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The world is full of persons, only some of them human

My latest story for Patagonia’s Roaring Journals.

There’s a moment in The Road to Patagonia when Matty Hannon – protagonist, film maker, surfer – stands, surveying the damage to his kombi van, which has just flipped and rolled off a remote Alaskan highway. He’s unscathed, but in the background of the shot, transporting oil to Valdez, lies the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. It’s a neat, if accidental, piece of symbolism: even in the wilderness, we’re never far from the long reach of exploitation.

Be it in the jungles of the Mentawais or the coastal scrub of Chile, the theme of taking – by corporations, governments and ideology – is central to the film. But there can be no taking without giving, and at the documentary’s heart is Matty’s deep commitment to something more tender, too – a generosity of spirit, of the collective and of nature. Arcing from pounding surf to environmental degradation, mental health and rebel resistance, the story is an unhurried, unpretentious look at how humans and the earth coexist. Surfboards strictly non-negotiable.

I watch the premiere in a packed theatre at Byron Bay International Film Festival, a bobbing line of babies in arms making up the back row of the audience. One of those is Colt, Matty and his fiancée Heather Hillier’s one-year-old son for whom the story is a parable and a love letter, a philosophical cornerstone and a paean to a future well lived. As we watch Colt’s parents meet, fall in love and travel down the west coast of the Americas, we see colliding worlds, crumbling cultures and the potent and hopeful connective fibre of something more spiritual, to something bigger than you and I.

But the story begins some nine years before that kombi crash and epic two-and-a-half-year journey south to Ushuaia. It begins with a Sony camcorder, bought towards the end of a five-year stay in the Sumatran jungle, where Matty “disappeared” with the Salakirrat tribes of the Mentawais.

There, the ecology degree he studied at Deakin University was no longer theoretical. Cut off from roads, electricity and phones but connected to culture, community and pristine waves, he filmed to share his life with family and friends at home in Melbourne, but also to capture something that he knew was special and threatened. His tribespeople friends weren’t financially wealthy but lived in abundance, intertwined with the land. They took only what they needed from the jungle and the sea, humans and nature living as one, resolutely traditional despite being well-aware of the outside world.

“It totally opened my mind to a different way of life, one that is dedicated to community and family and the environment. You’re incredibly time-rich over there,” he tells me as we talk in my home on Bundjalung Country a few days after the premiere. We drink tea and are interrupted by an obsidian crow who hops through the front door. Big Scrub rainforest isn’t far from my veranda and the ocean is less than a kilometre away, but Matty and his tribal chest tattoos seem a long way from the unknowns of the road.

It’s an exercise of my imagination, then, to picture him in Melbourne working a city job when he returned from Sumatra. “I just felt utterly out of place,” he remembers as he recalls the immensity of the city and its effect on his identity. He was diagnosed with anxiety and, for all its trauma, that moment gave life to the idea to surf his way from Alaska to Patagonia, filming the odyssey as it unfurled in no hurry and with no particular plan. Instinctively, he drives, then motorbikes, then horse rides his way south, stopping to sample some truly singular waves along the way. With each starry night, a bigger picture comes into focus, as if his own health is a fractal that can be multiplied to a universal scale: how did we lose the way when it comes to looking after our planet?

The first child of four, Matty was born in London, moved to Victoria as an infant, then to Jakarta and the Dandenong Ranges as a teenager. Those hills gave him a vantage point from which to understand the creep of urban sprawl and by the time he left, the “soul-destroying mediocrity of suburbia” had swallowed his teen home.

In the Mentawais, he saw coral bleaching, cyanide fishing and palm monoculture. Later, he and Heather witnessed the extent to which Canada’s old growth forest has been axed. But what they came across on Chile’s coastal spine is what he calls the epitome of industrialised monoculture. “They’ve literally just wiped the surface of the earth clear and planted pine trees in identical rows,” he says. Between an Indonesia striving towards development and communities torn from their life sources, he saw that “what we consider to be good quality living is not necessarily the truth”.

Instead, while Matty and Heather camped and foraged, spoke with locals and took on perilous mountain passes on their way south, an observation slowly condensed, then crystallised. “In their own different cultural ways, everyone was saying the same thing,” he recalls. “Up until a very short time ago, we all experienced the world through almost the same lens, albeit with a different cultural veneer over the top. We all saw the world as being animate.”

