28
Then the rainforest. Us northern Europeans yearn for rows of majestic deciduous oaks surrounded by leaf fall rather than vine curtains, random fallen logs, split termite-infested tree stumps and blood-sucking leeches that litter this unruly forest. However!! Nine months later I have perfected the art of zero-turns reducing mowing time to a few hours a week. Pomona’s Summit Suds has sorted my laundry, mice no longer visit the tank and despite limited rainfall we still have three full 20,000 litre tanks.
