Yes after months of absolute and pointless inactivity we’ve finally returned to plague the world with our rambling. By ‘we’ of course I mean ‘I’ but we I mean I thought it was a bit presumptuous to claim all the credit for my idleness, but there ya go. So, where have we been? Quite simple really… we’ve been moving… we’ve been settling in… we’ve been trying to work out how the hell we’re going to generate some sort of income and what on earth possessed us to buy a place so far from anywhere that it’s actually *called* the back end of nowhere!

You may think I jest but if so you’d be wrong! The little farm we bought (see last post) is called Erehwon Orchards and as I’m sure you’ve worked out already from the clues, Erehwon is Nowhere backwards… i.e. the back of nowhere. Obviously it *is* ‘somewhere and that somewhere is about an hours drive up corrugated dirt roads from the one time bustling fishing port of Eden. Where is Eden you ask? Grab a map and head down to the very southern tip on NSW and Eden will probably be the last town you’ll see. It’s a quiet little place these days. There are still a few fishing boats working off the wharf but there’s little else happening. At one time there was a huge fleet, a cannery, and even a thriving logging business in the hills surrounding the place. Now however it’s almost all gone and the Eden community is struggling to find its place in the modern world.

One thing that’s happened to liven the old place up is an influx of ‘sea changers’, people who are fed up to the back teeth with the rat race and house prices of the capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne and have headed out to where the sun shines yellow, the seas are still blue and you can see an abundance of wildlife on your doorstep. This is pretty much what we did and this is where we are. We gathered together our possessions, our animal friends and ourselves and headed off to the place I mentioned earlier, 65 acres of bush with a few acres of olives and hazel nut trees. There’s lots of scope for improvement and lots of opportunities for small producers to make a living, perhaps not a highly paid living but certainly enough to keep body and soul together and what more does anyone really need??