Beloved penpal,
It happened! We moved across the country again!
It’s been a few months of settling in, and I wanted to share the journey with you.
Buckle up with a cup of tea, this is going to be one of those long and languorous sharings. Just the way we like it!
I shared with you in July that we were moving back to Canberra, and the synchronous way we found our next home. Since then our days and weeks have been full.
In September, we put our old house on the market and put half our furniture into storage so we could stage it better. I also had the blessing of speaking at the Heart Centred Business Conference and seeing so many of my beautiful business friends. Our youngest had her first sleepaway camp – I was so proud of her for taking the big step and loving it so much.
While the girls were at school, my love and I busied ourselves with continuing to pack and clean so we were ready for house inspections. We also knew we needed to stay healthy and connected during a stressful time, so we went for walks most mornings at the local duck pond and along the beach. We had so many miracle experiences on those walks, it truly felt like such a blessing.
I also decided to take the leap and sign up for a new mentor and mastermind even in the midst of moving. It felt like a huge step – it had been many years since I invested in something like that, but I had this deep instinctual knowing that it was something I needed to do. I felt like I had so much trepidation and worry going into it, but it’s ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever invested in. Since then I’ve been diving into my mentor’s big library of teachings, and connecting with the mastermind, and it’s been so powerful. I feel like I’m healing and growing in so many ways and coming back into myself more fully. I wish I’d done something like this sooner than I did, but I’ve got to trust in the timing of it. I’ll probably talk more about the process in time, but it’s been such a potent part of the last few months I knew I needed to say it here.
I also did a bunch of teaching and creating to prep for moving. I taught new programs for the Academy – Graphic Design for your Business, How to Grow Your Biz with Affiliates, How to Create Business Systems and an Annual Biz Review. Plus we released new Academy templates including Sample Business Standard Operating Procedures, Affiliate Onboarding Email templates, 100 Social Media Content Ideas and a Daily Essential Business Tasks template. On top of 3 Q&A webinars and our usual monthly group coaching calls for the Academy as well. Plus we had 8 guest expert workshops in the Academy since September as well. Phwoar… blooming chuffed with that effort!
In the midst, all of life happening. Our girls spending time with their best friends before the move, and wrapping up all their school assessments for the years. Playdates and sleepovers and taking all four of them Halloween-ing together.
One gorgeous Saturday afternoon I rent a pontoon boat and I spend the most delicious time on the river with my girls and some of the beautiful friends I’ve made here on the Sunshine Coast. The sky is brilliant blue and the water is deliciously warm and all of it is such a miracle. As we sail back to the jetty, we dance wildly and recklessly and I laugh so hard I can barely breathe. All I can think is: I am so lucky to have been here, to have lived this and loved these people. All of this, a glorious adventure.
In early November, we move into a gorgeous Airbnb for a week while we finish cleaning the house and for our girls to finish school. It’s a grand old house on acres of land, filled with kangaroos and a lake teeming with fish and dragonflies. My husband and I sink into the soft couches and look out at the view, softening together at last. We sift through the library of books clearly collected for aesthetics and not content, reading out the weirdest passages of what we can find to each other. Our darling Madi comes for gourmet pizza and a twilight swim in the pool, my eldest’s best friend there too. The thrumming heartbeat of: We are so lucky. For all this. For what’s next too.
The US election results come through. I stare, dumbfounded and aghast. Sit under the gum trees to grieve, journal, get clear and decide how I wish to lead myself. I’m still in that process, but it begins there by that billabong with those dragonflies.
Finally, the last day of school. Our girls say their goodbyes to their teachers and friends. We stand together in the dirt car park as our eldest hugs her best friend goodbye. Her mother cries, knowing how much this means to them both. Both of them are moving to new schools, and they both know a new beginning is what they each need, but endings and goodbyes are hard, especially when there’s so much love.
In the morning, we set off as the sun rises. Wind our way into the hinterland. It’s not long until we are out of the bubble of the wealthy coastal enclave we’ve been sequestered in for six years. Stop in a small town that sells metal signs that declare “WE DON’T CALL 000 AROUND HERE” with a gun emblazoned over top. The local bakery certainly makes delicious sandwiches though. I cannot help but laugh at the duality of all of this.