Heather and Matty’s recordings explore the theme of resistance, gently telling the stories of violence and revolutionary tactics of those who have fought for their lands and communities. Zapatista members speak about the power of the collective. Mapuche rebels recall fighting, arson and kidnappings. One Mapuche interviewee claims to have been sent to jail for opposing large-scale industry – not a world away from the treatment, closer to home, of Adani protester Ben Pennings. But, bewildered and dispossessed as some of their interviewees are, they have in common a deep respect for relationships that go beyond the human.

“It’s almost word for word,” says Matty, describing the similarities between those he met in Chile and Indonesia. They talked about the spirit of a volcano or the spirit of their vegetable garden, or the spirit of a river. Derived from the Latin for ‘breath’, animism attributes sentience, or soul, to other beings, forces of nature and things. Matty quotes scholar Graham Harvey when explaining the concept: “Animists are people who recognise the world is full of persons, only some of them human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.” It is practised all over the world, from Western Apache to Siberian Eveny people, and has been for many thousands of years. Anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor labelled it “primitive”. Today, it is a counter-cultural misfit in an empirical, solvable world.

Still, it comes unbidden. At my mother’s funeral, I spoke about her soul living on in the jacaranda trees and the scudding clouds, in the chilli I chop for dinner. She is them and they are her. Here at Roaring Journals, Ella Noah Bancroft writes of a crying planet who “pleads for her children to return to a world of reciprocity”, as does Linley Hurrell, who shares the deep and ancient connection of Gunditjmara people, kin to koontapool, or southern right whales.

At one point in the film, the couple desperately search for water as they trek through Chilean dunes. They and their four horses haven’t drunk for a day and the humans are starting to panic. The next morning, the pack sets off, rounds a corner and finds a spring, fresh water dripping from grassy outcrops overhead. At its base is a religious shrine. The horses drink, Matty and Heather drink. Their relief fills the moment, and it’s easy to see why humans have come to worship a place where water gives life to animals and plants. Not far away, entire forests are being razed.

Might a lost sense of devotion be at the heart of environmental degradation? Perhaps we can learn to live as better humans by taking animism as a starting point and unspooling from it a thread that weaves being into all that surrounds us. “We’re immersed in a story that says we are separate and superior to nature right now,” Matty says. “If we were to stop for a moment, we’d realise that the most intelligent species in the world shouldn’t be the ones destroying it.”

We’re also the ones attempting to save it. Just as interconnected as the planet’s problems are, so might be the ways to counter them. Technology, be it in the form of wind farms or copper batteries, must only form a fraction of the recovery plan. (Matt is currently making a film about copper mining on the Clarence River and much of the resource’s demand comes from the renewable energy sector). Indigenous philosophy is also part of the answer, along with social and behaviour change, legislation and a lot of imagination. Pausing to assess our own behaviour must feature, too. “We’re ingenious,” Matty adds, “but we’re really only going to find success when we stop to analyse our own story.”

His own version of salvation was to slow down and connect. He and his family live on Gumbaynggirr Country on land he owns with his brother and sister. They’re plugged into local permaculture and a tight community. Connection means immersing himself in the ocean, eating local produce, walking, gardening. It means going out and canoeing the rivers and being conscious and building a home. Lacing the everyday with awe. Living with a long-term mindset. And what will the everyday look like in, say, 50 years’ time, when Colt’s 51? “I guess what I would want is that he grows up with a sense of wonder and a sense of hope,” says his father. “I don’t think there’s any way you can shelter him from the realities of the world and the problems we’re seeing.”

Perhaps, a little like frogs or earthworms, those communities in Sumatra, the Amazon and the Andes behave as sentinel species, sensitive to the changes wrought by globalisation. The world is alive and beloved, they taught Matty. And everything worth loving is worth fighting for.

Photo by Matty Hannon

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The truth of Australian wars

My latest feature for SBS, and one of the most important topics I have ever covered. Read the story in full below, or over at SBS.

“I was angry that my ancestors were part of the white-washing of history”

As a young girl, Sandy Hamilton held her ancestor, Stephen Partridge, in great esteem. A member of the British Army’s 46th Regiment, her great-great-great-grandfather had arrived in New South Wales in 1814, travelling its rivers with explorer John Oxley and later becoming superintendent of convicts in Port Macquarie.

“During my childhood my father instilled in us a sense of honour that we were somehow better because of our bloodlines to this man,” the educator from NSW tells SBS Voices.

But it was a version of history that turned its eyes from the whole, inconveniently grim, truth.

In fact, Partridge and his regiment arrived in NSW to witness the occupiers meeting resistance from independent, self-governing Aboriginal nations. The response was brutal and indiscriminate.

