Why move to the country?
First and foremost, space is needed to grow and breed stock and plant crops and vegetables. Sure, you can have a small chook yard and even a decent sized vegetable patch on a quarter acre block, but our ultimate goal is to both save money and earn money from our property, and reducing what we need to bring in from the “outside”, including money earnt from wages outside of the farm.
What is wrong with city living?
Nothing, if that is how you want to live, go for it. However, we have decided that the city life is no longer for us. Yes, we are “Tree Changers”. We don’t know much about living on a farm, but I believe that our enthusiasm and our clear realistic goal setting and researching will get us over the threshold. Other than that, I believe that most of our learning will occur “on the job”. It will be an experience in trial and error, we will make mistakes, but mistakes are worth making if you learn a valuable lesson from them.
For us, city living has reached its used by date. We have both become increasingly unhappy in our areas of employment. Matt is a storeman, he works in a large warehouse for Home Timber and Hardware, in Greystanes, which is close to Parramatta. He works ten hour days and battles the heavy traffic on the M4 twice a day, coming home stressed up to the eyeballs. I am a Registered Nurse. I work at a private hospital in Westmead. I have been a nurse for twenty two years and I have always done shift work. I work up to four evenings a week and sometimes I don’t see my husband for four or five days in a row. For example; Matt gets up at 4am to start work at 6am. If I work an evening, I don’t get home until 10pm. Matt is in bed when I get home, and he is gone in the morning before I get up. Luckily I can see my kids in the morning before they go to school, but the school mornings are rushed and there is no quality time spent with them. I also have to drive the M4 daily, and the amount of angry people on the roads confirms to me that city living is stressful, time is short and people are always in a rush.
My job is also very stressful. I work in the operating room. There is a constant striving, a constant push to get operations done, to finish overbooked lists well into the night, for overtime, for on call and weekend work. There are not enough nurses to carry the load. There is not enough equipment to go around. Surgeon’s become rude and impatient and there is little gratitude for doing the best that you can do in your job. I have become jaded, disillusioned. I yearn for simplicity, to live off the land and to be my own boss.
There is also the “arms race” in getting increasingly dependant on “bigger and better” material objects. Everyone wants a bigger house, a flash car and the biggest TV that you could possibly fit in your lounge room. Not only that, people these days want a TV in every room. Many of the newer houses are not environmentally thought out. In fact, they are very environmentally unfriendly! They have black tiled rooves and no eaves (hello! We are living in Australia, one of the hottest countries on the planet), tiny windows (there is a lot to be said for natural light), you need a small nuclear reactor to power the air-conditioning along with a third wage to pay for the costs of running it, and the house itself is literally bulging off its tiny block. You can reach your hand out a side window and touch the neighbour’s house without even having to stretch.
Ask yourself this; do you really need 58 acres of internal house space to live in? What do you do with all that space? As far as I’m concerned, it’s obscenely excessive. What has caused people to want to live like this?
Do you really want to stay in that job that you are no longer happy in?
I WANT OUT