I have sometimes mused on how as adults we, quite
unconsciously, make a home base for ourselves that is similar to our
childhood home. I grew up in Milford NJ, a
small town on the Delaware River. Our
house was on acreage just outside town situated on a hill with a long driveway,
woodland and lots of fruit trees. Now on
the other side of the world I find myself in Bellingen NSW, a small town on the
Bellinger River. Our house is on acreage
just outside town situated on a hill with a long driveway in a forest and lots
of fruit trees. On my mother’s first
visit in 1988, she remarked how much our home in Bellingen reminded her of our
place in Milford.
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| Main Street Milford |
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| The entrance to Honeysuckle Lane. The building on the left use to be the public library. My favourite place to go. |
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| Main Street Bellingen |
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| Our house on the hill |
However instead of 3.5 acres of freehold land as in Milford
we are on 640 acres of shared co-operative land.
Instead of apple, cherry, pear and chestnut
trees we have orange, lemon, mandarin, mango, guava, lychee, coffee and
macadamia trees.
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| Mandarins which will be ready to eat in May |
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| Our mango tree but no fruit this year |
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| We had a great lychee crop this year |
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| Ripe coffee beans ready to be processed |
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| Hopefully we will get some macadamia nuts this year if the cockatoos don't eat them all first |
Instead of a pine forest with grackles providing a deafening
cacophony in the evening and white tail deer timidly grazing on the edges, we
have a sub-tropical rainforest with yellow tailed black cockatoos and rainbow lorikeets
making a racket during the day and frogs croaking all night while wallabies
timidly graze on the edge of the forest.
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| Yellow tailed black cockatoo |
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| Colourful Rainbow lorikeet |
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| Wallaby or as our daughter use to call the 'wobblelies' |
As a child I would spend hours exploring the woods, climbing
along the shale cliffs of the Narrows and playing in the Quequacamisicon Creek (which
now seems to be called Hakihokake Creek)
searching for salamanders. As an
adult I spend hours walking through the rain forest marvelling at the 30m trees
and taking refreshing dips in the swimming hole at Boggy Creek while hoping to
see the resident platypus.
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| A bush track near our house |
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| The swimming hole at Boggy Creek |
So have I come full circle with an Antipodean twist?
In any event I feel extremely fortunate to
have had a life spent in such beautiful places.
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| A view of our house from the dam |
