It was a cold, wet winter’s night in Melbourne when we decided we needed a place in the sun. Of course we weren’t so far into the red wine that we’d consider living in Deep North Queensland. This was the 1980s and Queensland was practically a police state at the time, so we settled on Northern New South Wales and bought a farm just inland from Byron Bay. When I say farm, it was more of a large, neglected, overgrown cow paddock. We hadn’t even settled the title when we received our first fine for noxious weeds from the local council. Thistles grew up to our armpits and the lantana was so rampant that we later discovered a two hundred yard dry stone wall that nobody even knew was there.
We weren’t deterred. We’d bought the farm for the future. We hired a manager and got him to draw up a plan to turn the paddock into a Macadamia farm. We got a consultant to regenerate the rainforest. We were still committed to work in Melbourne but we headed north as often as possible. The trouble was the farm had no farmhouse and finding accommodation in Byron Bay for eight people wasn’t easy, especially over the Christmas period. That’s when the houseboat idea came up. The Richmond River joins the sea at Ballina, about twenty minutes south of the farm. We could live on the houseboat there. Drive up to the farm. I wasn’t keen on the idea. Not that I had any premonition of what that houseboat or the Richmond River was like. I just didn’t fancy the idea of spending a week on a boat with three other adults and four kids. Fortunately Annie’s teenage niece Rohan, was spending Christmas with us. I phoned Martin with the bad news.
“We can’t take a houseboat. They’re only licensed to sleep eight. There are nine of us.”
“No worries” said Martin. “We’ll hire two houseboats; one for you, one for us. We can have races up the river. Talk to each other on the boat radio. Big Fish to Rubber Ducky. It’ll be great.”
If only I’d known.
