I don't want to strain the relationship needlessly, but isn't it about time you put the fence between our properties back in the right position?
You needlessly had my original survey pegs bulldozed - even though a bulldozer was only required when you eliminated the fence between your property and the communal lagoon - and I had to pay several thousand dollars to obtain a new survey.
Before the pegs from this new survey disappear again, I would like the fence positioned along them. I would also like our boundary with the communal lagoon NOT fenced in, as I quite like the kangaroos visiting our property.
Also, we have some prospective buyers for the property who insist on a clearly defined boundary.
Thank you for your attention in this matter."
They say, "Good fences make good neighbours", but several years ago, our neighbours bulldozed our simple but adequate fence and replaced it with heavy barbed-wire fencing, ostensibly to keep their cattle in, but in doing so also removed all markers from a survey I had carried out when I bought the property in 1993. The new fence seemed to suffer from "boundary creep", and it cost me another expensive survey to establish that the fence had crept onto our property by as little as one metre at one end to as much as a massive four metres at the other.
In the interest of good neighbourliness I was not too bothered and only made a passing remark about it. After all, we live on over seven acres, so what are a few metres between friends, but that was before I read about this perverse law of adverse possession, colloquially known as "squatter's rights", which is a legal principle that allows a person who occupies land without the owner's permission to eventually claim legal ownership. To succeed, the occupier's possession must be continuous, exclusive, and hostile (without the true owner's consent) for a legally mandated period of time, which in New South Wales is twelve years.
I eventually mustered enough courage to dash off the above message.
