Treechange

Seachange is mostly an Australian expression. Treechange is a variation of it. But yesterday I noticed Seachange had made it to mainstream web.

Here is a quote from the site: "Downshifting and seachanging can be the same thing but they need not be. For example, you can downshift and stay in the city, and you can seachange and keep a high income."

Why did we want to keep a high income?

We wanted to be as free of Centrelink as possible and maintain some sort of independence. It is not possible with children to do that entirely, but we are happy the way it is now more or less.

The other ideas for a name for my blog were centred around words like "accidental treechanger" agrarian, things like that.

What is agrarian? Agrarian, I didn't get a handle on except that it means someone that likes a particular place, likes farming. Well I am agrarian, I do love where I grew up, this point is brought home a lot, especially since my Dad died. Farming, well I haven't been on a farm since the age of 14 and had little to do with killing animals since my husband went corporate for 10 years and we didn't go hunting anymore. He finished corporate life in 2001. So I am still thinking about that. Our new house that we haven't moved into yet is zoned agricultural, so we will see. I will always feel displaced, but haven't done anything to rectify that. My brother has, I haven't. So I guess that is where the accidental fits in. How did I come to be 2 hours plus from my hometown and further from my farm homeplace?

In order to get back into my husband's old career we took a contract position with the view that since his skills were in apparent shortage that we could either stay there or get a job back home. This didn't happen. We were very grateful at the last minute to get a job here. There were no rental houses big enough for us at the time, so we bought instead. There were few houses available to buy as well, but this suits us well.

This is my favourite article about Seachange. There is an interesting list of reasons why people don't seachange here. And here is a website where you can view a video about the government's push to try to get more doctors to seachange. They even have the actual videos of some peoples new lives too.