Hi, we’re new here.

My family and I embarked on a tree change in late 2020 - we are COVID refugees, having escaped the inner suburbs of Sydney for NSW’s mid-north coast. We left a 127sqm block of land for 11 acres, just outside the small town of Bellingen.

Don’t get me wrong, our Sydney life was pretty cool. We shared walls and a rear lane with our neighbours and made life long friends. We held a lane way party three years running that became a bit legendary. There was a live band and a tip truck pool.

We could walk everywhere and only used the car on weekends. The kids’ school was a 5 minute walk up the road.

We had convenience on our doorstep - literally. In our street we had a public school, a medical centre, a hairdresser, two parks, two cafes, two pizza places, a fancy pants bakery, a noodle place, a fine-dining degustation restaurant, a deli / wine bar, a pub, a milliner, a dress shop, a beautician, a paint shop, a fire station, a police station and the courthouse. And if it was too much to leave the house we could get almost anything brought to us in about 30 minutes. And we did - a lot.

We also had traffic lights and a pedestrian crossing right outside our bedroom window, a front row seat to drunken carrying-ons when the pubs closed on Friday and Saturday nights and a deck for a backyard. Instead of a garage we had an attic. I became an expert at organising our belongings into very tight spaces.

We were each working full time jobs that we didn’t love and there was never the time to truly appreciate the life we were working so hard for. We neglected our friends. We were always hurrying to be somewhere else.

Then we had a worldwide pandemic. Home schooling almost broke me. The things that I thought I would miss in lockdown, I didn’t seem to miss at all. My parents retired and moved back to my home town and the life we had created didn’t seem to fit so well anymore. My husband (a country boy at heart) was ecstatic when I suggested we move to the country to be closer to my family (albeit further away from his) and live a different life.

And so we did and here we are.

We have dreams of a man shed and a music studio, a camp kitchen and a chicken coop, a potting bench and veggie patches. Kids running in the grass and swimming in the river and picking fruit off the trees for afternoon tea. We dream of a creative life, greater connection to nature, spending more time with the people we love, working for ourselves, eating food we grow, being kinder to the planet, and having the time to just sit and enjoy the sunshine.

It’s a work in progress.