Uh, What Was The Plan Again..?

Oh, right, there wasn't one. It's working out great and I highly recommend it. Every day I still have moments of surreality where I think, "How the hell did I end up here in the desert?"

It was about ten years ago that I organised a Telstra commercial shoot on location in Meekatharra - I worked from a swanky production office in South Melbourne, sipping lattes and nibbling designer Japanese food, rolling my eyes as I forced myself to talk...verrrry...slowwllyy...to Geoff from Hillview Station, sorting out helicopters, crew accommodation and travel directions. Meekatharra was just a logistically frightening place in the middle of freakin' nowhere, a problem to solve as I tried to find out what the vegan art director could live on, where the crew trucks from Perth could re-fuel, where to hire cars for the agency, how to get the exposed film safely back to the lab in Melbourne. I didn't go with the crew; it was a phone & paperwork exercise interspersed with moments of horrified urban disbelief as the crew rang in during the shoot to tell me that it was 53 degrees out at the station and they had to use heavy farm gloves to handle any of the film equipment.

If someone had told me then that in ten years I'd be living there with a fire-fightin' truck mechanic, chickens, a hiking cat, a chihuahua and a pig-dog, driving meals on wheels and hanging out with a mad Vietnam paratrooper sergeant and a Scottish ex-Foreign Legion soldier, I would have fallen about in fits of laughter. But here I am, loving every second of it.

One of the things I like is that the town is so small I run into friends all day, whether I'm working, shopping or just poking about. You don't feel the division of life, work and play here the way you do in the city. Will I ever wander off in the bus again? I like knowing that it's there, that I can go roaming any time, but Meeka grows on me each day and in our rambles out of town I realise that there really is virtually no limit to the amazing things to explore and do here, whether it's scavenging in the scrapyard for things to build a shed, walking through the bush or poking through the ghost towns & abandoned stations that lie hidden everywhere you go. As the weather cools down, there will also be camping in the national parks and secret local places, prospecting, fishing and just sleeping under the starry sky.