Lot 31 North Boambee Road

Well, we went to see a place yesterday that was pretty interesting: 10 acres in the North Boambee Valley (quite a desirable location), which we can afford! The property doesn't have a house on it so we would have to build one, but it does have ocean views and an area suitable for house-building.














This photograph is taken looking East, over Coffs Harbour to the coast. If you look at the horizon you can see the sea, and we'd be 10 minutes by car from lovely Sawtell beach and shops; 15 minutes from the big shopping centre. Actually the sea view is better than in the photographs, and we just love watching the weather coming in from the sea. At the bottom of the photograph is the nearest house, just behind the grasses, and you can also see a patch of bare red soil which would be a dam (a large, deep pond for a reservoir - probably used for watering the garden and for any horses).














A close-up of the neighbour, down the hill. You'd want to plant some trees to screen the immediate view of his building, but it would be very easy to do that without losing the view out to sea. All of these pictures were taken from a flat area about 2/3 up the property, which is a suitable house site although there may be another suitable site slightly to the south that would mean we weren't building close to the boundary.














This picture is taken looking West towards the boundary. The trees curve around the ridge, up and to the rear of the property, where there is an area of protected Koala habitat. This can be both a blessing and a curse: we've seen adverts for several properties with Koala habitat where there has been so much habitat you'd be lucky to squeeze anything else in. And of course, nothing can be built on or run through Koala habitat. On this property, however, the Koala habitat runs along the top boundary and wouldn't interfere with what we want to do; instead, it provides a protected boundary along which no-one else can build either!














This phototgraph is taken looking North towards the rear boundary on the ridge. Although the site is on a hillside it's nowhere near as steep as other places we've seen, and it's not too steep for Ella and Patrick to be able to scramble round and explore. There are flatter areas which would be fine for horses, or an orchard, or a vegetable garden.














Look at the lovely tree ferns! They are decades, if not centuries old.

There are, of course, downsides. For example, the whole place would be completely 'off grid': no water, sewage or electricity on site. There isn't a road, either... There is access to the property along what is currently an OK track: you'd want to be in a 4-wheel drive at the moment, but it's a shared access road with 4 or so other properties and there is a suggestion (which we would have to investigate) that the group would be prepared to chip in to upgrade the road sufficiently that you wouldn't need a 4-wheel drive to get up there. The lot itself is 1.4kms off the highway.













Sewage, electricity and water aren't a problem. While most Australians actually live in urban areas with more than 1,000 residents, many Australians who live 'in the bush' (which this isn't really, but it's getting closer to that sort of living!) have to sort out their own sewage and water. And there's enough sunshine to provide electricity, and there are government grants available to help, as well as a first-time purchaser's grant. So it would be a different way of living, but just think: no electricity, water or sewage bills to pay ever again!














Clearly we need to calculate these 'infrastructure' costs very carefully before we decide whether or not to buy the place. It's a good price in a good location, and we could really see ourselves living there. What we need to do is to go back several times and see it again (now we've located it - there's not exactly a "For Sale" sign to let you know where it is), in different weather and with our boots on so that we can walk the boundaries (if we can find them since it's not all fenced). Meanwhile the farmer who owns the land is going to 'slash' the place on December 11th, which will make it more accessible on foot and enable us to see the contours a bit more.

It's like, totally AWESOME, dude!

Yup, Patrick's been bitten by the surf bug... We bought him surf lessons (rationale: surfing = a major feature of life around here = social life = sun, sea, sand = fitness, tan... etc etc; you get the picture).
The guy who went into the water spoke relatively normally; he came out saying BODACIOUS! RAD! and AWESOME! It's not so much that we've produced a monster; we seem to have excavated Patrick's inner Keanu Reeves...

Patrick thoroughly enjoyed the surf lessons, to the extent that his loving father, stepmother and sister have nurtured his surfing habits by forking out for a surf board (Southpoint 6' 10" epoxy 'fish' board, for those in the know), board bag, spring weight wetsuit (short legs and sleeves), board wax (I'm pleased to say that it's Mrs Palmer's Super Sticky rather than Sex Wax or Five Daughters), soft grip board attachments for the car's roof rack, and a dinky little waterproof bag for his money and keys that he can zip inside his wetsuit.


















