When we left the city we moved to a small 17 hectare "lifestyle" farm near Youngs Siding, approximately 20 kilometers from Denmark and 35 kilometers from Albany on the south coast of Western Australia. The farm was about one quarter remnant native vegetation and the rest pasture, with a house, a shearing shed and a couple of dams. It also had around 120 sheep which, unknown to us when we committed to buy, came with the sale - we decided we did not want to be "real" farmers so we gave them away.
The vegetation on the farm was unfortunately damaged in the past by sheep grazing, but still contained some interesting plants and fungi. It supported a large variety of native birds, kangaroos, bandicoots and bush rats, as well as small insectivorous bats which could be seen fluttering around in the evening sky. Tiger snakes and other reptiles were common in summer and frogs bred in the dams and our artificial pond.
As we have got older the work involved in looking after a large area of land, plus the relative isolation and need to drive to get anywhere convinced us that a move in to town would be a wise thing to do, preferably while we were still young enough to manage the process in the way we wanted to, and before it was forced on us by circumstances. Even before we purchased the farm we owned a house in Denmark which we rented out. It was well located just a couple of blocks from the shops, and had a small soldier-settlement cottage which was well on the way to falling apart.
So we demolished the cottage, removed the existing trees and built a retaining wall on one side of the block so that we could fill it with soil to make it level. Then we designed and owner-built a new reverse-brick-veneer house, taking nearly four years to complete it. More than half of the people who worked on the construction were friends from Youngs Siding - amazing given the limited number of people who live in the area. Once we moved into the new house, we worked on establishing the gardens - Australian native plants at the front, a Japanese / Mediterranean inspired garden bordering the patio at the side and a shadehouse and vegetable plots at the back.
Although we did not plan it when we left the city, our working lives seem to have followed us - we maintain a number of web sites and sort out a few computing and internet problems for friends and local people and organisations. We do this for free since we seem to be able to live within our means and many of our clients could not afford us if we charged anything like market rates - and it means we get to know some interesting people.
Geoff has always been interested in photography, and over many years of working, travelling and living in various places he has built up a large collection of photos, some of which can be seen in various photo galleries on this site. We update and add to the galleries on an irregular basis. While we were living at Youngs Siding Kaye developed an interest in fungi on the farm, so you might also like to have a look at the photos in Kaye's fungi and lichen slideshows. Our travel pages have numerous pictures from Australia and overseas, and we have also included a slide show of Kaye's sewing, spinning and weaving. For those who just like to look at the pictures, we have collected together links to all the photo galleries and slide shows in our pictures page.
In 2010 we travelled along the Mediterranean through Spain, southern France, Italy, Tunisia, Greece and Turkey. One of the most fasinating places we visited was the World Heritage-listed region of Meteora in Greece. The weather was cold and misty, so it was easy to believe that the spectacular monastries balanced precariously on top of huge pinnacles of rock were haunted. We had a glimpse of something in the shadows in a stone-paved room and Geoff took a picture; when we got home we used it in a web page to document our travels.
Amazingly we seem to have captured a long-departed spirit and so now we have a haunted web page. Don't believe me? Then click on the picture on the left and wait and watch carefully. But be aware that ghosts are very sensitive and are "spooked" by being enclosed in little screens.
It occurred to us that we might have created the first web page ever to be used as a home for a poultergeist, so we did a web search for the phrase 'haunted web page'. It turns out that our page is not unique, although the spirits do seem to come in different forms. So we wondered: can a web page be exorcised? A search on the internet did not reveal anyone specifically offering this service.