In early 2009, I was living in the suburbs of Sydney with my husband and our ‘first child’, a five-year-old golden retriever named Frank. My husband and I both commuted more than an hour each way to our full-time jobs, where we worked at least 20% more hours per week than we were paid for, and we came home too irritable and exhausted to do much more than scoff some takeaway, stare at the TV for a couple of hours and go to bed. My husband’s mum had recently passed away from an aggressive brain tumour, we had a mortgage that ate up more than a third of our earnings, and life really felt like a treadmill. More and more frequently we found ourselves muttering, ‘life’s too short’.
At that time, we were regularly visiting my sister and her husband, who had recently moved to a small property in the Snowy region. Slowly but surely, we had fallen in love with the landscape that we drove through, and began to talk and dream of an idyllic life on a few acres, away from the ‘rat race’. Ever the realists, we knew we needed to be near a major centre for work, schools (sometime in the future), and general ‘stuff’. We talked about it endlessly, and without actually making a decision, we started ‘just having a look’ for work in Canberra, and for a few acres somewhere in that idyllic countryside.
And as soon as we started that ball rolling, things started to happen. In March, we sold our house, in anticipation of one day leaving Sydney. In April, we found out I was pregnant with our first child, and in May, my husband was made redundant from his job of 19 years. In a matter of weeks, we had become homeless, I’d fallen pregnant, and my husband was out of a job. Things were definitely looking up! And it got better: a few weeks later, my husband was offered a fantastic contract in Canberra, and we were on our way.
Well, my husband was at least – I stayed in Sydney until my maternity leave kicked in. In the meantime we explored the surrounds of Canberra on weekends, and on a random drive one day, we stumbled on the perfect small town, just half an hour from the CBD of Canberra, with rustic houses nestled in country gardens on half-acre blocks. We bought the third house we looked at, less than ten minutes after we walked through the colonial-style door. We moved in at the end of October. And when I say ‘we’, I mean that I laid on the couch, 36 weeks pregnant with no visible ankles or chin, and gave directions while my husband and family moved all our stuff in.
And we’re still here in our perfect small town but, because we apparently are pathologically incapable of just settling in anywhere, we have sold that house and are now on the verge of fulfilling our other lifelong dream: to build our perfect home.
(Oh, and it was a girl!)
Countrified 