Home and Away

We landed in Australia at 4am on 6th September. Our first impressions on landing don't go very far beyond being mildly excited at how clean and orderly Darwin airport was compared to Bali. Karl was particularly impressed with the cleanliness of the loos. Reception at our hostel was closed due to the early hour, so we made ourselves comfortable on the sunloungers by the pool, pulled our backpacks up close, and went to sleep. The following morning was blue skied and warm. We were welcomed by one lovely member of staff while another prepared the daily free breakfast. After some tea, a few helpings of toast and a square crumpet (!) we decided we liked Australia. This impression remained for the next five weeks. It's an awesome place. And, for once, I don't use the term 'awesome' lightly.

However, by this point, we had neither the patience nor the budget to be tourists in Australia. There are many words that spring to mind when you think of Australia – beaches, diving, surfing, kangaroos, Aborigines, bush walking etc etc. But one of the words we weren't expecting to use was 'expensive'. Compared to what we were spending in Asia, Australia was a massive shock. We went from paying 10pounds a night between us, to paying over 40pounds. Our average weekly spend more than doubled, and it left practically no money to do anything fun – diving and visiting the national parks was out of the question. If we carried on like this, we were set to run out of money within a couple of months, without actually having done very much.

Luckily, my lovely friend Nina recommended a work exchange website. The idea is that you can search for a nice family to stay with for a few weeks, getting free bed and board in exchange for a few hours of work each day. The work depends on the type of property – it could be picking fruit and looking after trees on an orchard, cooking and general housework in the city or gardening and looking after animals on a farm.

We found Rick & Annie, and their brilliant organic hobby farm near Grafton, a nice little town about halfway down the east coast. A hobby farm is essentially a small farm. Small by Australian standards, that is – Rick & Annie's place is about 100 acres. They live there with two of Annie's kids, Briony and Brennan, and a wonderful assortment of animals (more on them later).

The farm

Halfway round the globe and missing home, for the next two and a half weeks they allowed us to make their home our home. It was nice to be in a family environment again, and it didn't take long for us to settle in. Sofas, home cooked meals, kids running around, playing football in the garden, falling asleep while watching Midsomer Murders on a Sunday...it was perfect.

Me, Karl, Annie and Rick enjoy pie and ginger beer for lunch one afternoon.

The photo was taken by Annie's lovely friend Lynney

They're actually in the process of building a new home on the property. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see on Grand Designs, and you can just tell that it's going to be absolutely stunning:

Under construction, but still beautiful

We stayed in our own cosy caravan, at the top of a hill, about a 5 minute walk from the main house.

Cosy caravan

It was a nice stroll on a sunny morning, through the paddocks, past the horses and cows. But you wouldn't want to do it during the cold and dark nights. So, Annie offered to teach Karl how to drive her car. Karl tried to act all casual and answered with a nonchalant “Oh yeah, that'd be cool”, although his eyes practically popped out of his head and he had a pretty huge grin on his face. From that evening onwards he took great pleasure in driving us both to and from the house in Annie's car.

Not to be left out, I learnt to drive a tractor. It's easier to drive than a car (so I'm told), and waaaaay more fun. Plus, it's the first time I've ever driven anything, apart from Karl up the wall. To earn this special privilege, though, I had to help Annie fill up eight huge bags with cow and horse manure. Plastic gloves, no shovels. It wasn't too bad, to be honest – I've seen and smelt far worse things since beginning this trip. Besides, afterwards I got to spend a while driving the tractor around the paddock, practicing changing gears and trying not to run over Ellie the dog, before we loaded the poo bags in the bucket at the front and I transported them up the hill.

If you have a tractor that needs driving, I'm your gal

Apparently it was only fair for Karl to have a go to, so Annie taught him as well later on that week.

Karl was ok at tractor driving

This time, we were gathering hay from a paddock across the road. Raking it up, pitchforking it into the trailer behind the tractor, and then jumping on it to push it all down.

The hay is used for mulching, which we did on other days in the vegetable garden. Mulching is where you put a thick blanket of hay around plants to maintain the temperature of the soil and prevent weeds from growing up.

A lot of the work we did on the farm didn't feel so much like work as just pottering about happily in the garden on sunny mornings. The sort of work we did included:

Creating sawdust paths between the rows of plants in the vegetable garden

The veg garden

Planting marigolds in between vegetables and herbs to keep away pests

Sowing seeds for next season's crop – peppers, melons, tomatoes, aubergines etc

Putting up fence and netting around the strawberry patch to keep out wallabies (little kangaroos)

Planting new things (fenugreek, irises) in the herb garden

Extensive herb garden

Preparing an adjoining paddock for planting by fertilising the soil, sowing seeds (corn, soybean, melon), planting (potatoes, ginger, tumeric), mulching and spreading over manure and stinky seaweed fertiliser. Took a good scrubbing to get the smell off our hands...

All in a day's work...

Cracking corn using a traditional, old-fashioned corn-cracking contraption. The cracked corn is used for animal feed.

On some mornings we helped to feed the cows, horses and chooks (chickens, ducks and other such birds)

Letting the chooks in and out of their pen, and collecting eggs

One morning we found this little gem of an egg:

Teeny tiny

We also had a go at milking Prize, the Jersey cow, a couple of times. Although this was usually done at 5:30am and we couldn't quite bring ourselves to get up that early most mornings.

