Out of the trees and into the light

Amanda Ducker

I adore stories about failed tree changes, but this is not one of those.

“It’s a logical progression for you to return to the city or at least a bigger regional centre. Generation X tree changers enjoying village life are confronted a decade later by the practicalities of life. This Arcadian ideal of a wonderful life with little kids in a village community is idyllic up to a point – when the need for a higher order of services can only be provided by a larger centre. While you might continue to enjoy the isolation and peace of a farmhouse-type existence, to today’s teenager, who is very tribal, that just doesn’t cut it. This awakening prompts another shift.”

SWAPPING CITY LIFE for the country is great, until the kids hit high school.

We were meandering along in our seventh year of village life when our days in the country suddenly felt numbered. In what demographer Bernard Salt describes as our “farmhouse mindset”, we hadn’t seen another major move looming until it was almost upon us.

I adore stories about failed tree changes, but this is not one of those. I won’t be kicked to death by a mule or a resentful local later in this story. I am perfectly at home in the country, having grown up on a farm before spending my twenties in Sydney, and for a long time I carried on a passionate love affair with Nundle, the village in north-western NSW to which I moved with my three-year-old daughter in November 2000.

There was even a time of high romance when I thought “Nundle” should become a verb, a broad one that could mean “to knit and eat nuts by a river”; “to swim naked in a creek”; “to grow stupendously good tomatoes and potatoes”; “to hike many times in the bush with a new friend and only ever meet one other soul, an old gold miner who turns out to be a distant relative”; and “to write about these things in detail in my diary”.

Recently, though, our simple life seemed to be growing unwieldy and unsatisfying. If we stayed much longer, my daughter would have to spend three hours a day on the school bus, unless I was picking her up after sport or music, which would mean carting along her two much younger sisters, one of whom yells “Help!” repeatedly on car trips longer than a kilometre. By then, the little ones’ chef father would be commuting to Tamworth, too, for work – we’d probably pass him revving along in his old ute on our way home.

Of course, Bernard Salt could have mapped out this inconvenient future for us years ago. “You are being panel-beaten out of Nundle,” the author of The Big Shift, a book charting geographical lifestyle trends in Australia, suggests to me.

“It’s a logical progression for you to return to the city or at least a bigger regional centre. Generation X tree changers enjoying village life are confronted a decade later by the practicalities of life. This Arcadian ideal of a wonderful life with little kids in a village community is idyllic up to a point – when the need for a higher order of services can only be provided by a larger centre. While you might continue to enjoy the isolation and peace of a farmhouse-type existence, to today’s teenager, who is very tribal, that just doesn’t cut it. This awakening prompts another shift.”

Hmm, why didn’t I have that awakening before we built our darling little house on the river? When I finally realised circumstances were banking up on us, though, I was secretly relieved as well as sad. I needed to shake the feeling that I was fading, that I’d put myself out to pasture too young in a roadside paddock. After the wondrous early years, my freewheeling life seemed to have become more conventional. I still had wonderful friends and found the cloud-capped mountains as uplifting as ever, but I was feeling increasingly trapped by low-level pressure to be a goody goody local citizen and school mother. It’s not as if I plan to rack up a criminal record down here in Hobart, our new hometown, but it’s good to feel a bit fast and free again.

According to economist, author and retiring head of public think tank The Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton, we are in no danger of losing the benefit of our country years by returning to city life.

“The significance of a tree or sea change is having the courage to make the transformation in the first place,” says Hamilton, who has analysed consumerism in his books Affluenza and Growth Fetish. “Once you have done that then you are changed forever. You have broken out of the work-spend cycle and adopted a different attitude. Whether your tree change is forever does not really matter; the point is to buck convention and make the change.”

By moving on to Hobart rather than back to Sydney, Bernard Salt tells me we have chosen “to re-enter the capital city lifestyle on the lowest rung”. (Another friend suggested we were merely “swinging from tree to tree”). Top rung Sydney would have proved trickier financially, but it was never a serious contender after the Nundle years: I’m sure I’d find its seductive on-the-make energy too unsettling during these years of intense mothering.

Besides, I’ve already lived there. I love Sydney, but it is part of my old life, the one where I could head for the door without three pairs of eyes pleading with me, please don’t go, we love you so. To live well there – in the style we’ve enjoyed in Nundle, without much money – we’d both need to be working too much. I cannot bear the thought of any of us feeling torn by that demand. In Hobart, I think we can still have the good life together – as close as can be – whilst enjoying manageable workloads and the novelty of all the amenities and our easy access to them.

Judy and Peter Howarth are not returning to Sydney, either, when they leave Nundle next month. Instead, they’re off to a new house in the Blue Mountains, within striking distance of all their grandchildren in Sydney. The Howarths were tree change leaders sixteen years ago when they began to pour their considerable energy and resources into the Nundle community, giving the place an X-factor that lured about a dozen of my generation away from their city careers and into the tiny town.

It was after seeing a picture of Judy bottle-feeding a joey in a magazine spread that I decided to go there. Now, having sold their landmark Nundle enterprises, Judy has begun packing. The other day, she found herself going through boxes of old photographs of various poddy kangaroos. “And I had no idea which one was which, any more,” she admits.

When we decided to leave Nundle, we were planning to keep our house. It was Judy who questioned the wisdom of this. “Even when you dearly love a place, there comes a time to let go,” she counselled me one day over coffee – and we listed it within days. “You can’t go back. You have to keep moving forward.”

Still, when we met for dinner for the last time at their beautiful Wombramurra homestead, days before Christmas, I think we were all a bit shocked by what we’d done. Wombramurra’s sale had come through the previous evening, and we’d accepted an offer for our cottage that very afternoon. We raised our glasses and felt oddly flat.

My eldest daughter – the one for whom we’ve really come to Hobart – cried and cried during our first week here, convinced we’d made a terrible mistake. However, after shopping at Salamanca Markets, swimming, fishing, boating, borrowing books at the State Library, watching Pinocchio unfold live at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens and roller-blading at Woody’s Roller World, all within five or 10 minutes of our new home, she was beginning to come around.

A few days ago, she asked her two year old sister, “Do you remember our old house?”
“Yes,” said Zara.
“Well, we’re never going there again,” she said.
And we all laughed.

This article was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum, Feb 23-24, 2008, as “When tree is not enough”.