The property adjoins the park on two sides offering endless bush walking
It took 12 long months of traveling between Byron Bay and Bundaburg, which included many of the Islands in Morton Bay, to find a piece of land that would give us the unique attributes we were looking for.
These included above all, total privacy and seclusion, but we also needed to be near an airport for my work and Kathryn wanted to be close enough to good restaurants for the occasional night out.
The kids wanted to be near the beach and nightlife.
The creek runs through the property most of the year
My Welsh relatives come from a small island, Bardsey Island off the north coast of Wales. A 20 acre farm was considered to be large and this would be given to the eldest son leaving everyone else to carve out a living fishing or looking after sheep on the mountain. So having the opportunity to play with 116 acres was beyond my wildest dreams when I was young.
The 3rd forest plan indicating the recommended stages
I had no plan for the land when we arrived other than to clean it up by getting rid of the acres of lantana and mountains of old discarded pieces of timber that inhibited any tractor work.
We started on the hillside having a bulldozer rake the tree stumps and large timbers into 12 very large mounds that burned for a week. Three large swales or terraces were then constructed to slow up runoff from the torrential rainfall we get. This also has the effect of creating small springs making the hillside into a very large sponge for capturing the rainfall which judging by the wetness of the soil works very well.
These also act as access roads for tractors once a crop has been planted. An access road was then constructed around the hillside and a 2 inch irrigation pipe laid down underground. This was then extended all the way to the furtherest section of cleared land to provide a good backbone.
The water gets pumped up from the bottom dam, creek or bore to a holding tank which can gravity feed all parts of the land with what appears to be a limitless amount of water, although I have identified three dam sites should we need them.
The hillside was cleared for stage one and 3 large terraces built to capture the water
I have explored the feasibility of countless crops and growing seems to make the land economically sustainable using strict organic principles. These have ranged from organic edible bamboo shoots to medicinal herbs and have even considered fish farming.
The most viable was medicinal herbs but this required too much of my time which was becoming a scarce commodity over the last few years.
The bamboo grows very well but due to health & safety regulations we would have to install some expensive processing equipment which meant that we would have to produce on a large scale which I did not have the time for.
We planted 250 clumping bamboo plans which do not spread
We use the bamboo to keep some of the tracks in good shape
So I kept coming back to specialist timber, rain forest cabinet timbers on the wet regions and trees for pole house construction on the higher places and set about preparing the ground for future planting.
We have a planting and maintenance outline plan along with the recommended tree species developed by one of the country's leading experts. But I soon discovered that whilst we could get a license to plant trees no meaningful agreement could be obtained from either the State or Local Government that would guarantee the right to harvest them.
This has now been resolved by the Department of Natural Resources who will now offer licences that provide this assurance.
However it's taken about 18 months to get the first stage sorted out where the existing cleared areas have been mapped, verified and entered onto the state governments spatal system. The land now has a certificate defining the current areas and identifing what I can do on the other parts re forest farming.
This process was managed by Greening Australia who have also applied for a forestry licence to cover the whole property which will allow the tree management and planting of the whole property.
The property can now gain primary producer status with out having to run cattle on it Phew !!
Hillside ready for the planting of trees on stage 3
Greening Australia advised me to wait until a carbon credit brokerage has been established (later this year) before planting the trees so as to get the potential income factored in to the plan
The cleared part of stage 2 (green part on the map)
The uncleared land on stage 2 is currently getting the big weeds slashed leaving the few old rain forest trees.
The lantana had spread over this part of the property hiding the old rain forest trees
Uncleared stage 2
What the vegetable garden can look like when I don't have anything better to do