The fear and the stakes were deemed so high that, in 1816, the 46th was ordered by Governor Lachlan Macquarie to punish “hostile natives” – despite their status as the King’s subjects – by firing upon them and “hanging up on trees the bodies of such natives as may be killed in order to strike the greater terror into the survivors.”

And so unfolded the Appin massacre, when Muringong, Dharawal and Gandangara men, women and children were ambushed in their sleep and shot or forced over the cliff edge by soldiers moments before dawn at their encampment at Broughton Pass, 60km south west of Sydney.

In the aftermath, 14 bodies were counted although it is believed others were not retrieved from the gorge of the Cataract River below. At least three, including one woman, were later decapitated and sold by soldiers.

Far from his sparkling image, Partridge was likely party to a violent attack on women and children.

It is a fact that Hamilton learnt in 2016, when she watched Dharawal elder Glenda Chalker describing the 46th’s involvement with the Appin massacre on TV. Hamilton instantly checked her family records and realised the connection.

Every detail I discovered made me sick to the core, but I felt compelled to find out the truth about him and not just the glorified version

“It was a shock. Every detail I discovered made me sick to the core, but I felt compelled to find out the truth about him and not just the glorified version,” says Hamilton.

“It’s the cover-up that angered me. I was angry that my ancestors were part of the white-washing of history … [My ancestor] was also an instrument in the dark history of the invasion.

“I don’t remember the word massacre used in relation to Australia up until a few years ago. I’m now 57.”

The following day, she drove six hours to Appin and met with Chalker, taking the first steps on what has become a long journey of healing – and a determination to speak plainly about the past where it has so often been obfuscated.

In her new SBS documentary series, Arrernte and Kalkadoon presenter Rachel Perkins explores the “great Australian silence” around Appin and the many other massacres that form Australia’s bloodiest 100 years. The Australian Wars lays out the unpalatable facts: soldiers, convicts and settlers made a grab for land in what many historians agree counts as a war – and yet no war in Australia was ever declared.

Before that fateful dawn raid at Appin, Governor Macquarie instructed his men to avoid injuring women and children wherever possible and to call a command to surrender. But historians claim he would have known that First Nations people lived in family groups, making it impossible to attack male warriors alone. And, “even if there was a call to surrender, that was never, ever going to happen when you turn up at dawn with 30 soldiers with muskets ready. As soon as someone moves, the order to fire is given,” historian Dr Stephen Gapps tells Perkins in the series. “It was always going to turn into a massacre,” he says.

Realising that what happened at Appin was illegal and well beyond the bounds of civilised behaviour, Macquarie sanitised the record, as historian Bruce Scates tells Perkins in the series. “Several natives have been unavoidably killed and wounded in consequence of them not having surrendered themselves on being called to do so,” Macquarie wrote afterwards.

It is just one of many instances of white-washing that served Australia’s settlers and, 200 years on, continue to dominate the narrative of Australian colonisation. As the series notes, even people living in Appin do not know of its barbaric history.

Hamilton’s thoughts about Partridge run parallel to how society is beginning to reappraise Macquarie’s achievements. She has accepted that Appin is in her DNA, but was Partridge simply a soldier following orders?

“Was he a terrible man … was he cold-hearted and lacking in all feeling? He wasn’t trained to run down innocent women and children and old people, so I can’t help but to think that as a human being he was shocked by the situation he found himself in and that he was repulsed and horrified by what he was compelled to do. I hope he was,” she says.

“I don’t know how he lived with himself after that. All I can imagine is that he was in some sort of denial.”

It is likely that, fresh from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, he would have seen his job in NSW as part of another small-scale war, Professor Henry Reynolds, who appears in the series, explains to SBS Voices. Certainly, the Dharawal people would have seen this as war in its most fundamental of senses – but for the British to acknowledge that would have made a knotty situation yet more complicated.

“To treat Aboriginals as worthy foes would have created a different situation … It would have meant that fundamentally there was that respect for the people who were resisting,” says Professor Reynolds.

Instead, according to Reynolds, Indigenous people were increasingly redacted from the story and by the early 20th Century became little more than a footnote in history books. Leaving out First Nations peoples meant, “you left out the violence,” he says, and leaving out the violence meant swallowing, then promulgating, a convenient falsehood.

Now, asks Perkins, “are we ready to face the past … or go on living a lie?”

