Ever since people asked me why I settled in Nelligen - if "settled" is the right word! - I have been asking people who came after me the same question. Their answers have been as varied as the people themselves but often there was a personal twist to it, just as there was to mine, as I explained in "Why Nelligen? Why not?".
Two people I asked were a couple from Victoria who bought a house here for no better reason than that their best friends had also bought a house here. When their friendship broke up, first their friends and then they moved away again. Which made my own plan in 2003 to relocate to the little town of Childers a safer proposition since the person who had attracted me to it in the first place, Noel Butler, my best friend for the best part of thirty years, had already been dead for eight years by then and was not likely to leave as he already lived in my memory forever.
After a lifetime spent in New Guinea, Noel had struggled - a struggle we shared - to make himself at home again in Australia, first at Caboolture, then at Mt Perry, and finally at Childers. He never quite succeeded since, as he put it, after a lifetime spent in PNG, "my spiritual home will always be New Guinea". He had either succeeded in finding his home in Childers, or his sudden death in 1995 had prevented him from trying his luck somewhere else again. I like to think that, for the last eight years of his life, he had found his home in Childers, so that when potential buyers knocked on the door of "Riverbend" just after I had begun to advertise it more than twenty years ago, I thought I check it out. What I am suggesting here is that, unless it is for work reasons, we usually have a personal reason for choosing the place we want to live in, and that the memory of Noel had been mine for driving to Childers.
And I wasn't disappointed. As I wrote in my travel diary then, "Childers, some fifty kilometres from Bundaberg, is a National Trust town and has a real community spirit. People know each other without living in each other's pockets as they can satisfy their curiosity from the constant stream of visitors who stop over for a day or two or, in the case of a whole bunch of overseas backpackers, work in the area as fruit pickers. The town is surrounded by rolling hills which are covered in sugarcane and avocado plantations. Everything seems to grow in the deep red soil! Most of the town's population live in highset 'Queenslanders' which are ideal for the subtropical climate. The footpaths are shaded by huge Brazilian leopard trees where locals and visitors sit at small tables taking their refreshments. This continues well into the night when the four pubs open their doors to the warm breeze. Before we had finished our first drink at the Childers Hotel, we had met people from as far away as Perth and Tasmania and struck up a long conversation with the licensee who happened to have lived just about everywhere, including my own 'stamping grounds' New Guinea, Burma and Saudi Arabia! It's a small world and it all comes together in Childers!"
Next day was much of the same. My diary again, "Beautiful morning at Childers! My old mate Noel Butler used to live here and at Mt Perry after he had come down from New Guinea in the late 70's. We had met aboard the PATRIS on the way to Europe in 1967 and kept in touch all those years until he passed away in 1995. We drove out to Mt Perry, which experienced renewed mining activities, to look at Noel's old house. Stopped at the not-so-grand Mt Perry Grand Hotel for a beer and a chat with the locals and some of the newly-arrived mine workers who were a colourful bunch. It left me to ponder what I might be doing today had I taken up Noel's invitation in 1985 to join him at Mt Perry which, as he put it, would have given him a new lease of life. His last place on the outskirts of Childers was now shaded by well-established trees and groves of banana and paw-paw trees, thanks to his hard work. What a difference from Christmas 1990 when I last visited him here!"
At the back of my mind had been to look at some houses. If I could find something suitable, I would sign on the dotted line. One that attracted my attention was the little split-level shown above, which was located at the edge of town at 5 Ginns Road. For me it "ticked all the boxes", but it was priced at $290,000 at a time when most houses in Childers sold for under $200,000. Had the price been lower, I might have signed on the dotted line. Someone else did shortly afterwards at $275,000. In the end, all I finished up buying on that trip was a new pair of shoes.
Over twenty years later, we are still at "Riverbend" and the same house is again for sale - this time for $785,000 - after it had been resold in 2007 for $371,000 and again in 2013 for $410,000, which should tell you something about the real estate market over the past twenty years as well as about the difficulties of selling at the high end of the market (it does also debunk the myth that house prices double every seven years).
I also still have those shoes I bought in Childers in 2003, although I have not worn them for quite a while. Perhaps it's time I tried them on again.
