As I walked around the back of the house, I saw the bins first. Both were tipped over, rubbish everywhere. A trail of messy clues that would no doubt lead to a very happy perpetrator. The upturned table, the gas cooker on the back lawn, tins of beans crushed by a sizeable jaw, the toilet door off its hinges and the toilet itself covered in mud. The final clue left no shadow of doubt – a hole in the side of the food cupboard in the shape of Tina the pig.
I first laid eyes on this house 10 months ago. I found it during one of many daydreaming sessions, scrolling through a real estate website, imagining all the different lives I could live in all the different homes. Sometimes, I searched “coastal”, other times “apartment”, but mostly I searched “rural”. In every search there was one consistent filter: “river”.
Fast forward through months of house renovations, the second largest natural disaster in Australian colonised history and some of the wobbliest days I’d ever experienced and there I was, following a trail of refuse on the wraparound porch to find one very content, 180kg teacup pig sleeping beside our accepting border collie, Ziggy.
In my career as a music journalist/radio broadcaster, I’d broken bread with some of the biggest names in music and entertainment, from Quentin Tarantino to Pharrell Williams to Debbie Harry. In that moment, staring down at Tina in bewilderment, I wondered – and not for the first time – how the hell I’d gotten here.
Growing up in the western suburbs of Brisbane, I would lose myself for hours on an “island” I’d create on the front lawn using a circle of garden hose. I would sit all day in that circle with my packed snacks and daydream of a life by the sea. I barely swam in the ocean as a kid, but at 17 I took myself there. Over the next 30 years I barely left the coast – from Western Australia to far north Queensland, to Sydney and the Gold Coast. I spent 11 years near the waves of northern NSW.
But something else tugged at me. Something that meant neither my husband, nor our kids were strangers to being packed up on weekends to look at places that were dry, hot and far from ocean breezes. I was dreaming about land; big degraded agricultural land. Land that we could regenerate, on a stretch of riverbank we could restore.
In June 2021, we pulled up to an open inspection for the house that would become our home. It was only about an hour’s drive away, to the west of Lismore at the southern end of Bundjalung country, but the landscape on the other side of the lush hinterland was harsh and expansive, a place where green sat closer to grey. It was land prized for its capacity to produce beef and sugar, rather than loved for its beauty.
The 100-year-old farmhouse was stunning on the outside. Inside, it was dark. There were holes in the floor. Unfinished walls. Dangling power cables. Rotten carpets and nicotine-stained ceilings. We wandered through the fluorescent-green kitchen to the back door.
There in the back yard, invisible from the road, right behind the old birdbath and the sign that read Cecil’s Garden, was a river. A wide stretch of the once mighty Richmond, 15m from the back porch.
Two days later, we put in an offer. Against every bit of logic, without any idea of how we were going to make money, we were trading our two green acres north of Brunswick Heads for treeless, heavily pugged soil on the most wounded river in NSW. Two surfers heading out to hardcore cattle and cane country.
“I’m not here to make friends,” I told my husband as we followed the removal truck three months later. “I’m here to do this project and that’s it.”
On the coast, I already had a community I loved, in a place where I had felt more at home than any other. I was not moving to the river to bond with people, but to create habitat.
It’s been two-and-a-half years since this deranged adventure began. Since March 2022, when the largest flood ever recorded moved through the Northern Rivers of NSW like a liquid excavator scouring the riverbanks bare, we’ve planted 8,000 native trees and 2,000 native grasses to weave them back together.
We built a billabong for native aquatic species. We’ve connected with the most incredible environmental organisations, and created The Prana Project, to explore restoring mental health through restoring habitat. We’ve received so much vital wisdom from mob. We’ve stayed financially sustainable through grants, teaching yoga and organising retreats. We’ve had six frosts in three weeks. Our water tanks have bulged and run dry – twice.
We see koalas daily and spy brolgas on our 40-minute drive to the beach. We’ve grown apples and silverbeet, lettuce and beetroot. We’ve sunk in mud deeper than our gumboots are high. Our kids are still not back in their schools, which were devastated by the floods. But we’ve had some of the happiest days of our lives here and Tina and Hazel Hog have found pig heaven.
As for friends, even though we set out not to make any, we inadvertently have.
On a patch of old farming land, on the banks of a river calling for care, we have found a kind of calm we never knew possible.
