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The following article is an edited version of an article first printed in the Sydney Sunday Telegraph Magazine 14 November 2004. Both the article and the accompanying photograph are copryright Sunday Telegraph.
What would you do if somebody said you could knock at least $200,000 off your mortgage, earn the same money in a less pressured environment and spend more time with family? Would you say, "You little beauty!" and ask for directions? Or would you, like the vast majority of urban Australians, fail to react to the news at all - that is, if you even heard it in the first place?
According to Peter Bailey, convenor of Country Week, misconceptions about inland life are rife. People simply do not realise what's on offer, he says, especially in regional cities, not only in real estate and job opportunities, but also in "urbanesque" culture and lifestyle.
After more than a year, Julie Carlson still seems slightly shocked to find herself in the small town of Guyra (pop. 2200), high on the New England Tablelands of northern NSW. She's pleased to be there, but only just coming to grips with the fact that she's living in the kind of place she would once have witheringly dismissed.
"I was one of those people who would drive through a town like this, thinking, 'Why would you live here?"' admits the stylish owner of Guyra's funky new shop, Black Sheep Wool'n'Wares. "The biggest misconception for me to overcome was that there was absolutely nothing going on."
Carlson, 34, who had always lived in Melbourne, went north in April last year with partner David Mills and son Cooper, now two. For Sydney-raised Mills, 36, it was not such a culture shock: he spent his childhood holidays on a Guyra farm, and his mother then moved to the district permanently. It was while visiting her that the new parents felt tempted to stay. "We said we've got nothing to lose; let's give it a go for a year," says Carlson.
Mills, a locksmith and safe-maker by trade, had just left work at the family security business after 17 years. Carlson, a former administration manager who'd ditched her job with the Australian Government Solicitor a few years before, was taking a maternity break from interior design studies. The move was under way when Carlson's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she ended up back in Melbourne for most of last winter, until losing her mother -and her deepest tie with the city - in September.
Carlson and Mills bought a house on 0.8ha outside Guyra and have already amassed the full complement of farmyard pets for Cooper. Since finishing the shop, Mills has been inundated with renovating and maintenance work.
The couple has also bought not only the wool shop premises but the entire old department store in which it is housed (for $106,000). That show of confidence, and the success of Black Sheep Wool'n'Wares is, in turn, inspiring other people to give it a go, says Mills. 'In small towns, longterm locals are often more hesitant to start new enterprises. It tends to be newcomers who-have to get the ball rolling, but you do get a lot of support." Helping to breathe new life into an old country town is most gratifying, says Carlson. "People's generosity of spirit here is extraordinary. That's something I never encountered in the city. People are so supportive, they say beautiful things to me."
Rani Alliband developed her taste for regional life in Japan. She discovered the simplicity of daily life outside the big city while working as a cultural-events organiser for the Japanese government in a small city near Tokyo.
"I discovered that daily life there offered great base, yet there was still good access to the city. I see Bathurst the same way in relation to Sydney," says Alliband, 30, who moved to the growing NSW regional city (pop. 30, 100) this year to take up her first teaching post, as a Japanese teacher at Kelso High School. Alliband keeps a "Sydney wish list" on her desk for specialty items she can't get locally, but she enjoys "not having to live with overwhelming choice all the time".
Describing her new lifestyle as "simpler, yet clear-cut and intense", Alliband says the country move is one of the best decisions of her life. 'I may end up becoming what the Japanese people call an 'I-turner', that is, someone who grows up in the city then moves to the country and stays there. Moving here has saved me in many ways. It's hard to badmouth your home city but I have realised that some of the things always thought were just part of life, are not. I don't have to put up with allergies from the smog, and I don't have to accept those two-hour, one-way commuting times, with late-running trains and peak-hour traffic."
Alliband, a Macquarie University graduate recruit who requested a country posting, says she worried about limited opportunities to speak Japanese in Bathurst. However, she has found number of other Japanese speakers through the local Charles Sturt University. And she has come involved in Bathurst's strongly maintained relationship with Japanese sister city, Ohkuma, meeting many visitors and making sure that her students do, too. Indeed, meeting people in general has been easy. "I didn't know anybody first but I was invited to be part of so many things I feel like I've been living here for years." Almost ready to plaster a Bathurst bumper sticker to the bumper bar of her car, Alliband has already started to research the property market. "I pay $150 a week for a two-bedroom apartment, half of what I'd be paying in Sydney. Real estate is actually affordable. Here, it's actually possible a single person to buy a house with land."
When Melbourne nurse Melita Clough met Mark Hogan, she declared she would never marry, have children or move back to the country "I had become totally Melbournised after 10 Years," says Clough, 32, who grew up in the Victorian town of Stawell, a stone's throw from the couple's home in Ararat. "I loved everything about the city - except the cost of living."
Within three years, she'd done all three. The dream had changed. Clough was no longer the ingenue with all her aspirations pinned on life in the city, but a woman casting about for the best place to raise a family with the man she loved. "As soon as we decided to have children, we knew we'd live in the country. I didn't think I even knew how to bring up children in the city, it just seemed so complicated," she says.
The historic gold-mining town of Ararat (pop. 8000), set amid the dramatic mountains, lakes, rivers and vineyards of the Grampians Pyrenees region, was the natural choice because Hogan already lived there.
"It just made so much sense to stay here," he says. "The lack of pressure, and access to my family are wonderful. Living in the City reminds me of playing football: it's like a full contact sport, where you need peripheral vision going all the time. It can be a great lifestyle, but for families everything about the city seems difficult. There are lots of benefits, but just so much crap you have to go through to enjoy them."
Hogan, 27, returned from a stint at university in Melbourne to begin a cadetship in journalism on The Ararat Advertiser, one of Victoria's oldest newspapers. " I'd have leapt at the opportunity wherever it came up," he says. "It just happened to be in Ararat." He went on to become editor, aged 23, and moved on after the birth of Ruby, "to a more family-friendly job".
Now executive officer with the Grampians Pyrenees Regional Development Board, Hogan works fairly regular hours, spends only 15 minutes getting to and from work, and comes home for lunch most days.
Home for the family is an historic three-bedroom weatherboard house on 0.2ha in the heart of Ararat. Since purchasing it four years ago for $67,000 (prices have since escalated), they have renovated and plan to extend soon by adding a master bedroom with ensuite, walk-in wardrobe and second living area. They will pay for most of the addition upfront, and they expect to be debt-free within a few years.
All the extra money [that would otherwise go towards repayments for a house in the city], we spend on the kids, holidays and improving the house. We don't have to scrimp and save. I earn what I'd get doing the same job in the city, but our living costs are much lower. Babysitting costs us $20 a day. We can afford for Melita to take 12 months off in unpaid maternity leave."
Currently at home with Ruby, 4, and Oscar, 9 months, Clough plans to resume teaching part-time at The Royal Melbourne Hospital next year, staying overnight with city friends one night a week. It's the specialist nature of her work - she teaches coronary care to post-graduate nursing students that keeps her traipsing the 200km to Melbourne.
When she tells people at work that she lives in the country, they tend to assume she lives on a farm. As Hogan says, "It's hard to break down the stereotype of farmers chewing on a bit of hay.'