Eumundi Voice - Issue 80, 6 October 2023

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Several auto-controlled water timers control the bore irrigation and the dry creek bed is our favourite natural feature providing endless fun on the ATV. The biggest surprise of all is the rainforest becoming my favourite haunt. I’ve explored its crazy creeks and knotted vines, taken numerous photos and I live in hope that the forest’s koala food trees will one day lure the real thing.

A move to acreage after a lifetime of city living is not for the faint hearted but for us it has been tremendously rewarding and life changing. My teens entertain friends doing doughnuts on the mower during overnight camping trips rather than loitering at shopping centres. My husband watches kangaroos while typing at his computer and a strange kind of creative fury drives my day – a day beginning with the birdsong alarm call and ending with the starriest of night skies. Though I still hate dead mice and leeches.

Liz Stapleton