Carol Altmann - Four Seasons with a Grumpy Goat: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Life on the Farm

Carol Altmann grew up on three acres by the sea in Warrnambool, Victoria, and has had an abiding love for wide open spaces ever since. Carol worked as a newspaper journalist for almost twenty years, including for The Australian as the Adelaide Bureau Chief and later the Hobart Bureau Chief. In 2006, she wrote the acclaimed non-fiction book After Port Arthur which was long-listed for the Walkley Book Award. She now lives on a property in Gippsland and lectures in journalism at Monash Universitys Gippsland campus.

Four Seasons with a
Grumpy Goat

Carol Altmann

First published in 2011

Copyright Carol Altmann 2011

Authors note: All of the events and people in this book are real; however, some names have been changed to protect privacy and the sequence of events has on occasion been changed for narrative purposes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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ISBN 978 1 74237 551 9

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my dear father Walter Altmann,
a bricklayer and a writer.

And in memory of my beautiful friend Denise, who loved the
newsletters from Tasmania and believed there was a book in them.
There was.

Contents

A thankyou to my friends for reading the so-called Map of Tassie newsletters emailed from Neika each Sunday night for a year, and telling me that they couldnt wait for the next instalment. The idea for this book was thus born. Bringing it to life would not have been possible without the guiding hand of Richard Walsh, commissioning publisher at Allen & Unwin, who has taught me so much through his skill, advice and good humour. I would also like to thank Allen & Unwin publishing director, Sue Hines, for believing in the idea and in me as a writer, Jo Lyons and Clara Finlay for their meticulous editing and cheerful encouragement and Nada Backovic for the cover design: I am privileged to have had access to the skills of such talented women. I also want to acknowledge Colleen Stickley, who lost her battle with a long illness before I finished this book and was so looking forward to reading it; how I wished I could have written faster. And finally, to Louise for being everything to me.

I think we should buy a hobby farm.

It was my idea.

It was also my idea to find a farm on an island at the bottom of the worldnext stop, Antarcticawell before sea changing or tree changing had caught on in an exhausted nation.

At the time of our decision, Tasmania was still not a fashionable place to live and house prices were a third of those on the mainland, so we could afford to buy a four-bedroom, five-acre property on the side of Mount Wellington and keep our house in Adelaide, just in case homesickness overpowered our dream of owning a few acres.

We knew nothing about keeping five acres, but the house itself was lovely. Half brick, half western red cedar, the place looked solid, comfortable and big: much bigger than the grainy pictures in the Hobart real estate guide which sat open on my lap led us to believe on the day we set out to inspect potential properties. In fact it was too big for two people, with two lounge rooms, two bathrooms, three bedrooms and a loft, but I liked the idea of a guest wing should friends want to come and stay.

The main bedroom was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling corner window which looked across two dams, down the valley and away into the hills, with the nearest neighbour a comfortable acre or two away. And then there was the land, a combination of rolling pasture and raw bush where, the longer I looked, the more I could see my dream of a few ducks and chooks and maybe a goat and a sheep or two materialise without any effort at all.

Despite it being sunny outside on the day of the inspection, I could exhale fog in the kitchen, but Colin the real estate agent smiled cheerfully and assured me that all it needed was a couple of skylights to brighten up the place.

While I pulled at doors and tested floors, my partner, Deb, wandered around outside, only to return minutes later, yelling peee-cawks, peee-cawks in her North Carolina accent. There were, to be sure, two peacocksor, more rightly, two light-grey peahens prancing and pooping across the cedar deck. Oh, arent they just adooorable, Deb cooed as the birds ejected slimy green bullets onto the decking by way of a greeting.

Colin milked the moment: They come with the house!

I stood in the garden and looked at the valley falling away below us and knew that this was a captivating place with an enchanting name: Neika. Neeee-ka. Few people have ever heard of Neika, eighteen kilometres south of Hobart. It is the only Neika in Australia. Dreadful to spell, but lovely to say: Neika. This was it. We were moving from Adelaide to Tasmania.

We were going to slow down and become farm girls.

N ever try to move your own furniture. Never even be tempted, unless: a) the distance to be travelled is extremely short and b) the furniture to be transported amounts to no more than what can be packed into a six-by-four trailer.

Even then there is always a danger with mattresses, which seem to take on a life of their own when lifted from a bed and placed upright. Within minutes of trying to move them, they start to flop and wobble and you are forced into a crushing waltz with a flat-footed, six-foot-something giant as you shuffle towards the door. Mattresses also like to leap onto the road, no matter how tightly you bind their middles to the roof-rack or to the side of the trailer. Whoop! There they go, straight over the side and onto the bitumen, threatening to cause a major traffic accident on what is always the busiest road in the journey.

Given these perils, under no circumstances should an inexperienced, slightly nervous tree changer of slender build try to relocate an entire houseful of furniture from one state to another, particularly when the other state is an island, separated by more than two hundred kilometres of some of the most treacherous and stomach-churning ocean in the worldall of which I should have noted before I decided to save a few dollars and pack our own shipping container bound for Tasmania.