More than a week on the farm and both so much and so little has happened that it seems like the most useful conveyance would be a series of vignettes.
First and foremost, the farm instantly feels like home. This is the end of the beginning of a project that started over two years ago and -thanks to the comically slow process of property settlement in Tasmania- it's also the end of a three month journey of minutely planning and designing and thinking about how various systems work. So that 'home' feeling shouldn't be all that surprising, although the only other place it has ever happened has been in one house in London.
The farm feels like home but everywhere outside of it feels like being on holiday, because I don't know where anything is or which vendors are good or which roads I should definitely not drive on in my shitty old Peugeot. (Quite a number of them!) This is a familiar honeymoon period that you always enjoy when you move somewhere properly different like other countries/islands.
The ferry ride over was fine except for the swell. Thankfully, I've been on enough boats to not get seasick but I also definitely do not sleep when I am being vigorously rocked head-to-toe on a seesaw. It was strong enough that I was mildly worried about the cars bumping into each other in the hold. The sensation was actually very relaxing, but there was no sleep at all, which is only really a concern if you have to drive the full length of an island the next day, starting at 5:30am. And I did.
Getting the farmhouse up to 'liveable' has been sort of like The Martian before he starts growing food in his own poop. The car was packed to the very gunwales and it really did feel like packing for a xeno-colonisation mission: what was essential to take? What was cheap to buy down there? What could I make or do without?
I like planning for things just as much as doing them so I'm quietly proud with how well that went. In addition to the carload of martian supplies, the separate guesthouse on the property -our future farmstay accommodation- which was previously rented out to local salmon fishermen came very humbly furnished per our negotiations. This meant three single beds, one couch you can sit on, one you really shouldn't, a toaster that needs a five minute break between toastings and other such priceless objets.
Because the single bed frames are quite substantial and have to be dismantled in the room with tools we did not have, we actually spent our first two nights of house ownership not even sleeping in the actual house, only moving in once the mattress I ordered just after Christmas arrived. (The other part of my planning that I'm proud of is getting the pre-arrival online ordering done correctly so things just sort of showed up each day as needed.)
Given that this is the first place we ever bought, it is interesting to compare departing from a property you have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars versus leaving a rental property. Basically, if you sell a place you can leave shit everywhere but you can't if you're renting and want your five hundred dollar deposit back. Crazy. So we now own two lawnmowers, neither of which work, a couple of wheel barrows, one rusted through and the other with a dodgy wheel, a blunt handaxe and so on.
It's all riiight on the edge of being reparable, and I think that's the logic behind the previous owner leaving them behind. He didn't want them but perhaps we'd use them? Besides, the dump is only a few miles away and, as we found out this morning, the neighbour whose house you can see in the above image works there.
My neighbours! Let me tell you I may have won the white people city slicker lottery here. One is a retired apple orchardist, another sells firewood and slashes people's fields for very reasonable rates, yet another set are chicken breeders/sellers of some local renown. They're all going to be much more helpful to me in the short term than I am to them unless they want advice on which mic to use for the podcast they should probably start. (Rode. Now we're even.)
Speaking of neighbours, one of them helpfully explained in great detail why the tractor I just bought currently doesn't work -which I found to be too funny. Apparently the front piston and only the front piston needs a new ring and he knows someone in the next bay over who can fix it. She turns over at least, but we have sadly yet to film our YouTube smash hit: 'top 10 tractor fails'.
And obviously, this is southern Tasmania, so it's been warm and it's been cool and it's been sunny and it's been raining and one of the things I most like to do is watch the clouds roll in from the west over the Hartz Mountains. You can inhale deeply -especially when it's raining- and activate what can only be a genetic memory of what air and rain are supposed to smell like when they are entirely free of pollution. (Tasmania's west coast has the cleanest air and water on earth and the weather moves from west to east for the most part.)
I need to tell you about the plums in the image above. They're the best plums I've ever tasted and -like I mentioned on Twitter- I used to shop in Chiswick. That may sound normal to you. Yes, fruit tastes better straight off the tree. But you'll only say that if you haven't shopped in Chiswick, where we'd get wild-harvested, wild garlic over from France that same morning. I worked in food media for a number of years and I know everyone thinks they're an expert because everyone has to eat but this is one of the few things I do actually have professional expertise in. Anyway, it felt like a reward for the effort and also a promise of what we can and will actually do with the land over the next five years. The promise plum tree sits next to some kind of multi-grafted apple tree that we have a receipt for but no idea what kind of varieties will eventually grow on it. So that should be fun, assuming I don't kill it.
There hasn't been a whole lot in terms of local exploring for a bunch of obvious reasons, like having five acres to understand, and rivers to listen to while drinking outside at night. Also we've been fairly frantic updating our Final Design Exercise for the Permaculture Design Certificate so it more precisely matches the property (which will be shared on the premium member blog in a few days) but we did manage to make it all the way to the literal end of the empire -a twenty minute drive from the farm. Southport -Australia's southernmost settlement- has a delightful coffee vendor selling from of an old water tank tricked out to look like a rocket, with free wifi under its associated tent. A rocket. It was so 'me' that the whole thing felt like a low-budget, 70s TV show rendering of an hallucination or dream sequence. And this still technically being Australia, the coffee is great.
Anyway, I've committed to writing at least a couple of blog posts down there in the next month before the temperature moves from cool to bone-chilling, Antarctic fury because... well, why wouldn't you?
From a magical perspective, I've also been casing out the nearby, intractable forest for likely locations for an upcoming experimental project and I've been slowly waking my first permanent spirit room since leaving New Zealand to life (although the heavy lifting there will be done at the new moon).
One final observation that seems really small and obvious but has been a little profound for us both is that old farmhouses (1885) really do smell like farmhouses, particularly when there is something roasting in the (enormous!) oven. It took all manner of enchantments, two decades of multinational graft, derring-do and corporate chaos -getting changed in storage rooms of Parisian cafes between meetings, barging into Miami hotel rooms to make sure someone wasn't dead, multiple redundancies, secret meetings in Soho pubs, living on one £1 supermarket sandwich a day for the first week of work because you had exactly £5.05 left to last five days, several books written between the hours of 4:30am and 8:30am and things I will only tell you about if you leave your cellphone in the guest house- but opening the door and shimmying out of my wellington boots while the scent of the roast wafts down the hallway smells like... home.
So this is it. These are my first impressions of a farm called Chiswick.
Now the real work begins.