All summer I’ve seen you, checking out homes in real estate agents’ windows. No need to be Nostradamus to know what you’re thinking: “Christ, we could move here. Have four bedrooms, butler’s pantry and pool for half the cost of our city place.”
Not having the Moving Somewhere Else fantasy is possibly illegal in Australia. Right now is peak time, with holidays already missed as work and school are back. I know the feeling.
My husband and I just clocked up five years since we left Collingwood for Ocean Grove. Feels like five minutes and forever. To celebrate, we sat on the porch, watched dogs wrestling, ate that viral roast chicken in a bag thing, hashed over the hits and memories since 2021.
Befriending magpies. Learning to grow things. Reading with a Pasito mojito while Chris mowed lawns. Unearthly winter winds. Carrying our dead warrior groodle Maggie to the vet’s van, needing one more, just one more kiss on her head.
Nearly breaking up, thinking we needed to be back in the city, deciding we didn’t, laughing and laughing and lying together in a sunlit afternoon bedroom feeling bloody lucky.
About a year in, ABC Radio Melbourne’s Jacinta Parsons told me it takes seven years to acclimatise to a smaller, isolated place. I was aghast — wait, there’s still six years until this truly feels like home?— but Jacinta, you were spot on. I’m almost at the loving part with two years still up the sleeve.
But there are tons of things I wish we’d known when we decamped to a town where we had no friends, no tradies, no idea locals don’t give a fat rat’s about big smoke blow-ins. I don’t want any of you to be as hapless, should you be yearning for a sea or tree change.
So here’s a cheat sheet to keep in your back pocket.
Think about renting first. Understand small towns are not bastions of diversity. Know you’ll have to drive everywhere. Make sure your car isn’t a European station wagon with low-profile tyres. Rural potholes are bastards.
Invite people down only every second weekend. Go to see whoever’s playing at the pub, netball court, footy ground. Find a trivia night. Don’t plant passionfruit (trust me.) Get properly out of town once a month to shake things up. At one point, I dreamed of going to Gumbuya Park.
Be prepared for days to be fabulous — nature, bakery pies, op shops — and nights so boring you start ironing hankies so you don’t scream into a pillow. Remember, coffee machines are turned off at 3. That means you need hobbies, ideally ones that involve meeting people in real life.
Last year I joined a sauna book club (held in, not about saunas) and took up pickleball and jazz funk classes at the local senior cits’ centre. My homemade mozzie surface spray has gone gangbusters, so much so that I’m hailed in the street as “the bug lady”. Aiming for local identity status within the next five decades.
And I have a job four minutes’ drive away at a bookshop. It gets me out of the house and into conversations and good clothes. Look out for the matron in the caped Willow cocktail dresses, silk harem pants and gold Castaner espadrille wedges who’s terrified of the cash register.
Right. Lack of infrastructure is discombobulating so start building it, stat. It’s taken a while, but we now have a gym community, his’n’ hers doctors, fence builder, pharmacist who knows when we’re due for flu shots. A provedore! Takes away stress.
Most of all, you need mates. We would be bananas without our small, quality crew. Lots of time is spent on dog beaches and decks, shooting the shit over chips, often in bathers or dressing gowns. Not exactly Maison Batard, but I don’t have the right cut and colour for that just now.
Worth it? Look, I say yes. Have a crack. But it takes a while not to feel torn about where you belong. Which is always where people and things you love are.
So sure, move for the view. You’ll stay for the heart stuff, or you won’t stay at all.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media. Her book, Boogie Wonderland, is published by Affirm Press.
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