“ I’ve been coming to Lismore on holidays from Melbourne for probably 7 or 8 years. I originally came up to go to Tropical Fruits New Years Eve and since that experience I have been completely hooked on the whole region. A lot of my friends from Melbourne had previously lived here or were moving here. There was sort of a relationship between the gay community I was associating with in Melbourne and the gay community here.”
“Several years later I went travelling around Australia and I met Dan in far north QLD. Other than Byron he hadn’t spent much time in the Northern Rivers and I kept telling him how incredible and beautiful it was and what actually happened is Dan jumped online at Realestate.com to have a look at the landscape mainly”
Dan – “ I was interested in how you would farm here, my main concern was what you would do, what the rainfall was like and how you would raise cattle here.”
Miki – “So Dan actually saw this property after he pulled it up online to just check out the landscape and it reminded him of what the tablelands are like around Malanda and Millaa Millaa. Obviously at the time there wasn’t even a conversation about us buying a place together so the next time we saw each other as I was in Townsville at the time and we were doing weekend visiting each other, he pulled up the property and said ‘Is this what the Northern Rivers is like and I said that’s exactly what the region looks like. Four years later we ended up buying the exact property that Dan was looking at. We travelled Australia and had another look, revisited it a few times and it’s funny that this property was never consideration at that point in the relationship anyway as we were still very fresh.”
Dan – “Before we met I had every intention of moving south as well and that was to compete with my horses in a sport called Camp Drafting which is working horses with cattle. Here there are far more comps close by than the far north. One in Kyogle, Casino, Lismore, Uki. We are still to get there as have been too busy with the cattle. We have 155 acres with horses, chickens, cattle, big vegie garden and fruit trees and eventually have sheep and goats as well.”
Miki – “The property itself has quite a bit of pasture but there’s pockets of regenerating rainforest. We have one area marked out , fenced off so that area can be free of livestock and we’ve started removing privet, camphor etc. There’s already a seed bank of existing rainforest trees there so it just needed the sunlight.”
“I’m studying nursing full time so only one semester left to finish my degree. I wanted to create a life with balance. The plan was as soon as I realised I wasn’t going back to Melbourne if I were to live in a regional area I wanted to create a life where there was a balance between work and a farm. That balance is starting to fall into place now nearing graduation.”
Dan – “I work in disability support and also Barefoot trimming which is natural hoof care. We always shoe horses thinking that they need us to shoe them but there’s a whole new school of thought that has come out in the last 10 years that if you make your horses environment, exercise and diet is as natural as possible and trim them in a certain way they don’t need to be shod. I break in horses as well for people locally and do a bit of horse training in the area which I will eventually extend.”
Miki – “All our spare time we spend here, building our house, fencing, getting a garden started, building sheds. and all in just over a year and a half. We built on the edge of a cow paddock so there was nothing here. It’s busy but satisfying. It’s hard and stressfull at times but it’s really satisfying because your achieving and working in a beautiful environment, we’re tired at the end of the day but it’s worth it”.
Dan (L) and Miki with the big gentle Bronson.