We follow the mountains up into the Granite Belt. It’s a way we haven’t been before. Usually we head straight west to a border town on the river, but we made a last minute travel plan change after there was multiple violent invasions of motels there. I’d called the local police station for reassurance on safety, but they couldn’t give it to us. And even though it felt like a stick in our spokes to change our well worn travel path, it feels like an unexpected blessing.
I always feel like there’s something precious about the gift of seeing land for the first time. Getting to meet new country, and be astonished at how it’s a view my eyes have never seen before. For years I wondered what my homeland was, and I know now that it just happens to be a really large one. I belong to Australia in all her beauty. And maybe I belong to the whole world too, maybe the whole earth is my home, but Australia and her eucalypts and her mountains and her magic have my heart.
We end up on a back road somewhere in Granite country, aptly named for its bold outcrops of rocks. The hills are precarious and the road becomes gravel and we stop to let a horse float cross a one lane bridge. You cannot remove the smile from my face.
Eventually we cross the border into New South Wales and it is wild how the wilderness changes from state to state. The palm trees become poplars, wooden houses become brick, cattle become sheep. We drive through the historic town of Tenterfield, listening to Peter Allen’s song for the town. I read the Wikipedia entry for every small town we go through, each page and town a rabbit hole of fascination. Did you know of Sir Henry Parkes’ famous Tenterfield Oration? Or Captain Thunderbolt?
Listening to that song, driving through old Australian towns brought me to tears with nostalgia, brimming with sentiment that not’s quite my own, belonging to all the ones who came before me, of times and places lost and found.
By mid-afternoon we drive into the stunning old town of Glen Innes. It is the ancient homeland of the Ngarabal people. Their name for Glen Innes is Gindaaydjin meaning “plenty of big round stones on clear plains.” I can report it is a stunningly accurate name for the place. The whole region is now known as New England, and is one of the highest and coldest parts of Australia. In an odd turn of events, the region’s first settlers were Scottish, and many of the surrounding towns are named after Scottish ones (Glencoe, Ben Lomond, Armidale). There’s something about this cold highland place that’s oddly mystical.
We found our way up to the Australian Standing Stones. It’s an odd and a wonderful thing – to be in the midst of this distinctly Celtic rock formation, but surrounded by gum trees and the heat of an Australian summer. What touched me most though? The wall of stones brought from all over England to place there. I’ve never been, but it is the homeland of most of my ancestors, and as I touch midlife there’s a homing instinct in me wanting to return my genes into the mist and fog.
We find our motel for the night, and the lovely receptionist says: “Are you… the online Leonie Dawson?” I laugh. I am indeed. I am the online Leonie Dawson. She’d taken one of my e-courses, and I am giddy with the joy and serendipity of it. Across from the motel, stunning historic buildings loom. We order room service and it is the most delicious room service of our lives. I still think fondly of the deconstructed cheesecake we share between us (it’s enormous!) If you’re ever driving through, it’s this place. Not sponsored, just a soft place to land with scrumptious food.
At first light, we head off again. We follow the spine of the mountain range down to Tamworth. We’ve never been before, and always wanted to. Australia’s icon of country music. We of course have to get the customary photo in front of the towering Golden Guitar statue. Then we spend the most merry hour in the visitor centre and museum behind it. We take photos in front of statues of our favourite musicians. I want to cry with gladness to see my beloved Jimmy Little and I hum “Under the Milky Way” under my breath.
My love is thrilled to wander through a maze of guitars played by musicians far and wild. I am giddy to stand so close to a guitar played by Willie Nelson. It’s an intoxicating kind of inspiration to be surrounded by so many tools of creativity.
Then we’re back in the car, winding our way through wide farmlands and small country towns. In one, we see a sign pop up for a monument to Dorothea MacKellar. We get lost trying to find it until my husband decides to double back. I’m glad he does because it is worth it. Enormous silos painted with a stanza of Dorothea’s most famous poem:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
It’s the ultimate fan girl poem of Australia, and as a fellow adorer of this land, I feel it deep in my bones. And I love that we’re still a day’s drive from Canberra, and yet there too is a magnificent monument to Dorothea:
Onwards we head, and after a while, our bladders are fit to burst. We panic stop at the first Toilet sign we see in a tiny town – and it ends up being the most delicious serendipitous side-adventure! We find ourselves at Crystal Kingdom in Coonabarabran – a quaint crystal store with a brilliant little museum attached with a dinosaur statue and fossils and crystals from all over the region. We discover we are in the Warrumbungle region – the site of ancient volcanic eruptions that have transformed the area into fertile farming soils, and leaving behind a wild range of mineral formations along the way. I buy myself a crystal ring as an early birthday gift to myself. The greatest toilet break ever!