We're cool. I got to go to 'Coopers Surf' at the Jetty with him and ask all sorts of dumb questions about what you do with the wax, why length matters etc etc. Hard, at times, to escape the feeling that 'surf terminology' is specially designed to make women sound as if they're giving men the come-on, but there you go... Had I been a nubile twenty-something in a bikini it might have been a problem, but as 40-year old stepmother of almost 19-year old lad I don't think anyone would have taken me seriously!!!

Australia v England

Points in favour of living in Australia!

• Shop assistants who know where the products you want to see are located in the store
• Shop assistants who greet you in a friendly manner when you walk in, and say goodbye to you when you leave - all with a genuine manner!
• Shop assistants who are incredulous at the idea that a shopper might be expected to pack their own bag, and who understand that separating frozen food from household chemicals might be a good idea!
• OK - I have to put the beach in the list somewhere: it's close, it's clean, the water's warm, the surf's great, and there's SAND!
• Beautiful parrots and mynah birds calling in the morning, and eating bird seed on the verandah
• Friendly neighbours who are considerate about making noise, even though they're so far away that they won't upset you anyway
• Local fruit stalls with trays of nectarines, mangoes and pineapples for $20 each - about £8 - what you'd pay for 4 of those fruit in a UK supermarket most weeks! You've got no excuse for not eating your 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day here

Drawbacks of living in Australia...

• Few decent newspapers (I make an honourable exception for the Sydney Morning Herald)
• No Sunday papers unless you count the Sun Herald (and I don't!)
• Strange filter lanes onto dual carriages that come in from the right hand side...
• Undertaking is legal!
• No Marmite - well, not as I know it... there is something called Marmite, which got me very excited, but it turned out to be false optimism
• Insane quarantine regulations that mean I won't be able to bring Marmite back with me in my luggage - I'll have to try and find a shop that sells it in Sydney!
• It is a VERY long way away from our family and friends in Europe... and I don't think that disadvantage will ever fall off the bottom of the list. We miss you all, daily.

Coffs Harbour zoo

We decided to go to the zoo at the weekend, just for the hell of it, and it was a slightly disappointing experience. We got there with an hour to spare before it closed, and we trudged round in the heat... There were some interesting birds - several colourful varieties of parrot - some cute guinea pigs and rabbits, some ducks, geese and hens, and I saw an emu in the distance. We saw some koalas, backs turned towards us as they clung to tree trunks in their enclosure, but the stars of the show were the kangaroos and a pea hen with baby pea chicks, something I've not seen before.

The zoo is quite dilapidated, staffed by people who don't seem to care very much, and lacks interesting information and amenities, so I think it's safe to say that we won't be going back there very often. But it was good to go and see it for ourselves. Michael and Patrick have both been there before, but a very long time ago: Patrick can't have been more than 5 or 6 years old as it was before Michael and Jennifer divorced, when her parents lived at Sapphire Beach, near Coffs Harbour.

The biggest damned barbecue you ever saw

Michael's gone all Australian on me and has bought a huge barbecue... For those of you who remember the amazing Smeg A3 range cooker we had in Woodfield Road, I think this is bigger! The photograph is with the lid down, but if you lift the lid you find a metre-long rotisserie spit (with powered motor, so no hand cranking the thing round and round!), and an infra-red set-up that will cook things 'conventionally' while you barbecue on the front...

The reason for having the barbecue is two-fold: firstly, the cooker in the house is unbelievably awful, and secondly, in the hot summer it's much better to keep the heat of cooking outside. We've had two meals on it so far: roast chicken last night, cooked on the spit, and spare ribs tonight - and both were delicious, so despite the fact that I would undoubtedly have bought a smaller model, I think Michael's done the right thing. And after all, he is the cook of the house!

Girlie essentials!

It probably won't be of any interest to the males in the audience, but it's been nice - and reassuring in some peculiar way - to be able to report that I've found a good beautician and a good hairdresser! I don't suppose many of you think of me as a snappy dresser or even, possibly, as someone who cares a lot about their appearance... Part of it is to do with a distinct lack of any practical advice on any matter relating to physical appearance or dress sense or anything else 'vain' in my upbringing, so I've struggled on without any clear sense of style for years... and I suppose that part of the problem in the UK was one of being too shy to do anything about it, so I didn't!

Well girls, this is Australia, where you can walk into the biggest stores of the biggest names in designer fashion or beauty wearing shorts and flip-flops if you want to. Bond Street? Pah! I can't say that I actually have walked into the Sydney Chanel boutique, for example, wearing shorts and flip flops, but I just feel that I could. Here they just don't care if you're a size 6 or 16, or size 26 for that matter. They don't comment on your nails, your teeth or your hair.

