K – We met a thousand years ago at Armidale University doing drama. We got together when I was 19 and Nick was 26. We were both cast in a play. Nick asked me to audition because he actually liked me and I liked him but didn’t know that he liked me so I wanted to be in the play as well so that was it. It was an old Australian play and Nick had to play this horrible, racist stockman and I was the young blonde city girl moving to the country and it was all scary (laughs). We’ve been married for 25 years.
N – Kylie got her teaching degree and landed a job in Newcastle so we moved there but didn’t like it very much so Kylie got a job in Canberra.
K – I got into the Graduate Recruitment Program with the Government for the Dept of Education and Training Youth Affairs. I was working under the Liberal Government and decided very quickly that the Public Service wasn’t for me. I was on a work trip, opened the paper and it said …’Challenging career in the Northern Territory’ I went home and said to Nick, What do you think? I applied, got the job and they asked when I could start. I said, 2 weeks so my job gave me leave, we packed up our house in Canberra and sadly had to give our cat to my parents. I cried for 2 days. This was 18 years ago.
We flew to Alice Springs and the following day we were driven out to Papunya. I never experienced anything like it, working in such a remote community. I grew up in Tamworth. We had 6 1/2 years there and we absolutely loved it. The people were amazing. We’d just had our second child and we were looking at going back to live in Alice Springs so I could work in town but the rents were so expensive. Nick had this brainwave idea…what if we could swap houses? We had a house in Nambucca Heads.
N – I was a stay at home Dad and that’s when I had the time to build the websites, Aussie House Sitters and Aussie House Swap and they took off.
K – The House swap was the first idea because we bought the house in Nambucca Heads and we thought it would be great to swap with someone in Alice Springs so they could live by the sea and we could live in the desert. Nick said I think there could be something in this. It was 18 years ago when the internet was starting to take off.
N – The House Sitting site has gone really well. It’s the number 1 site in Australia and now we have 6 employees.
K – Over the years Nick fine-tuned the site so it was a really good model and then did one in Canada, New Zealand, the US and the UK so we have house sitting sites in a few countries now and they are growing steadily. It started with just Nick and now there are 6 of us working in Lismore. We bought our little blue building down the road but out grew it. We moved to this space in Magellan St and our plan is to put our new office upstairs.
Last year we applied for Small Business Champions Award which is Australia wide and we’d applied twice before. Each time we would turn up and we always made the finalists with Aussie House Sitters but last year they opened up a Tourism Award. We wrote about Aussie House Swap because it’s a sustainable and affordable travel model and we also wrote about how we survived Covid which really affected our businesses. We lost all of our revenue overnight but we managed to keep our staff and our membership. We were supposed to go last year but the award ceremony was cancelled twice. Finally it was locked in for this year and then the flood happened which was devastating. All of our buildings were hit badly and then we got a reminder about the awards night a month after. We thought, Stuff it! Let’s just go.
N – We thought we’d just go and have a nice weekend down in Sydney. We’d done all the cleaning we could do.
K – My sister Elyse worked for us as well and her house was really badly damaged. She was one of the people stuck in her yard with a back pack holding her cats over her head for hours as the water was raising. She was rescued in a tinny. She’d gone from that a month ago to this massive room at the Casino. She had to borrow a dress from her daughter. We were just all over the shop so we thought we’d just go, eat some food, drink champagne and then they called our name and we won. It was absolutely surreal. I talked a bit about our story, being a small business based in Lismore and all the other small business owners who have worked so hard to help each other and I mentioned Elyse’s story as well. So for the rest of the night, wherever we went people were congratulating us. There was so much love in the room for Lismore. It was a lovely experience and we felt proud that we were representing the Northern Rivers. There are so many businesses that work so hard. Then we came home and the second flood hit. We had a bit of a spring in our step after the first one and then the second one took the wind from our sails.”