Finally by late afternoon we find ourselves pulling into Dubbo. We’ve stopped so many times here on our road trips between Queensland and Canberra through the decades. A glorious overgrown country town full of trucks and travellers, an enormous zoo and old brick cottages in lovely gardens. When we arrive in November, the streets are festooned with purple, Jacarandas in full bloom lining the roads. There’s something about those incandescent flowers that make happiness float up unbidden inside me with each tree we pass. A kind of visual euphoria.
We take the next day off from travelling, blessedly. After all: what are we going to do? Go to Dubbo and NOT go to the open plains zoo? There is no other option, especially for our animal-besotted 10 year old. We hire a golf cart to drive around the zoo in and spend a very merry morning there. We gaze besotted at a tower of giraffes with half a dozen tiny, gangly baby giraffes by their sides. Our 10 year old discovers a new found obsession of animal photography. There are lions and elephants and ducks and fairy wrens and tortoises and echidnas. We teach our 14 year old how to drive the golf cart and she is ecstatic with the power of it. We eat lunch beside the meerkats. It’s the greatest way ever to spend my last day as a 41 year old.
When dawn breaks, we head off again. Stop at the deliciously kooky Wellington Gateway Sculpture. I remember when I first saw it as a 20 year old, driving to Canberra the first time with my love. I was the most naive farm kid from North Queensland, and I was stunned that you could have a Statue! In the middle of a paddock! For no real reason! It felt like a decadent level of creativity that I hadn’t seen before!
And now that 20 year old and her lover are there with their children, and their children are closer to 20 years old than they are. And it’s a glorious kind of thing to show my children the things that have brought me magic over the years. To wonder at what will inspire them too, make memories that glow inside them.
We stop at Wellington Caves visitor gallery too, to marvel at megafauna statues. We promise ourselves we’ll be back to see the caves. I hope we do.
Onwards the car stretches over the roads, eating up the miles, drawing us closer to our new old home. We pass platypus country and sheep country. There are so few cars around us on these back roads of Australia, just as there hasn’t been the whole way down through the inland. Finally, that quiet country road merges with a motorway, and we slide our way down wide open paddocks into Canberra. The kids are delighted when we cross the border at last. My eldest says firmly: “I like the way the trees look here.” It feels surreal after all this planning and all this time and all this driving, we are here at last.
It is my 42nd birthday. Douglas Adam once wrote that 42 is answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. I wonder what I will learn in this year ahead, in this well-loved land of mine, with new and old adventures that await.
We drive to one of my oldest and dearest of friend’s houses. She has our new house keys for us, having done all the inspections for us. Our youngest beelines for the verandah calling “I heard you have guinea pigs out here!” It is a real blessing to be back with these people who love us so well.
We drive exhausted to a nearby holiday house that we’re staying at for a few nights while furniture arrives. We order bubble tea and Door Dash, and I sit on the front lawn as we wait for it to arrive. I look up at the gums in a wave of exhaustion, and I speak to the spirits of the land again. “Hello, beloved Canberra, we are back… I am so grateful to be with you again.”
There is no answer apart from the rustle of leaves and the bend of branches. The children come out to join me, and we lay back to look at the distinct cornflour blue of Canberra skies. This land is the land that I was not born into, but belong to nonetheless. The one I have chosen to move to three times now. The land and her people that have nurtured, supported and inspired me in ways I can barely articulate. I am more myself because of Canberra, and now I am back again. I am grateful for every single adventure we’ve had along the way. And I am grateful to be here right now.
Wedged between my giggling children and an immaculate sky, I think to myself:
Canberra is a love story.
There is more to tell you. Of our new house and all the adventures we’ve had in Canberra since then. All the wonder and miracles of it. All the hard parts too. But that will be for next time, I think.
I can barely wait to tell you all about it.
All my love,
P.S. Just a loving reminder that my brand new program Creative Goddess Embodied begins soon… so very excited to take this profound journey with so many of you!