Some of this is undoubtedly to do with the fact that probably 85% of Australian women don't seem to have any sense of style at all. A fairly standard 'uniform' for women of all ages is a 3/4 sleeve shirt with a rounded hemline, worn open-necked over cut-off jeans or below-knee-length shorts and flip flops. Possibly a short-sleeved T shirt if you're feeling adventurous. Hmm.

This is all outside of Sydney/Melbourne, of course. Sydney-siders are a breed apart and they're sharp dressers - more New York than London! Anyway, over here I somehow feel a bit more confident and have decided that at 40 years old NOW is the time to get a decent hair cut, a regular facial and a manicure! And what a joy it is to turn myself over to the beautician firm in the belief that she will not snigger to the other girls in the salon as soon as I've paid the bill and left. Blackheads, wrinkles, thinning hair, sun damage, bushy eyebrows, untrimmed cuticles - they just take what they find and do something with it, accompanied by intelligent conversation and absolutely no sniggering. I love it. Admittedly, today was my first facial - at an Ella Bache salon - but it was great and amazingly cheap, and I thought I would make it a regular treat, along with the occasional manicure and pedicure. OK, so when you see me in February you won't actually be able to discern any of these things underneath the layers of clothing and the jetlag, but I'll know it's there!

Time to think

I've been meaning to put up a posting on the blog for days, but somehow haven't managed to gather enough time to think about it! Despite the fact that we're new here, haven't settled in yet, don't know what we're doing, don't have a social life, the fact is that I seem to have plenty of things to do.

I suppose that one thing that is definitely different about living here and that has a certain impact upon my day is that one has to drive everywhere, and I worked out that I'm racking up at least 40 kilometres (25 miles) a day, just driving to and fro the shops and Ella's pre-school or taking Patrick to his Thursday night fencing sessions or to surf school... On days when we decide to 'go somewhere' it can be 70 or 80 kilometres a day. Perhaps it's not much, but it's so much more time than I am used to spending in a car!

We're all acclimatising slowly. You probably won't want to hear that a day with temperatures of 18 degrees Celcius merits the gas fire being on and the wearing of long trousers, jumpers and shoes with socks! The average temperature here at this time of year seems to be in the mid-twenties. It must be warm because I'm wearing shorts! Not a pretty sight, I grant you, but certainly an unusual one. I'm still finding some days chilly, though, and appear to be the only person in the house who's putting on a cardigan in the evenings - but then, as my mother-in-law would say, I'm a cold frog!

I've just read an interesting article in the Coffs Advocate, a local paper, advising residents of what to do in the impending storm season in terms of precautions and a 'storm kit'. Strangely, the "storm season" is another of those things - like the fact that Coffs Harbour is the tick capital of Australia - that no-one saw fit to mention to us until we'd arrived! Anyway, we're advised to prepare an emergency kit containing stout shoes, waterproofs, a good torch and batteries and various other items, and to ensure that our gutters and eaves are clear of leaves, our garden is free from loose debris that could be hurled around in a tropical storm, and that we should keep a list of emergency numbers IN the fridge... I guess I'll start putting that together, then!

We were talking to our friends in Holland, Andrea and Tim and their children (my godchildren) about the emotional journey one makes when moving countries. I do feel quite strange at the moment - neither 'in' nor 'out', not sure of where I am in fact. Andrea reckons that there's a real trough that hits one at about three months, which will be mid-January, just after Ella's birthday and the excitement of Christmas and just before I go back to the UK. I wonder how I'll feel...

In some ways it's funny how fast one adapts: Michael and I can find our way to half a dozen local beaches, several restaurants (although we've only been out to two!), various useful retailers and the local shopping mall, the bank, the library, the doctor's surgery, the vet, and various local attractions. We're able to find what we need on the supermarket shelves and at the chemist, we've adopted Australian brand names to replace similar products we used to like in the UK, and we know the comparative price of petrol at several petrol stations. We've got an internal compass that tells us which way is 'home' and whether things are north or south of Korora, east or west of the Pacific Highway, and we can work out roughly how long it will take us to drive from A to B. I find it quite amazing that we've assimilated so much information in such a short space of time... But this isn't 'home', really.

