life, upside down: [Relocation to] Victoria

I wrote this post in December 2019 and just hadn’t quite gotten around to selecting and resizing all the photos to go with it to publish. Then there was Christmas, which was somewhat unnecessarily hectic, a few days off work trying to hasten through a much-larger-than-I-thought-it-was-going-to-be graphic design project I volunteered for, and then New Year’s Eve came, the day the Abbeyard/Mt Buffalo fires started. Fast-forward two evacuations and weeks on constant alert breathing air heavy with smoke, and a month recovering from it all. It was already an unusual start to the year, and this was before coronavirus became a worldwide pandemic and everything shut down.

Time has been strange these past couple months, and honestly I have not had much energy to write or take photos the way I normally enjoy. It is not just the pandemic as I have being feeling a bit out of alignment for this past year here. I had settled perhaps a bit deeper into Uralla than I had thought, and the move has been a difficult adjustment for me, perhaps moreso in that my work is still in Uralla and I can’t let go of the ties I hold there. There is a lot of uncertainty for the future, as my work there will likely come to an end in the next month or so.

So we press forward, one day at a time. I am trying to prioritise my health, wellbeing, and creativity, and hoping bit by bit to get back into the swing of things.

Kookaburra, July 2019. Dacelo novaeguineae. While we are used to hearing kookaburras every day,
now that we live outside of town there are certainly a lot more of them.

6 December 2019

We made the official move to Victoria in July and will have been here now nearly five months, which have flown by. Of course any kind of move has a number of chores which come along with it (whether changes of address, setting up new utilities, or just learning where to find certain things in new surrounds) and as we moved interstate there were a few extra tasks to undertake (new car rego, drivers licences, insurances). That all on top of getting used to the way of life south of the border and the unique VIC lingo (you’ll give yourself away coming from NSW if you order a midi instead of a pot!) And of course, I haven’t even mentioned the unpacking…

Coming from drought-stricken New England, it was a welcome change to see green paddocks and to have frequent rain during the spring, although the hills are already tinged with brown as the grass dries out as we head into the hot summer. We are renting an farmhouse on a cattle farm, about a 15 minute drive from the town of Bright and just five minutes from Mount Buffalo National Park. Being so close to the park is fantastic – hard to make an excuse not to go on a weekend when we want to take a walk or simply get out of the house when it’s so close.

A crimson rosella Platycercus elegans preens its feathers.

Being out of town, we have more birds in our backyard on a regular basis than we did in town in Uralla. There are an enormous amount of crimson rosellas which can be heard chirping all day long and I very much enjoy seeing the fairywrens hopping about, which were uncommon visitors in Uralla but quite regular here. It has also been fantastic to see all the new birds from a new area: grey fantails, scarlet robins, and more which have yet to be identified. The magpies and the currawongs have slightly different calls, as if they, too, have a Victorian accent to their northern cousins.

Scarlet robin, Petroica boodang.

Brown Thornbill (?) Acanthiza pusilla.

These amazingly tiny birds are incredibly fleeting, so difficult to capture!

The female satin bowerbird, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus. A bird I'd never seen before we moved
to VIC, now we see them nearly every day in large groups, hopping through the paddocks or
in the garden. Last summer they ate our capsicum plants, leaves and all.