We, being Hugo and Pip, thirty-somethings, husband and wife, best mates, blow-in's, partners on the road less traveled, have just celebrated an anniversary of sorts. When we first packed up and left our shoebox studio apartment in inner-city Sydney for a rundown, century old farm house and its equally as tired 32 acres of Huon Valley hillside in Southern Tasmania, most people we knew said we were crazy and those who didn't and wished us well, were probably thinking it. After all, we were walking away from a life we were fully established in, friends, family, secure, well paid jobs and the relative ease of maintaining a home consisting of, well, one room and it wasn't that we were unhappy, we had a great life, it just didn't feel like we chose it, it just kind of "happened" and "was", we just fell into everything. Not at all like we chose this life...at Little Oak. This was the most conscious a decision gets, it was the kind of wide eyed, white knuckled decision that makes you feel like you're alive, and possibly very stupid.
It began with a holiday to escape the pace of life in Sydney, our love affair with this state that would lead to us sitting in front of a fire in our home of- three years on a Tassie farm picking up the pen again on a blog we started as many years ago but quite frankly got too overwhelmed to keep up with. In Sydney we always felt pushed for time so we needed to get out of it to clear our heads, de-stress if you will, Hugo mentioned Tassie for a few days and here we are, still pushed for time but for completely different reasons.
Within the first hour of landing at the airport late one Friday afternoon on our maiden voyage to Tassie and in a frantic rush to catch the last Bruny Island Ferry we discovered peak hour in Hobart, was in fact more like peak minute, maybe peak quarter of an hour on a day of total traffic mayhem. Nobody seemed in a rush to be anywhere, except us, people let other people, complete strangers, change lanes, they gestured thank you's with a wave and a nod of their head, no one beeped their horn, no one tailgated and within no time, say 15 minutes, we had passed through the main artery of the city and were suddenly rural, if not bush. We made the ferry with time to spare and we'd traveled four times the distance from our office in Sydney to our apartment in a fraction of the time and we were surrounded by natural beauty, not the view of someone else's wall or window, just forests, the ocean, islands off islands, it was paradise.We soon realised the natural world is everything here in Tassie. Nature is still the most imposing part of its capital city as Hobart seems to kneel at the feet of the majestic, mammoth Mount Wellington, nothing about Hobart's cityscape is big or brash enough to detract from the landscape it respectfully shrinks into. The air feels like it does your insides good to breath it in, there is water, crystal clear, clean water everywhere it seems. Every inch of the state offers up some pristine environment of epic proportions, whether its a coastline or a mountain range, wilderness abounds so it should have been no surprise the staggering number of locals who take to bushwalking like city-dwellers do to treadmills, literally everybody seems to own well worn hiking boots or at least a kayak. In fact awe inspiring scenery can become so common place you start not to notice it after a while, not like you did when you were just a tourist. There's a saying here... A good view is wasted on a Tasmanian, and it's so true, a good view is also wasted on a mainlander after a few years too until other mainlanders come to visit and remind you how lucky you are.
We spent the first year at Little Oak working tirelessly while full time in our respective careers, squeezing every inch of productivity out of the daylight hours after work and on weekends. Returning fuschia walls with no less than four coats to a less migraine inducing off white, ripping up three inch thick sticky, shag pile carpet to reveal Tassie Oak hardwood floors, planting and planting and planting ourselves into bankruptcy to create the cottage garden and the veg patch, reestablishing fruit tree's to bare land that was once hectares of orchard and developing a healthy obsession with attracting as many bee's and birds as possible back to the property. We built, we pulled down, we farmed by google, we farmed according to the know-how of neighbours whose roots in this land date back as far as convict settlement and further again to the traditional owners. We failed a million times, and tried again as many, we fenced, and we fenced and we are still fencing and will be until the day we die.We have more than halved our annual income, even less again than what we had when we first moved here, a notion that could send me bolt upright from my sleep at night in panic, in exchange for the pursuit of fulfillment in work we love and we are happier than we've ever been and I have restful nights sleep every night worn out mostly from physical exhaustion.It's the best kind of exhaustion. We've learnt not to waste anything, if we grow it and don't eat it, there are plenty of chooks and pigs who will, and a garden always hungry for compost. We shop locally for what we can't raise ourselves, local grocers, dairies, butchers, cheese and yoghurt makers, even chocolatiers and damn good ones, not just because we want to put back into the community and state that affords us this lifestyle but because you just get used to eating/drinking a better product and its hard to go back.
It sounds idyllic to a degree, this lifestyle, and to a degree it is and it would have to be because it's also bloody hard work, requiring some steely determination not be beaten by the setbacks and there are lots of those, about as many as there are triumphs. So the anniversary I speak of that we are celebrating, is of something we were told we would need to reach when we first came here..... the three year mark. If you can last three years, you're here for good, they all said. So it would seem, we are settled in for the long haul now we've reached this supposed milestone and if I'm honest, it does feel like that, three years is just long enough to want to throw it in at least half a dozen times, you've sized up to some doozie challenges and come through the other end with your feet still firmly planted in Tasmanian soil and grateful for it. Though it feels like we're no where near the top of the mountain yet. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the progress we hope to make breathing new life back into Little Oak, so if you're interested, feel free to follow, sometimes it will be poetic tales of the good life, all fresh baked cakes and fruit picking and sometimes it'll be about the near frostbite, animals on the loose, a thousand competing deadlines for which fence is priority and a myriad of other adventures. I promise we will keep the blogging up this time, if only for the family and friends we left behind on the mainland to follow our Life at Little Oak.