It's been strange and interesting making our first visits to properties through estate agents ('real estate' agents, over here). We've only been to see two, and our timescales are fairly laid back so we're not desperate to purchase anything before Christmas at the earliest; we're just trying to get a feel for what's available, in what areas and at what price. The first one was at Bonneville, which is 10 kilometres or so south of Coffs Harbour city centre, but on the coastal side of the highway. It was 5 acres with a house - more than we wanted to spend, and the house was too recently renovated for us to have wanted to knock it down and start again, so it really wasn't what we wanted. What was interesting, though, was the reaction it provoked in us - fresh out of city living as we are! We were unanimous that 5 acres is a minimum amount of land for what we want here, and that the house we saw was too close (i.e. half the length of Woodfield Road) to our neighbours! Knowing us you might wonder how we could possibly adapt to the sort of semi-rural living that all of this implies, but we're going back to Michael's roots and no sooner has he set foot on a property than he's talking about dams, bore holes, decent fencing and the dangers of bush fires with trees too close to the house... My interests are different: I want to fall in love with the immediate countryside: my soul (if I have one?) and my artistic interests require a view - proper countryside - something to stir me! - and no near neighbours because I'm fed up of living with them, cheek by jowel.

Today we went to see a different property, up the Bucca Road, which is about 8 kilometres north of where we are so it's a good half an hour drive into central Coffs Harbour. The layout was much more what we want: a good half kilometre between us and the nearest house! But the pricetag was hefty given the condition of the house on the property - which would need demolishing and rebuilding completely. Outside I could see rotting roof timbers, holes in walls, broken glass and signs of termites. Inside was like my nightmare of Patrick's room, at its worst, multiplied throughout the whole house! It didn't surprise me to discover that the current tenant is a single bloke... let's leave it at that.

I'm hoping that we'll visit a property that we can afford that also excites us - that makes us think of possibilities and has a view and enough flat land for a horse, and maybe some fruit trees. Ideally we'd also still be in the catchment area for Kororo Public School, but maybe I'm hoping too much! As and when we find such a place I might start thinking about what 'home' is. Meanwhile, all this is fine but there is a slightly surreal aspect to life. It isn't hard to cope with, just strange.

Phew! Toby's home...

Toby would like to tell his crowds of adoring fans that he's out of hospital now, and resting at home with his family. The vets have told him he can't go for walkies until next week, and then he's got to submit to the indignity of walking on a lead, but hey! When you're a star pooch you understand you just gotta take the rough with the smooth. And what's a little walking on the lead compared to the indignities of a drip and oxygen, eh?

Meanwhile, the extra doggie treats (he's a bit thin after not being able to eat for five days, OK?), adulation and grooming are making up for it. It's just good to be home... (and apparently all the humans missed him, especially the small noisy one who now thinks she should brush him ALL THE TIME. Give a dog a break!)

The (mis)adventures of Toby and the Tick

Poor old Toby! I couldn't bring myself to write a blog entry about him yesterday because we weren't at all sure he'd make it through the night... Yes, folks, my premonitions about him encountering nasty Australian wildlife have proved to be true!

A few days ago, heading the dire warnings about paralysis ticks, I looked up the symptoms and description on the internet and consequently we have spent the last few days searching for a tick, because Toby started panting and that's a recognised sign... Unfortunately we couldn't find the blasted thing and so we decided to keep an eye on Toby but assumed that the panting was due to the 32 degrees outside! But yesterday Patrick took him out for his second walk of the day, and came back saying Toby was having trouble walking and wasn't interested in chasing the surf, which is very unusual. Sure enough he couldn't swallow and his breathing was very laboured. We finally found the damned thing - on his nose! It wasn't visible until it was half fed and we'd checked him over SO carefully - I felt awful things had got to that state because basically we had to rush Toby to the vet hospital ($$$$$ callout fees for a late night consultation, but hey, what the hell!), and weren't sure if he'd survive.

Luckily the vet was able to tell us that Toby was improving by this morning and although he's had another night in hospital we're hoping we'll be able to bring him home tomorrow. Phew! Now, of course, we'll be checking on him twice as hard, and he's got he's got to have two anti-tick tablets every second day (he won't mind - as long as you wrap tablets in pate Toby will eat anything!). Frontline doesn't really work over here, especially if your dog swims, and there's no way Toby will be happy to stay away from the beach!

Evening views driving through Coffs Harbour

Regime Change

Life is a bit different these days, so I thought I'd give you a taste of what we're doing, and how it's different from our Bristol days.

