Where to start

I’m sitting in the middle back seat of a four wheel drive, going along a dirt road we don’t usually travel.

To my left in a baby seat is a little girl who’s seven weeks old. The vigorous corrugations on the road are making her cheek fat wobble and she reacts to the potholes by spreading out her tiny toes. She’s sleeping, with a little frown and pursed lips.

On my right, and leaning into me precariously, is a five year old boy with a sweaty mop of blonde hair, one sandal and ninety-six mosquito bites (not including the eight on his face). The unwieldy lean into my armpit is because he “wants mummy time”. He’s on his way into a warm doze too, but with more of a gape than a frown.

The front passenger seat’s taken up by a young red kelpie, and a border collie with alarmingly pale blue eyes. They’re jostling for position; if Charlie the kelpie lounges, Diesel has to stand; if Diesel relaxes, Charlie is perched in her toes on a tiny postage stamp of seat. She periodically falls asleep standing up with her head hanging, then collapses onto the handbrake.

My husband is driving, fully aware of the comical nature of his passenger load.

The road is unfamiliar because we’re doing a detour around a bushfire which is still smouldering along the tree-lined verges of our usual route. And I’m in the back because little Poppy was squalling as we left, which turned out to be because she was tired, so two kilometres of vigorously hand-expressing breast milk into a bottle to feed her on the road wasn’t needed after all. And the dogs aren’t in the back because there are groceries there, and dogs eat groceries. Diesel has fallen asleep in disgust, with his head lolling under the dashboard and his body on the seat. We’re running two hours late for dinner at Mum’s, a heinous crime when Ollie’s bedtime is two hours after dinner.

Actually, we’re staying at Mum’s, because of a domino effect of causalities, at the centre of which is the fact that the house which we intended to have built by sometime in 2011 is, in early 2013, a levelled site. The shed, however, is about a fortnight away from being habitable; so we hope to move in in a couple of days, gaping walls and waterless kitchen notwithstanding. There is a toilet. All will be well.

This scenario has led me to believe that we’re eccentric enough for me to need to start a blog. Perhaps to justify the unconventional situations in which we find ourselves; perhaps so later, we can remember; or perhaps to give other people the opportunity to laugh at us as much as we laugh at ourselves.

I am 38, large-ish, and I have two sons, a baby girl, three dogs, a cat, ten chickens and gallstones. Stuart is 6 feet of energy, commitment and slight eccentricity, and has the same white-blue eyes as the dog. Early on in our relationship we worked out we could do far more together than either of us could do apart – no, wait, we could do more as a pair than the sum of what each of us could do… this is getting unwieldy. Suffice to say we discovered neither of us could live with the ordinary, and neither of us could see any good reason not to follow paths of ridiculous audacity and financial recklessness. This spirit of adventure has landed us on 206 acres of breathtaking Kangaroo Island hillside, with three children, three dogs, a cat, ten chickens and an almost completed straw bale shed.

The dogs sit up and look with herding-dog eagerness out the window as we enter my parents’ road. Charlie pricks one ear – the other ear tries to prick, but has a rakish fold. “Are you looking for playmates?” asks my husband. “Hoppy bouncy playmates?” As roos scatter in front of the car, her muscles quiver and she puts her paws on the dash. At least this time she doesn’t try to run through the windscreen.

It’s hard to know when this journey started. In 2010, when I was idly scanning realestate.com and I came across a sweet little acreage just out of Kingscote, and the idea of giving up on Adelaide and moving to the island first occurred to us? Later that year, when after re-applying for my own beloved teaching position and failing to win it, the decision was sealed and we made an offer on a far bigger and wilder 206 acres of land in the hills south of Emu Bay? Or did it begin way back in 1998 when my parents, holidaying on the island, spotted their own 130 acres of heaven on the banks of Pelican Lagoon, and started our extended family’s step by step migration south?

The heavily corrugated road winds through farmland and scrub. Half way along, an old piece of asbestos is propped against a rock, painted with a faintly aggressive SLOW DOWN. We’ve always wanted to follow that up with another plank saying RELAX but we’ve never got around to it. We’re supposed to SLOW DOWN for the benefit of the kangaroos, whole families of them, who turn and look at the car, and if it’s too close, turn and hop away, usually in completely the wrong direction so you end up panicking them as you chase them up the track. After some close-set coastal scrub, the road reaches a hilltop and with the kind of view of the lagoon which at this time of evening is so beautiful it leaves you short of breath, you enter Mum and Dad’s driveway. The house’s skillion rising out of Mum’s garden 800 metres away on the hillside, a valley forested with 12 years of revegetation, the shell-grit beach where Stu and I were married, and the island-dotted lagoon reflecting the peach-coloured sky.

It’s no wonder we got tired of Adelaide.

Dinner is reheated. Hamish, 7 years old and a depressingly talented talker about inconsequential topics, has been showered and pyjamad by Mum. He is as always is very loud and full of information about storm troopers and droids and the millennium falcon. He and his 5 year old brother Ollie immediately begin to fight over a lego light sabre, an inch of plastic that can cause intra-familial world war three. Little Poppy wants a feed, my milk supply is struggling to keep up with her growth spurt, and Dad is already being tasked with the dishes although we’re still trying to eat. And the sun is setting magnificently over a vista of lagoon.

Tomorrow at dawn my parents are flying out - evacuating and leaving the house to us. But it’s 40 minutes drive (and about $20 of petrol) to school for the kids, or to our farm and the building work that needs to be done; and it’s about an hour away from the spot where the yellow school bus that Stu drives each morning is parked at the end of its run. We can’t sustain this. So insects, heat and lack of running water notwithstanding, we’re on the verge of moving into our unfinished straw bale shed.