Barb

“As long as I’ve got some land around, I am happy. If I lived in a town, I don’t know but I suppose you’d adjust to anything if you’d had a decent garden or something, maybe I’d get by.  But I just love having the space and the land, so I suppose I possibly could be happy anywhere. I was born and lived at our Broken Hill property until I had to go away for high school and boarding which I didn’t like. When I came back, my mum and dad said, ‘you can stay for a year,’ but I never left, I kept working on the property. I suppose they wanted me to do anything, just to figure it out, but there was really nothing else I wanted to do. I wanted to be a farmer because I’ve always just loved being on the land. Everything about farming and gardening, just all of it. Being around nature, hearing the birds and yeah, I can’t really pinpoint it. I’ve always been an outside person, always amongst it. I think I was a pretty disappointing daughter to my mum, I was never inside, helping her cook or anything like that. Both my brother and myself kind of worked together on the property until I moved down to what Dad called his ‘toy farm’ which was a hundred and twenty-five acres down between Victor Harbor and Mount Compass.  But Mum and Dad actually didn’t have very long there and they both died quite young, too young. I don’t think those pains ever go away, and that makes us human I suppose. Normally I can talk about things like that, but other times you just get emotional. I think I’ve got a lot more emotional because since the fires we’re all a bit more emotional anyway. I mean, I always cry at movies and things like that, especially with animals. Chris had moved down to the farm; he bought the butcher shop at Mount Compass and we ran that for a while. But then we were looking around for some extra land to go with our bit on the toy farm as a hundred and twenty-five acres wasn’t really sustainable. We discovered Kangaroo Island and Chris reckons he walked off the ferry and thought, ‘oh, this is it.’ We looked at a couple of farms, decided on this one and the rest is history—that was twenty-six years ago now. Now we are actually in the process of reducing the size again, sold a couple of paddocks, leasing out some more, and funnily, almost getting down to the size of the toy farm for us again.”