We're waking up quite early - not altogether out of our natural desire to wake up with the parrots, but there you are - and taking Ella to the Montessori school on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I do her packed lunch the night before (no school meals in Australia!) and put it in the fridge so it's all ready in the morning. But the big change is that if it's sunny we load Toby in the car as well, and after we've taken Ella to school we (Michael and I) take Toby down to the beach for a good long run and he loves it. Today it was hysterical: yesterday was very stormy and this morning the surf was up - good sized waves. Michael threw Toby's ball and it landed in the spume just as the waves withdrew down the beach, but by the time Toby got to the ball it was swept away by the next incoming wave - and he went after it! He was literally somersaulted up the beach by the wave, and far from being frightened, he went back for more! I was the one who was petrified for him, although in the end he was fine...

When we got back we had a cuppa and started doing some work. Today I had to go off into town and sort out Ella's immunisation form, buy myself a second-hand table to work at, and submit an etching for an exhibition. Michael did some set-up work on the home computer network. After lunch Patrick (who has probably spent several hours, by this time, MSN-ing his friends in the UK) takes Toby for another walk! So we have a very contented dog who is barking a lot less because he's thoroughly tired and has had a great time.

When we've collected Ella from school she settles down in front of the TV for a while and Michael and I carry on working, but then we stop and Michael makes dinner.

There's still a lot to do before we've settled down - I, for one, am going to have to revise my ideas about how I am going to set myself up as an artist here - but we're trying to enjoy the aspects of living here that are radically different from living in Bristol, such as our proximity to the ocean, and to try and create a life for ourselves that is a bit more relaxed than we perhaps have been used to in recent years... Currently the stress is more on Michael than it is on me: I did the bulk of the arrangements about our relocation in the UK, but he is having to do all the work here because I know nothing about the local utility companies, Internet Service Providers, telephone networks or that sort of stuff. It will all balance out in due course.

This evening we went out: I took Michael to a private view for an art exhibition (where I met the lovely Willis, for those who know him), and then we collected Patrick and Ella and took them to a restaurant for dinner.

Phone photos!

I have to say that taking photos with my phone is quite good - the images are surprisingly clear and quite large when you think what is taking them... It would have been great to have my small digital camera with me, or to have had Michael's super-dooper digital SLR, but of course our packers packed them before we could say, 'Hang on a minute!' and so that was that.













I would have really appreciated having focussing ability (mind you, I say that every time I wake up in the morning these days...) and depth of field but it's not bad all things considered.














So thank goodness for mobile phone technology, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see my shots of the view from our veranda last night before a big lightening storm! Sadly I was wrapped up in bed rather than taking photos of the sheet lightening itself... I'll save than for another occasion.

Toby on the beach

I'm under no illusions - I know you are much more interested in pictures of the children and the dog than you are of me! Anyway, here are some pictures of Toby enjoying himself in Korora Bay this morning (one of three local beaches where dogs are allowed off the leash - and there are a couple of beaches where he can be walked on a leash, and several more beach where dogs are simply not allowed at all). As you can see, he made a doggy friend!













Now that Ella has started at the Montessori Pre-school (today is her first day), we are planning to take Toby for a walk up to the Pre-school and then down to the beach and back home, and Patrick will hopefully be able to give him a run later in the day as well.














Toby just loves the sea - he's taken to chasing the surf out and then running away from it as it rushes back in, and as you can see from this picture, the swell is quite high! There have been a couple of occasions on which we've been yelling at him to turn around and race back before he gets swept away by a large wave... but he has such fun. I've had to buy combs as well as a brush for his fur because he's got sand and sea water in it all the time at the moment. I've found somewhere to get him clipped locally and must arrange that - the shorter his coat is, the easier it will be to wash him off AND check for ticks!

Highs and Lows

Achievements:

• Getting my New South Wales driver's licence with entitlement to ride a motorcycle!
• Sorting out temporary (and immediate) contents insurance for the house
• The dishwasher has finally been installed AND plumbed in AND the leaky tap has been fixed and it works
• Michael and I have a new bed - no more sleeping on the mattress for us!
• Toby's home!!!
• Patrick's been to his first fencing session and enjoyed it
• Michael and Patrick are out tonight at the Bellingen Jazz Club, about 25kms from here, listening to two of Australia's best jazz trumpeters (well done Sara for carefully reading the local rag)
• Yesterday Michael and I took Ella to visit the local Montessori pre-school which is conveniently located about 1km away, next to the primary school she will be starting at in January, and she's enrolled for 3 days per week starting next week
• We've encountered some of the neighbours, including Clinton, Tracie and their son Anton and dog (poodle/terrier cross?) who only moved in opposite us three weeks ago