Prize & Daisy

Weeding! We spent two mornings in one of the horses paddocks pulling out fireweed, which is poisonous to horses and cows. The bags we were filling up had previously been used to store horse feed, so the two horses in the paddock (Duke and Queenie) got all excited and decided to have a nose around, picking up the bags and chucking them around, making a bit of a mess. When Duke realised it was just full of fireweed, he snatched the straw hat off my head, deciding that it would probably make a better snack. After a bit of a munch he changed his mind and spat it on the floor (it was a bit crumpled and soggy, but otherwise fine). Then he had a bit of sulk and started kicking his feeding trough. Drama queen.

The dreaded fireweed

Duke & Queenie finally go back to munching on grass instead of my hat

We also helped Annie to set up her own website. She's a reflexologist (I got a fantastic foot massage one evening), and has come up with her own theory of Padaveda (“knowledge of the feet”) which combines reflexology principles with Ayurvedic teachings. Karl did the techy side of the website, while I worked on the text, and we combined our limited Photoshop knowledge to create a banner. You can see it here: www.padaveda.com

One weekend, Rick and Annie were going away to a conference on soil management and very kindly gave us the option of spending a weekend on the beach in their camper van. So on a Friday afternoon they dropped us and the van off at a campsite in a little town called Woolgoolga, and Karl and I had our first ever camping trip together. As with most camping trips, it had it's fair share of mishaps. We decided that we wanted to turn the van around so that the doors opened out to a nice grassy patch, but Karl hadn't driven a manual before. There was some difficulty using the clutch and a lot of stalling, and after bumping into a picnic table and backing into some tree branches, we gave up for fear of drawing too much attention to ourselves when we didn't possess a driver's licence. We tried again the next day, after I'd explained to Karl how the clutch in the tractor worked, and had some more success. Also, we hadn't thought to test the camping stove before leaving the house and were slightly dismayed to find that it wasn't working – that was our well-planned menu out the window. In the end, we had to cook all our meals (including boiling water for tea) on the communal BBQ grill, which drew some strange looks, as well as some kindly concern, from fellow campers. We'd also forgotten to bring any bowls or mugs.

Once we'd gotten over all this, it turned out to be a brilliant weekend, even though it rained all day on the Sunday. Our camper van was small but incredibly cosy:

And we had some great dinners, including grilled lamb chops, and Aussie style burgers complete with pineapple rings (don't knock it...).

We didn't quite make it fully into the sea, due to the freezing water and enormous waves, but we had a little paddle and some nice strolls down the beach. Oh and some amazing fish and chips – almost as good as back home.

Food on the farm was always brilliant, because most of the vegetables and herbs come straight from the garden. And it turned out that Annie loves Indian food, so we did a little knowledge exchange where she taught me how to make my own paneer, yoghurt and ghee, and I showed her how to make chapattis and a couple of curries. Another evening, Annie invited over her friend Lynney and we had a bash at making homemade masala dosas, which were an enormous success:

During our second week they organised a campfire dinner. It was quite a cool setup with huge, heavy cast iron pots over the fire, filled with Annie's bean stew, Rick's lamb stew, and fresh corn on the cob. Lynney had made a delicious spinach and cheese pie, her daughter Lily whipped up a carrot cake, and somehow Karl managed to charm Annie into making him a cheesecake!

Lynney with her fab pie (left), and Annie's scrummy cheesecake (right)

The list of fun things we did during those two weeks is almost endless. But here is some of it anyway:

• Visiting the waterfalls nearby. Once again, it was one of the best we've been to, even though the water was freezing. Karl did his usual array of jumps and flips. I divided my time between swimming about a bit and sitting on a rock, chattering my teeth.

• The next day we took a stroll down to a little swimming hole on their property. I didn't go in this time, but I'm told the water was even colder than the day before.
• We spent a couple of afternoons in the nearby town of Grafton, where there's a bakery that does the best apple turnovers.
• Annie arranged for her neighbour to take us to another nearby town, Coffs Harbour, where we had a nice picnic and a stroll, and found a cheesecake shop.

We bought half a cheesecake. To share with the rest of the family, of course...

• We helped to clean windows and ceiling's at Annie's old house in a small town called Tucabia. We went round to a neighbour's garden with Bree and Brennan to eat mulberries, pecans and macademias from her trees (with her permission, of course).
• Bree taught us how to tightrope walk. Or she tried to, at least. We were rubbish.
• Karl played a lot of football with Brennan
• Bree helped me find some four leaf clovers in the back garden
• We had a few pub dinners. The barramundi and chips at the local pub was very good
• Learning how to make ricotta and cream cheese
• Played with Ellie the dog. Me and her became good friends until she tried to get over-affectionate with my leg. I didn't realise girl dogs did this. Anyway, then I backed off a little bit.

Ellie has a snooze

• Star gazing. I've never seen a sky as full of stars as when we were on the farm. Stunning.
• We saw a snake! We were in the house and it slithered past the window, then darted away when it saw we'd noticed it. When we described it to Rick later, he said it sounded like a poisonous one. For once, I don't think he was just teasing.

Thinking about it, I can't believe we packed so much into such a short space of time. We're really grateful to Annie, Rick, Bree and Brennan, for going to such lengths to make sure we were always comfortable and having a good time.

Working on the farm for a fortnight meant that we didn't have enough time to do some of the things we'd planned in Australia, like diving the Great Barrier Reef or visiting the Whitsunday Islands. But I found that I didn't actually care, because I doubt any of it would have provided as brilliant an experience as the farm did. We did an unbelievable amount while we were there – things we wouldn't have been able to do if we'd been travelling around as regular tourists - and we loved every minute of it. I'll catch the coral next time round.