Getting on the map

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After years of confusion we finally have a road with a name and with it, an address.  When our area was first settled and  land divided into farming lots, our road formed a circuit through the green and rolling hills of the district, and so it was imaginatively named Greenhills Rd. The entire district is full of green and hilly land, if you check the map, there are a total of six Greenhills Roads in the Shire. When you want to report a bushfire or fall off the tractor and need to contact the emergency services you have more than one problem.  

About 30 years ago a state forest was planted and fenced off, straight through a large section of the road, so for 30 years it sat as a dead end cut off from it's other half, quietly sliding off the map and out of recent memory as it's original name faded away. Deliveries  mostly failed to reach their destination, utility meters were seldom read. Only intrepid Sunday morning joggers and serious bike riders ventured down our track and they needed to have a pocket for wire cutters to hack through the forestry fence.  To be honest our road is seasonally either rutted and dusty or rutted and muddy, it doesn't deserve much more than a dotted line on a map, and as one neighbour puts it
 " rocks grow up and potholes grow down in it"  

Unfortunately, as life gets faster and more complex,  living in a parallel universe reached through dust or mud has it's draw backs, the neighbourhood decided it was time to come in from the cold.

One neighbour had a sign to his farm put up at the corner, so we all adopted his farm name as our address - and it worked for a while. Then the bureaucrats decided to solve the problem by acknowledging the name of one of the original land holders- that unleashed some historical and hysterical skeletons from old family closets and so was duly dispatched.   Meanwhile rates notices, utility bills and all junk mail continued orbiting in yet another parallel universe. Not even the local council engineers could locate us.
Some might argue that we had arrived at Nirvana, leaving the mayhem of the world behind, but the Rural Fire Service had devised a brilliantly simple farm numbering system and they wanted to nail their numbers to a proper road name. A cunning plan was hatched to circumvent the skeletons in closets yet still recognise the early settlers. The shire council tentatively agreed, the geographical names board checked that the choice was unique in the shire, the name was advertised in the local paper as part of the process and received no objections - the process was complete, we had a name and would soon have a sign on the road to prove it.

Many months passed, so many that we presumed the process had once again foundered on some bureaucratic shoal.
A post script:
The road sign had been up for a week before anyone noticed, we came and went round the corner without actually being aware that after 30 years the road had it's own notable, unique and unparalleled signpost.

Another postscript:
Our most recent electricity bill was an estimate, I suppose it's too much to expect instant admission to the world after a 30 year absence.