The neighbourhood

Now that we've settled on the name of our new venture, we need to sort out the problem of the address.  According to the title deeds our address leads past the sewage treatment plant to a dead end nowhere near our farm. Visits from friends or deliveries are going to be challenging or non existent unless this piece of local government logic is mastered.

What better way to meet the neighbours than to knock on their door and ask them where they think they live.

We have only three neighbours, our road ends at the last neighbours front gate. So I decide to start there.  I arrive on foot as walking the kilometer or so gives me time to take in the afternoon. The road makes sweeping turns to cross two creeks. Its a private road and I am to learn that the neighbours own shares in a grader and maintain their no name road themselves. Later when I report that piece of information, the other half of the farming partnership's eyes light up -    a grader -  now that's a bit of machinery he hadn't considered.

 It's clear that not many people walk down our road, the neighbours dogs go berserk in a puzzled kind of way.
'Where's your vehicle!  Where's your vehicle '  they seem to bark.
'How can we pee on the tyres and check you out, if you just walk in?'

Their owners are welcoming  and in a half hour I learn the mystery of the address. It seems the legal documents are right -- up to a point.  Our road is connected to the 'dead end' but only in the form of a fire trail that cuts through a state forest with two locked gates barring the way.  Our neighbours got sick of loosing their visitors so they erected a sign to their farm. The local council was helpful, but each time it put up a sign, it mysteriously disappeared - the council was the first to give in. It seems a truce has been declared  -- but with whom?

As they have been there for 18 years, they no longer have trouble with friends loosing their way. Deliveries, they report are still a problem and anyone with a GPS tends to remain lost because the advice to 'make a left turn at the next intersection'  will send them sight seeing down to the sewage treatment plant.  

On our next visit I meet our oldest neighbour, he's lived in the area off and on for most of his 70 years. His grandmothers family were early farmers and timber cutters, a skill his father then passed on to his son.  He remembers cutting timber for the coal mines in the area, catching bags full of eels and roasting them for dinner over a camp fire and working the chain saw so hard that it set the bush on fire when he put it down for 'smoko', giving a new meaning to the term.

Our oldest neighbour is a wonderful walking local history book, he is also the proud owner of an eclectic open air machinery museum. He refers to his oldest chain saw as the heirloom and keeps it on the shelf along with all the others even though it hasn't started in over a decade. He has a '49 International that not only starts, but goes and rows of other 'stuff' that makes my city slicker knowledge and vocabulary redundant.

Our third neighbour, we discover is about 12 months ahead of us on the farming learning curve, and streets ahead in the infrastructure stakes.  In a little over a year they have renovated what is fondly referred to as 'the camp', turning  it into a cosy farm house for a family of three lively little girls. Fences, cattle yards, a tree house, veggie garden, chooks and a bunch of neighbourly cattle have all appeared in the space of a year.

As I circled back back to our block, I mentally filed the reams of new information and to that added a small mountain of jobs for our  'to do' list.
There was a spring in my step that I put down to the pleasure I felt about the openly genuine offers of help and information from each of the neighbours.