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We are retired. Before we moved from Perth to the country, Kaye was the webmaster at Edith Cowan University and Geoff was a groundwater modeller at the Water and Rivers Commission. Kaye has an economics degree and Geoff has degrees in biology. We both have postgraduate diplomas in computing.
We live near Youngs Siding, approximately 20 kilometers from Denmark and 35 kilometers from Albany on the south coast of Western Australia. Our small (17.4 hectare = 43 acres) hobby farm is about one quarter native bush and the rest is pasture, dams and buildings. We do not run any animals on the property now except for a couple of bantam chickens, and the dams contain small freshwater crayfish (yabbies - native to eastern Australia). We allow a local farmer to cut the pasture for hay each year and have a small orchard of fruit trees next to the vegetable patch. We are slowly increasing the number of native trees by planting and transplanting, and also grow exotic eucalypts which will provide us with firewood in the future. At the same time we are working on controlling a range of weeds which are found on the farm.
Like most people in the country, we have an interest in keeping track of the weather. We spend a lot of time outside, and our garden and orchard rely mostly on rainfall and dam water to keep the plants alive. Even more critically, we collect and store all our own drinking water as the public water supply scheme does not extend out as far as our farm. For a bit of fun we measure our rainfall and minimum and maximum temperatures. The instruments are very simple so the measurements are not highly accurate, but they do give a reasonable idea of the basic climatic variation over time. It is also a chance to try out simple Javascript-mediated web page plotting.
We have a variety of native birds which visit our farm and some interesting vegetation, unfortunately severely damaged in the past by stock. Kangaroos visit and we have a resident population of bandicoots and (we think from the burrows) bush rats. We have found one possum (hiding in the shearing shed) and small insectivorous bats are common fluttering around in the evening sky. Tiger snakes are common in summer and frogs breed in the dams and our artificial pond. We belong to to the Land for Wildlife scheme which supports people who preserve native bushland.
Now that we are retired, we look forward to spending more time on our hobbies and interests, although experience so far suggests that there is not enough time to do all the things we expected to. Some of our interests are:
Kaye was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and has documented her mastectomy and breast re-construction to help other women who have similar surgery. She is now free of cancer, sporting a new breast and a very flat stomach!
Although we did not plan it when we moved down to Youngs Siding, our working lives seem to have followed us - we still do some web page creation and teach classes at home on how to make web pages, and sort out a few local computing and internet problems. A lot of the web stuff is for free although we do have one major paying customer. It does not make us a lot of money but we get to know some interesting people.
For surfers with a bit of spare time and/or a high bandwidth connection, our photo gallery has pictures which have a connection to other parts of our web pages, or which we just think have some intrinsic interest. We update the "collection" on an irregular basis.
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We had to go up to Perth for a few days and arrived back to find this note in our letterbox. It is good to know that someone appreciates the local attractions. Greens Pool is about 15 kilometres to the west of Denmark at William Bay. About 400 metres out from the beach it has a line of huge granite boulders in an arc which break the force of the waves and enclose a protected swimming area. It is so safe that school swimming classes are held there; by contrast the rest of William Bay and a lot of the coast in the region can be very dangerous, with large waves, rips and undertows. We of course did not get to see the sunset on that day, but they can be very impressive in this area. |
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