Hamilton has faced hers unflinchingly. She attends the “incredibly poignant” Appin Commemoration every year, where, aware of the complex layers of her story, she celebrates the survival of the Dharawal people and its culture, in spite of massacre, abduction, servitude and, ultimately, silence.

“It wasn’t just white settlers defending themselves,” says Hamilton. “Unless we can lay it all out on the table and talk about the details … unless we’re brave enough to actually accept those truths and those stories, then we can’t really understand our history or our present. We can’t make sense of where we’re at right now unless we can look very plainly at what happened.

“There is no reconciliation without truth-telling. The trauma continues every time the truth is not told.”

The 46th was eventually posted to India while Partridge transferred to the 48th Regiment when his wife became pregnant. Today, he is survived by hundreds of living descendants. “Many,” Hamilton believes, “aren’t ready for this moment of reckoning.”

Three-part documentary series The Australian Wars premieres on Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV, airing weekly. You can catch up at SBS On Demand.

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She leads

My latest feature, and my first for Patagonia Australia.

Australian leadership – let’s call it what it is: traditional, male and white – isn’t working for many of us, least of all the environment. Bring more women and diverse voices to the table before it’s too late, urges Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia.

Traditional forms of leadership have failed the environment. It’s time for change. Photo: Ula Majewski

Sherie Bruce has trouble calling herself a leader.

The Arrernte and Yolgnu scientist and mother from the NT has stood against Adani’s Carmichael Mine plans on the part of First Nations communities. She’s gently agitated for a Reconciliation Action Plan at the Queensland Conservation Council, where she is deputy chair. She’s influencing a group of people in an organisation that can make fundamental change across a sector that can improve the lives of all Australians. She might not be ‘in charge’, but she’s a bona fide environmental figurehead, creating genuine and lasting positive change. 

“Well,” Sherie eventually concedes, laughing, “that’s leading then, isn’t it?” 

By her own admission, she has a classic case of impostor syndrome, doubting her abilities and achievements. She’s not alone. In the environmental space, women in Australia rarely dominate headlines or public conversations. They achieve results without fanfare and despite the barriers posed by the traditional structures in which they work. Yet, whether or not they acknowledge their wins, their leadership is largely unseen, unsupported and unfunded. As climate goals are ramped up, something has to change – and that something looks a lot like equality. 

“We need to unleash women’s capacity,” says Victoria McKenzie-McHarg, the strategic director of Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia. WELA is a not-for-profit working with women like Sherie to redefine leadership with the goal of tackling environmental and climate disaster. It was in her former roles at Environment Victoria and the Australian Conservation Foundation – and as current chair of Climate Action Network Australia – that Victoria saw a pattern emerge: masculine models of leadership that fail to recognise the challenge, take action and break away from the norms. “It dawned on me,” she tells me from her home (and WELA HQ) in Forrest, in rural Victoria, “that what we were facing was not an environmental crisis, it was actually a leadership crisis.”

“It dawned on me that what we were facing was not an environmental crisis, it was actually a leadership crisis.”

Give women and gender diverse people the space to lead their way, because – and here WELA’s message is disarmingly frank – we will not get out of the crises we’re in by relying on the same outdated leadership that got us into them. 

We know that more female decision-makers leads to better environmental results. The evidence shows that where women are leading, there is more collaboration, greater use of networks and more responses to community. A 2019 study found that more women in parliament meant more stringent climate change policies. At a local level, natural resource management by women is associated with better resource governance and conservation outcomes, according to the UN. In fact, if all women smallholders received equal access to resources, up to 150 million people would no longer go hungry. In the corporate sector, more women on boards increases the disclosure of carbon emissions information. And those most affected by climate change today? Women, girls and the marginalised. 

We know all this to be true, and yet we are still not getting women and diverse voices into the room. Take COP26 in Glasgow, where, on the opening day of the planet’s most urgent climate talks yet – and against a backdrop of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which explicitly champion gender equality – just 10 of the 140 assembled leaders were women. The UK’s top representatives at the talks initially included a sum total of zero women. Globally, just 21 per cent of all government ministers are women. 

The ‘WELA Weekend’ retreat, held in June, saw female environmental leaders from around Australia gather to learn, talk, and connect. Photo: Ula Majewski

So, yes, the word ‘leader’ still conjures power agendas and grey suits, intimidation and alienation. That is, after all, the reason for WELA’s existence. Leadership often looks like Scott Morrison… and Scott Morrison being ousted by a prime minister who actually believes in climate change. Victoria’s relief over Australia’s change of government is palpable. It also looks like Tanya Plibersek as Minister for the Environment and the surge of teal independents – whose campaigns, by the way, were largely driven by women aged 60-plus. But, says Victoria, leadership is also quietly thriving in your school, neighbourhood and local surf spot. 