Downers:

• The really, really, REALLY important envelope that has accompanied us thusfar with ALL of our birth/marriage/change of name/naturalisation documents in it has gone missing...
• The cockroaches have started visiting our house
• I've found not one, but TWO paralysis ticks crawling on Ella - presumably having jumped off Toby after his perambulations in the neighbourhood. I really don't like them...
• My laptop is playing up

Things we've been doing

Don't say I never get in front of the camera! As we don't have a scanner etc handy at the moment I was reduced to taking a photograph with my phone of a photograph taken by the resident photographer at the 'Pet Porpoise Pool' in Coffs Harbour, which we visited last Tuesday, I think (the date on the image is the date I took the photo of the photo, if you see what I mean).

I like the seal's look, especially the rolling eye...

It was fun to visit; I don't really approve of captive dolphins, but some of the residents (Bucky, for example) have been there for decades and you couldn't exactly release them into the wild and expect them to survive, and they looked as if they enjoyed themselves so far as I could tell... Anyway, in addition to being able to 'interact' with the dolphins during the show, you can also feed them, feed little fairy penguins and - if you're lucky! - be 'kissed' by a seal! Ella really wanted to do it, but I think several mentions of bad fishy breath were what made her wriggle away from the seal at the last moment, so Mummy got the herring halitosis instead. It wasn't so bad - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it is one of the better photos of me in recent months!

A couple of the local beaches!

This plateful of seeds, shells and a sea-urchin case is what we picked up from our first couple of forays out to the beaches...

Pictures of the house...

Coffs Harbour

I’m acutely aware that I should be observing myself observing the process of getting to know this area, our house and just familiarising myself with Australia, for the purpose of my PhD studies but it’s an interesting exercise in itself…

There are so many ways in which Australia, or at least New South Wales which is the state I am most familiar with, seems to have an American (or Americanised) landscape. What I mean is that in Britain houses are predominantly brick-built with tiled roofs and have more than one storey. It’s unusual to see fly-screens and screen doors, external water tanks or water pumps, flags, or houses raised on stilts or staddles. To my eyes there is a huge amount of billboard advertising here, and that, combined with single-storey shops, offices and houses, reminds me much more of the American small-town landscape with which I am familiar from visits to New Jersey (OK, not exactly a representation of the whole of the USA) and from movies.

Another similarity with America is that owing to the vastness of the country, I suppose, the car is king. I strongly resisted the idea of having two cars in Bristol and I still think I was right. But in Bristol you could walk or take the bus pretty much anywhere you wanted to go, and taxis, buses and trains were only a short distance away. Korora was ‘sold’ to us partly on the basis that we would be within only a few minutes’ distance of everything we needed – and we are, but we didn’t appreciate that the timings were given based on driving somewhere. You’d have to walk a long way to find a local shop, the local beach or any entertainment. Ella’s school is probably a kilometre and a half away from our front door and I imagine we will be unusual in walking her to school rather than driving. But this isn’t unusual: you’d have to be living in the central shopping zone to be near enough to the amenities to be able to walk there!

That is a long way of saying that much of the ‘fabric’ of Coffs Harbour as a large town, a local hub, an industrial centre of the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales is comprised of long strips of mixed businesses, houses, petrol stations and shopping malls with tons of advertising, and lots and lots of cars… and to this extent it is probably little different to any other sizeable settlement in this country. What marks it out as a tourist centre is the large number of motels, hotels and resorts sign-posted along the Pacific Highway. And what brings the tourists – and makes it a place worth coming to – is the breathtaking coastline and the hinterland.

Coffs Harbour is situated half-way between Sydney and Brisbane (roughly speaking), at the only point in the Great Dividing Range where the mountains tumble down into the sea. We’ve yet to discover what the humidity is like in summer, but the temperatures aren’t supposed to creep above 30º C between November and February – I’ll tell you what that feels like in due course. So far it’s been extremely pleasant, due in part to the microclimate facilitated by the local geography. We’re not talking gentle rolling hills here – we’re talking mad up-wellings of rock and no significant ‘coastal plain’ at all, perhaps because Coffs Harbour isn’t at the mouth of a river so there has been no historical estuary or riverine flood plain to flatten out the hills towards the sea. There are no cliffs really, either. Instead the land rises out of the sea and rises backwards to meet the rest of the Great Dividing Range with its steep valleys and elevated grazing country.

