Living In Maleny - Why we Came

In 1998 we were living in Belair looking down from the hills onto Adelaide and the sea when Kathryn suggested that we had not come all the way from Europe to live in cold winters. Her idea was to move to a warmer climate and find a community that we could put our roots down before we hit retirement age.

Kathryn mostly works from home and I spend a lot of time traveling so moving to a new spot was possible. So a few months later we had sold the house and moved into rented accommodation in Brisbane to seek out our future.



Before











& after













For 12 months we travelled the area between Bryon Bay and Noosa, even checking out the many islands in Morton Bay for a community we could become part of and a property we would yearn for. We came to Maleny fairly early in our quest and assumed wrongly that Queensland must be full of coherent vibrant communities. We fell in love with the hinterland of Bryon but could not find the large piece of land that I aspired for and we also felt that the community was not as forgiving in their differences as we found in Maleny.

So we turned our attention to finding the right property that met our criteria in Maleny which took months to track down until we finally were taken of the strangest house inspection I had ever encountered.

Garry shows us around the veg garden













Garry the local agent used a machete to guide us through garden around the house and I had to wait until we bought the property before I could get a contractor to use a tractor and slasher, that looked like a prop out of Mad Max, to explore the rest of the 116 acres. The house had been rented for years with no attention given to the land - which in Maleny means that you can't see it due to the wonderful growing climate creating a 5m canopy of lantana and sprouting trees.

Kathryn's kitchen

After

The best thing we brought was this
bakers oven for slow cooked casseroles













But we found our community and slowly started to become a part of it which we shall never leave.

Our first task was to knock down the house we found, the one Kathryn said that she would not set foot in. But the cunning farmer who built it had mixed his own concrete to a specification similar to wartime bunkers. Worse still his son had welded together a series of metal girders from deep in the ground and which anchored the roof that formed an unmovable object.

Luckily a one off lesson in Tai-Chi had introduced me to the notion of using an apponent's strength to one's own advantage. So we stripped off the roof and internal walls down to the concrete floors on both levels and started from the beginning using a framework that the engineers report suggested was overkill even by heavy commercial standards.

A change of plan














I now know that it would have been far cheaper to have built a new Queenslander, but I am not sure that we could have found anyone willing to build a house that looks both beautiful and yet so robust and strong.

We then started on the second Queenslander which was technically an extension of the main house but local planning laws allowed it to be over 100m away and totally self-contained. Kathryn uses this as her office and for holding seminars for up to 20 people.

Our plan was that we could always rent this out later on in life if we needed the income. The local council indicated that if we pursued our commercial interests on the land either as a seminar venue with cabins or with farm forestry that justified an additional managers dwelling then they would also grant this.
The office






















Kathryn did not fancy looking after cabins so we dumped this idea and had Greening Australia set us up with a pathway for the whole property to become a certified forestry business which will be very useful on the tax front once the trees start to be planted.