“I have seen the most extraordinary acts of leadership from the newest volunteer that highlights the inadequacy of our most highly paid corporate CEOs who are failing to lead on a daily basis,” Victoria says. “We have thought for so long that governments lead. Governments never lead, the community leads. And, if we wait for the government to lead, we’re really in trouble because there are not many women in government.”  

I’m reminded of the summer’s disastrous Queensland and northern NSW floods, when obliterated infrastructure and a governmental leadership void was circumvented by unbroken communities. Those who responded were young and old and from all walks of life. But behind every one of the sensational rescue or clean-up photographs was a vast and hidden coordination effort. As one of its accidental leaders, Jacqui Lewis, told me, she was “in awe of the other mostly women” she was surrounded by as she, amongst many other things, secured satellite communications to reconnect isolated communities.

From her back door, Victoria steps into the Great Otway National Park, a swath of temperate rainforest that is one of the most carbon dense forests in the world. It’s a wilderness she walks in every day, but come summer, it’s also a major bushfire risk area. Her experience of climate change isn’t born from research reports, she need only look out of her window. 

“This is a major existential crisis, hero-based strongman leadership is not working for our environment anywhere.”

WELA was founded in 2016 by a group of matriarchs in the environmental space. They are women who helped found the Greens, protested the Franklin River Dam, started the Wilderness Society and Bush Heritage, but, says Victoria, an alum of WELA’s inaugural program, “you don’t know their names, because they’re women.”

In 2019 she had a call from WELA looking for insights as to how the program might evolve, and even survive. The penny dropped. She grabbed a pen and butcher’s paper and, sitting on her living room floor, began mapping out WELA’s scaled-up future. “This is a major existential crisis, hero-based strongman leadership is not working for our environment anywhere,” she told the team. “We need women making decisions at every level, we need to make that happen, how about it?” To their unending credit, they backed her. 

WELA’s Victoria McKenzie-McHarg on a tea break with Ayesha Moss and Asmaa Guedira. “We need women making decisions at every level, we need to make that happen, how about it?” Photo: Ula Majewski

So far, WELA has trained over 130 women and gender diverse people, their ages ranging from about 25 to 75. It’s open to anyone who is actively working for the environment, paid or unpaid, and informally or formally taking a leadership role – whether they call it that or not. Through nine months of coaching, mentoring and two week-long retreats, the program comes at leadership from the top down, bottom up and sideways, and is geared to welcome difference, diversity and constant learning. It focuses on self-development – diffusing impostor syndrome, say – workplaces, campaigning and system change. Donations, including a Patagonia grant, support WELA alongside fees paid by program participants. 

And here’s the thing: it’s absolutely working. Alumni have gone on to lead and win some immense environmental outcomes. Jess Beckerling is campaign director at WA Forest Alliance, which late last year won its decades-long campaign to save WA forests, becoming the first state in Australia to ban native forest logging. She completed the WELA program on the approach to intense negotiations and a massive election campaign. 

Current participant, Chris Shuringa, is the convenor of the newly formed Victorian Forest Alliance, which has brought together grassroots organisations across the state to protect Victoria’s remaining native forests from logging. And for Sherie, joining Queensland’s conservation decision makers means not only a woman’s place at the table, but a First Nations voice, too. 

Their leadership is highly diverse in its approach. It is community-based, collaborative and empowers others. Hierarchies and heroes don’t feature. It sounds naff, Maribyrnong councillor Bernadette Thomas says, but for her, female leadership is about personal connection. She participated in WELA before running for a seat on council and also before finding herself making a coffin and writing a eulogy for a local creek following West Footscray’s uncontrolled 2018 industrial fire, when billowing smoke leached into the local ecosystem, creating a public health and environmental disaster. Her action was followed that night by a $1 million state government recovery plan. “There’s no way I would have stepped out of my comfort zone and done that if it wasn’t for WELA,” she tells me, adding, “I’m not a natural activist.”

Sherie might agree. But, since giving WELA a go – and putting her misgivings about a group of “kumbaya” white women aside – she sees that what the world needs more of, and what WELA is determined to bring to light, is leadership that happens to neatly align with First Nations leadership styles. Given Aboriginal women and men have stepped up against the odds for millennia, most obviously in the last 200 years, we have a thing or two to learn from them about leadership and resilience today. 