This has amusing consequences in terms of land for sale. You see pictures everywhere of parcels of land for sale, and of course we’re interested in buying a piece of land and building a house on it eventually. We have a fantasy of a rural idyll with a few chickens, perhaps a horse, some sheep, a half-dozen cows… Michael going back to his farming roots while I tend the orchard and the vegetable patch in between producing artistic masterpieces. Sadly, though, it will be damned difficult to do any of this within sight of the sea! Yesterday we went for a drive up Bruxnor Road simply because it’s over the other side of the Pacific Highway from us, and we’d seen a particular advert for 10 acres of land and a house that was vaguely affordable. We weren’t looking to walk in and put down a deposit but we thought it would be an interesting exercise to take a look at the property, assuming we could find it by dint of looking out for estate agents’ ‘For Sale’ boards. And we did find a lot of ‘For Sale’ boards – situated on properties that can’t have had a gradient of less than 1:4 on any of them, and yet these are seen as prime building sites! What’s more, people here actually build on them! I’m not joking: we almost burnt out the clutch on our NEW car on arrival in Korora because the driveway is very steep. It must be 1:4 – it’s certainly as steep as my allotment in Bristol, for those who visited that. And here people build on steeper land! We’ve spotted several roads being built around here as a preparation for residential developments and honestly, our car wouldn’t get up them and I wouldn’t know how to drive up them, even engaging our Subaru’s low/high traction system. In fact, there’s one road that we spotted just off the highway, and we simply can’t fathom how you’d get a car up there at all – although presumably diggers haven’t had any problems… They are hardy souls, Australian developers (and house owners!), but I don’t think the average cow would fare very well in such circumstances.

Surfers, swimmers, whale-watchers, paddlers and fishermen, however, get a great deal. The geography has created a series of beautiful curved, sandy beaches with lots of room for everyone, and we plan to make the most of them even if we end up buying land up in the hills somewhere. Here you can find gentle valleys, fields of cows (it’s predominantly dairy farming here; it’s too far south for sugar cane and too humid for much arable farming) and horses, gracious homesteads and stretches of sub-tropical rainforest between larger expanses of eucalypt woodland. It’s beautiful – quieter, less brash, calmer than the coastal strip. There are some larger settlements such as Nana Glen (home of Russell Crowe – we met his father today!) and Bellingen, and you’re close enough to Coffs Harbour to go and do the shopping.

The First Seven Days...

We’ve managed our first week. I met a woman in a delicatessen who asked why we came to Coffs Harbour, of all the places we could have chosen in Australia, and I mentioned the lovely climate. “Well”, she said, “it’s the summers…” I said, “Go on then, tell me. How hot does it really get?” Her reply was, “It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity. It gets so sticky that the air stands still, but I suppose that if you can last one summer you’ll be fine”… So there you go – we’re in for a not-so-hot but very sticky summer, and I guess it will be interesting to see what we think in only a couple of months’ time.

The weather here has been beautiful for the most part. We arrived in warm rain and a couple of grey days, but since then there has been lots of sunshine every day, with intermittent showers that seem to come out of nowhere! We’ve been down to the beach several times – several different beaches, in fact, as there are so many to choose from! – and it’s been lovely. The water is about 19º C and there’s great surf, and the beaches are mostly lovely golden sand with occasional fine shell-gravel (don’t know what the formal name for it is) and interesting rocks. On our first trip to the beach Patrick and Ella saw two dolphins breaking the waves!
Patrick has bought himself a body board, and we’ve offered him Surf School lessons to improve his surf skills and enable him to get out of trouble as there are plenty of rip tides on the local beaches. I took him and Ella out to Diggers Beach the other day and he went body boarding and reached the limits of his experience… as I told him when he went into the water, “I don’t swim well enough to be able to rescue you, so don’t get into trouble!” but he almost did… so Surf School – his birthday present – will be very useful!

Our House

10 Malibu Drive is both more than and less than we had hoped for. Perhaps predictably the Estate Agents’ details weren’t accurate! For a start, ‘small back yard’ should have been translated into ‘no back yard’, unless you count the 6-foot wide strip of gravel/scrubby grass that surrounds three sides of the house under the wrap-around veranda. Now admittedly, you can get a clothes airer under there, which is useful, and because it has solid gates and a good fence this area will be good for Toby to have a nose around, but otherwise it’s almost unusable. Then we come on to bedrooms and bathrooms: ‘Five bedrooms, three with en-suite bathrooms and two further bathrooms’ is an outright lie! There are indeed five rooms that might, optimistically be described as bedrooms, but there are definitely only three ‘bathrooms’ and one of those is a downstairs shower room/utility room with a very dirty shower and toilet… For those of you out there who might at some point be our guest, I can reassure you that although this shower/utility room would be your bathroom, it will soon be a lot cleaner and lovelier!

