Why Remote Treechanger?

I have been thinking about a name for my new blog for a long time. I wanted a new blog that fit in with the suggestions of my blog review, but first I needed a name.

The one I chose is not ideal, because I am not a city person here to annoy the locals, although they may think so.

I was born to a farming family, who on my mother's side can be counted as pioneers and I could be involved in the Pioneer gatherings they have near my hometown these days. When I mention the word hometown, I mean the town I was born in, and lived in after my family left the farm when I was 14. I lived in "hometown" for 25 years and hubby lived there 2 years longer I think. Wow, I don't think I realised that, since he doesn't think of himself as attached to that place. We were both unwilling movers to the place in the first place. I had a culture shock myself moving to a town with I think then 16,000 people in it. We think it is like living in a suburb of Melbourne. We never knew the grass outside of town was burnt to a crisp in summer, we didn't go there!

To be fair, when we were first married and lived in our first house I was still missing the country, and I dragged hubby to my childhood place 30 miles away often. Also he had a church friend with a farm and we went rabbit shooting very often, and hunting for ducks, quail, kangaroo, whatever.

On my father's side, I was the fourth generation on the farm. From the couple who started it, my Great-Grandma was from good Wimmera stock, which my husband can also lay claim too, his Grandma is the same.

It is ironic, that when I went to school in a tiny 30 child school which was considered a lot in those days, it was a lot smaller when I started, we only had a prep teacher for half a day then. In the afternoon we were all together in one room with it divided off with a bookcase, until the bookcase fell over, thankfully not hurting anyone. The irony is that the family names I went to school with, met at the school 8 miles away and heard about later at a place just down the road, were all people that lived where we have seachanged too. Their families had moved to where our farm was and we grew up together. The families weren't watered down by anything. By that I mean that, apart from us, and a couple of other families, the rest were from this place where I am now, or recently migrated from Italy or Spain.

Why did the families from where we are now go to live in the farming district where I grew up coincidently? I think it was a similar environment. Same cool weather, blue hills, it seems a similar culture as I have met people in another town nearby with my personality. Our hometown was not in the hills.

I'll start by saying I know we are remote in the town where we are now, as my husband gets paid a very small remote allowance to work here. I have as yet to work out if our new house about 30 miles down the road is remote as well. I started up a webpage a long time ago, haven't got very far with it as I couldn't seem to do much with the Bigpond hosting. I set it up as I had contacted a magazine that is free for people in the city and now regional centres I think saying I missed it. I used to pick up a copy of Melbourne's Child in 2003 when we lived an hour from the city of Melbourne. They said why don't I set up a website to help with the things that the magazine covered. It was called Remote Families. It took me quite a lot of searching when I first came here to find some online shopping to help me with being so far from the chain stores etc. Food was my particular interest. The photo at the top is one of the butterfly photos I have on the webpage, not this particular one, but more lifestage photos.

More about treechange in the next post.