“It’s collective. There’s no traditional leader with someone at the top,” says Sherie, telling me about her deep links with female elders and to the Arnhem Land, where she spent much of her childhood. “Everyone’s at the same level but someone has earnt the right to speak on behalf of others. You need to behave the right way to hold respect.”

All photos supplied by WELA, by Ula Majewski.

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‘It just doesn’t work’

My latest for The Guardian. This story is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, in the region I call home. Thank you, Anna, for everything you gave for The Guardian’s rental crisis series…

Months before thousands of people were left homeless because of unprecedented flooding, rental prices in New South Wales’s northern rivers were surging, largely driven by a pandemic-induced influx of families and young professionals from Sydney and Melbourne.

Anna Glanzen, 40, lives in Mullumbimby.

Her story

I’ve been living in this area for six-and-a-half years; I’m originally from Sweden and came to Australia 20 years ago. I’m a bush school mentor for kids and for many years I ran my own business. I earned enough to get by and loved it.

I’ve since chosen to homeschool my eight-year-old son and work one day a week in Brunswick Heads. We have our close community of friends and other homeschoolers nearby and my son’s father lives within an hour’s drive.

Until four weeks ago, we were living on a lemon myrtle farm near Lismore. We were given seven weeks’ notice to leave because the owners decided to sell – and then the floods hit, making finding a home near impossible. Before that, we were in a granny flat in Pearces Creek, where we were for 18 months. They didn’t want to rent any more due to fears of Covid.

I’m so sad for everyone who lost everything they own in the floods. I have been in friends’ homes cleaning up the aftermath with them; I’ve seen the devastation. My son and I didn’t lose our stuff – the water stopped below our hill – but it makes me feel guilty, trying to find a home when others have nothing. Our belongings are now in storage, but others have to start completely over. My heart aches knowing this. There’s so much grief and so many tears have been shed.

Every time we move into a new house, my son asks, “Do we get to stay in this forever, or is this just for a short time?” And I have to say, “I just don’t know.”

The budget

We need something of our own. And we have a cat, so pets need to be allowed – I promised my son that we would never leave our cat with someone else. My budget, $350 a week, is really pushing it, but could work if I live close to Brunswick and save on petrol.

I have been looking for a home for more than six months. It feels like there are a lot of people who have been escaping the towns and who are trying to move up here. All the prices for those who are already established here have gone up.

People would rather take a tenant with lots of money than a single parent. So many mums and dads I know have nowhere to go – how can you take $450-500 out of your budget for rent if your income [from Centrelink support] is $1,000 a fortnight? And then pay for food and petrol? It just doesn’t work.

The properties

People are getting ridiculous about what they are renting out. My budget’s always been tight but what I can afford has definitely changed. In the last couple of years it’s gone from being possible to impossible. You turn up to viewings and there are 50 people there. You wait your turn to see a tiny place that is dark and smelly. The demand is such that landlords can get away with it.

The flood means there are no rentals around. Even friends with bigger budgets can’t find anything and prices have actually gone up since the floods.

I saw a three-bedroom home in Lismore advertised for $1,300 a week. I looked at a granny flat in South Golden Beach that was $400 a week for a tiny little place with an unplumbed kitchen. The bathroom sink doubled as the kitchen sink.

In Lismore, one landlord wanted $360 a week for a dark granny flat at the back of a block, without a yard. It smelled like rotten fish. How bad was it when it hadn’t been spruced up for a viewing? And it still had a queue of people standing out the front. Sadly, I think it was completely flooded.

There was a great place in South Golden, but it was $450 and I couldn’t bring a cat. It had a mini kitchen and it was fresh, with a little patio out the front and one bedroom. There was also a great little container home on shared land in Wooyung for $350, but, same again – I couldn’t bring a cat.

The result

Through friends, I have found a small plot of land to rent in Mullumbimby and have been gifted a camper trailer for six months. A very kind property owner is charging me a minimal amount each week.

There’s no electricity and no water, so we’ll be living off-grid. I am building an outdoor shower and toilet and the camper is luckily quite big, with a kitchen and a bedroom. There’s even space for a sofa, which is amazing because my son loves curling up and reading a book.

I’m so grateful and relieved. This has potential. My plan is to save and build my own tiny home on wheels, so that we can drive away from any more floods. It’s OK to rough it for a while if it means I am building towards something that is ours. That’s the dream: knowing that our home can’t be taken away from us.

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