Room size is also an issue. The main living area is fairly large – certainly as large as the kitchen/dining areas + lounge in our old house in Woodfield Road – just. But the two bedrooms occupied by Patrick and Ella are tiny. Just as well there are built-in wardrobes because all of their furniture apart from beds will have to be located downstairs!
What we’d hoped is that we could have used two of the five bedrooms as an office and a study, making the living area a lap-top free zone (for a change), but I’m not sure how it will work out. Downstairs there is the utility/shower room, a large room with bay windows but no fly screens, and a poky small room with bare plaster walls that will double as a server/box room as it is uninhabitable and gloomy but has all the computer hook-ups in it.

Patrick wanted to have the large downstairs room as his bedroom, but apart from the fact that if he disappeared down there we might never see him again, we need that room as a guest/storage room.

Next in this iniquitous list of deceptions, we have the concept of a ‘workshop’, which turns out to be a small sink, a window and a couple of power sockets at the end of the garage. I had hoped that the word ‘workshop’ signified a separate area with light and power that I might have been able to use for my art, but no… you can barely see in there and there’s no room because it’s inside the garage with the car and the trailer! And the other problem is that our landlords apparently want to use it as a furniture store – something we’ve raised with them, because we are also likely to need to store boxes there once the sea-container arrives.

But the real killer is the last point: when we spoke to the Estate Agents, a couple of months ago, we stated quite clearly that for the purposes of Michael’s work we need to have a good internet connection. Otherwise, how is he going to be able to work? We can’t have the same excellent technology that we had in Bristol (mainly because of the local geography, which is a challenge to pipe-layers up here!), but we needed to be within range of an ADSL Exchange, which would enable him to use a local ISP and have good up/download capacity. We said to the agents that we wouldn’t even look at a house unless we could be specifically assured that we could get an ADSL connection to the house AND that the landlord would be happy for us to do so. Pacific Property went away, consulted the local service providers (or so we thought) and came back with the categorical statement that this house was connectable to the local ADSL Exchange. Only it isn’t. Only we’ve only just found this out because we’ve only just had our telephone connected and can only now test out the line. We can’t even get a 56k modem to work. Aaaaaaaaargh! Naturally I have pointed out to the agents that we have been substantially misled about the house and its facilities, and have been tied into a contract for six months in a house that we may not be able to stay in…

So where does this leave us? Well it leaves us waiting for a visit from a wireless networking ISP guy who is visiting this morning to tell us whether he can hook us up to a wireless transmitter that might solve the problem. If that doesn’t work we shall be taking it up again with Pacific Property, and trying to find ourselves somewhere else to live. Despite my heart sinking at that thought, our life here is only economically sustainable here if Michael can work!

But now for the good stuff, and there is good stuff. The house is full of character because it’s ‘old’, well, old for Australia! I have no real idea of how old, but it’s built in a traditional style with a wrap-around veranda and lovely joinery details. The front and rear of the veranda have carved lattice panels under the gables, and the scrolling design of the gable in-fills is carried through to the interior: all the rooms upstairs have the same lattice in-fills above the doors, which I suppose allows breezes to travel around the rooms, cooling things down in summer. The timber construction and the lattice design are even carried through to a ‘cubby house’ (wendy house) that the owners obviously had built at the same time as the main building. Nestled down the side of the house, this little child’s cabin is just beautiful – although it will need significant cleaning out if Ella is ever to be able to use it!

In the same way that photographs of the interior of the house were slightly misleading, so too were the photographs of the view but in a good way. Looking out of the kitchen window and the rear French windows there are great views of the Pacific Ocean, looking out over Hills Beach and Hawkins Beach (I think!).

We’ve met our landlords, Kerry and Tom, who are very nice. They live in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and are proposing in due course to use this house as a winter retreat, when the cold of the Blue Mountains gets too much… Looking at Kerry and observing her lack of eyelashes and eyebrows, and her wig, I wonder if she has been treated for cancer – the suggestion is certainly that they are changing the pace of their lives and aiming to relax and enjoy it.