Chapter 3: View Versus Water
So, it was decided. We’d look for land around Stanthorpe. Of course, I got obsessed with looking at land on-line. Hours and hours of scrolling through real estate websites and online maps – whole evenings slipped into the search vortex. When I wasn’t zooming in and out on boulders and creeks, I worked on our wish list.
To start with, it looked like this:
A view
Privacy
A dam or creek
Boulders
Native bush and some cleared areas
After a while I add:
A dam with water in it
Then a bit later:
A well, or anything that holds water
For our first weekend of searching, we stayed with our friends, Ceccy and Ray who own a block of land at Nundubbermere. The real estate agent, Julia, took us to three unremarkable blocks that all looked the same to me, just lots of bush on flat land. One had a steel shed on it. Inside the shed was a double bed with the top sheet partially pulled off onto the concrete floor, as if the previous occupant had started to strip the bed, then given up on the idea. Or maybe he or she had left in a hurry, either way, it was depressing. There were no views, no creeks, no dams with water in them. Very quickly, water became the most important thing, even more important than the view.
The drought was bad. Real bad, according to all the real estate agents we spoke to, who I have to say, are a very different breed to city agents. I’d thought Trev from the hinterland was chilled, but he had nothing on the rural agents. Some are un-pushy to the point of total apathy, pointing out downsides before we’d even thought of them, nodding in sympathy when we mentioned potential problems. They never rang back to find out what we thought, and the drought issue was not glossed over. They were keen to tell us how low the town’s main water supply, Storm King Dam was, (very), how much water would have to be trucked in very soon, (a lot) how they’d never seen such a bad drought. It’s bad. Real bad.
It was like they didn’t want to sell anything. Maybe it was some kind of clever country agent reverse psychology, because the bad, bad water situation didn’t put us off.
We kept smiling and assured the agent we’d get tanks.
Agent makes a ‘pfft’ noise and says: ‘Gotta rain first.’
Or, we could always build a dam, we said.
Agent scratches back of head and is polite enough not to mention the rain again.
We spent the rest of the weekend talking with Ceccy and Ray and my eldest nephew, Josh who’d also bought a block in Nundubbermere. We talked about what it’s like to own land. There was a lot to discuss. So many things to discover and understand. Smash had a lot of ideas, of course. He wanted to run music festivals on the block (that we hadn’t bought yet), buy a tractor and something called a D9 he’d seen in a Farm Machinery magazine he picked up from the petrol station on the trip to Stanthorpe. He would be growing grapes, making wine, setting up a solar farm, growing oak trees for truffles. Livestock would be good, and chickens, of course. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how smart pigs are. (Very). We talked about irrigation and off-grid solar and grey water and long drop toilets all weekend, then we headed back to Brisbane, to the real world.
About a month later, I was doing my usual daily check on the real estate website, when I saw a newly advertised block in Nundubbermere. Four hundred acres, very close to where our friends lived. I couldn’t believe it. Way too much land for us, but still, right near our besties and family! I asked Josh if he could go and take a look at it sometime. A few days later, I received a text message from him saying: ‘You know how you wanted a view?’ followed by a photo that looked like it had been taken from the top of Cunningham’s Gap, showing bushland sloping away to meet up with undulating sheep paddocks, farmland, then further on, wooded hills that led up to a range of bum shaped mountains. And above it all, a lot of purple grey sky.
I immediately thought Josh was having us on, teasing me for being so obsessed by a view. There was nowhere around Nundubbermere that had a view like that – not that we knew of, anyway. I sent him a text back asking, ‘For real?’ expecting him to send back a laughing emoji with tears running down its face or something equally disappointing. When he replied with: ‘I’m feeling a bit of block envy’ I knew he wasn’t tricking.
Straight away, I got on the Southern Downs Regional Council online mapping site and applied the contours filter to the block for sale. It seemed to have a hill right in the middle of it, a rather large hill, not unlike Trevor’s hill, but with some sloping space around the base included in the property – more a witch’s hat than cone. In the aerial photo, there also appeared to be a huge flock of sheep hanging around a dam – an impossibly huge flock. The photos on the real estate ad showed very little other than a front gate, a weed clogged, dark dam and a dirt road leading somewhere – nothing resembling the photo Josh had sent. I still couldn’t believe it and thought Josh might have accidentally gone to look at the wrong block of land, which was absurd. He’s lived in the area for years. Everyone knows where their boundaries are and who their neighbours are. I sent him back a text saying we’d drive up ASAP to check it out.
When I showed Smash the photo of the view, he looked sceptical. He was having problems at work. Buying land had slipped in importance. I however, became fixated on the idea. Hunched over the council mapping site, I scoured every centimetre of that block, followed the contour lines all the way up to 920 metres above sea level, zoomed in on something that looked like a cluster of sheds, and tried to work out why the flock of sheep were all standing so close.
I couldn’t wait to go and look at it, and as soon as Smash was able to get away from work, we packed the station wagon with the dogs, Blundstones, hats, flanny shirts and the compass and headed off down the New England Highway again.
