[iop890]

Great thread.

[glugger]

(06-04-2017 10:13 AM)Germanicus Wrote:  

(06-04-2017 01:53 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

I’m far more likely to be bitten by a venomous snake or crushed by a tree I’ve just cut down for firewood.

Great post.

Yeah, you rural Australians deserve a lot of credit for thriving where you are. Considering the plethora of poisonous snake species, the type of insects, and even that the cuddly animals like Kangaroos and Koalas could still fuck you up I've always mused that Australia was God's way of really seeing how much balls European settlers could muster.

I remember hanging out with Australian army guys and some of our guys were curious about maybe emigrating south and joining up. Which led to the Oz army guys talking about the jungle warfare portion of their training and how they had to rip off the bark of a certain tree, find a live tree slug, 6-8 inches long, and eat it right there in front of the instructors. Didn't eat the bug, didn't pass jungle survival, didn't pass the course. Now they could've been taking the piss on some dumb Canadians, but you fuckers are crazy, and I can totally see your troops having the nuts to pull that off.

That sounds like a witchety grub. They are a commonly known edible bug, that I guess the aboriginals once ate regularly. Although it obviously isn't the most the most pleasant thing in the world, it is not as gross as it sounds.

I personally think that all the supposed treacheries of Australia are grossly exaggerated. Nothing here can kill you besides your ignorance or unwariness.

[SamuelBRoberts]

(06-04-2017 12:09 PM)glugger Wrote:  

Nothing here can kill you besides your ignorance or unwariness.

And the drop bears.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

I already engage in some small-time organic farming for my personal consumption - mostly vegetables, but chickens are likely next. I also have a business idea connected with it. But frankly I don't trust Australia be the right kind of place for such an undertaking.

However - who knows - since globalists are buying islands off New Zealand it may not be a bad bet.

[Elster]

I think I will breed personal defense dogs and biological surveillance systems (also known as birs) as a biz once I get my land running

[debeguiled]

Great thread, Mr. Neubache.

Reminded me of this dude, from McCook Nebraska:



He might be up your alley:

[evilhei]

I acquired some land and old farm house in rural area this spring. Been fixing it up and already have spent couple of nights there. That farm spot can be tracked back at least 350 years and the house itself must be more then 150 years old. I have grown up and lived in cities whole my life.

I was introduced into the local community because I already knew one respected member there. The community is small, consisting of few villages with total of maybe couple of hundred people but its so different from what I have experienced in growing up and living in cities all my life. People know each other, visit each other, share tools and resources with their neighbours. All the building materials etc come from locals. Fish that I pay 15 euros a KG in the city comes free from local fisherman who get some other stuff in exchange from people. I am still trying to find more ways to add value back into the local community myself.

Without the introduction however I have a feeling I wouldn't been accepted just yet and I would have needed to make some serious effort.

I can't get enough of the country and trying to find more time to spend there. I am waiting to move there, winter proofing the house, getting a few horses and raising my children there.

[Ski pro]

I grew up urban, changed it all around 8 years ago to come live in the Alps. Everything you say is accurate. There is so much value in community. Sometimes it's a little claustrophobic but that's the price you pay for knowing everyone.

Recently, I've been living in a city again and it's so soulless. Moving back to the mountains in a week with Mrs sp and sp Jr. Cannot wait.

[Chaos]

Great post.

I have grown up and lived most of my life in a place like you are describing. It's on the other side of the world in the far north but it sounds identical. Except for the shotgun weddings. We bring knives.

I have travelled and spent time in many cities in 60 countries all over the world and I would never switch my own village, house and land for any other place. And raising a family anywhere else is unthinkable when I know how great and safe my place is.

However, about the girls. Here, most girls move away for studies when they are young, many have fallen for the career dream and they are aiming to live their life in California,Australia or any other mainstream trendy place. The result of that is that we have a lot of single men. You have to catch the girls before they head out studying somewhere. It's not trendy and popular to live on the countryside and it seems like a fair share of girls consider themselves as failures if they are not living in a metropolis.

The screening you describe is hilarious but very true. I have both dragged a Russian girl and Ukranian girl to live me for a while and they got screened pretty hard.

With that said, because the life in the forest is pretty silent most of the time I like to travel and spend time abroad a few times every year.
90% of the time I go to big cities because I enjoy the buzz.

I used to think for a while that I was dealt a bad hand of cards in life because I'm born in a place like this, but after traveling around the world, living in cities and meeting all sorts of people I have realised how insanely lucky I am. Having your own land and mansion, living in a community with your family close around you is pretty good.

I'm in the 22nd generation of owners of this place, straight bloodline from father to son for more than 520 years, perhaps even longer but they didn't track people any earlier than that.

I guess it's time and my duty to start making some children for the 23rd generation.

[Kona]

Leonard what do you and your family eat?

Do you grow stuff? Hunt / fish? Raise animals? If so what?

Do you just drive far to a grocery store?

If you do fish, where do you do it and what do you catch?

That's a lot of questions.

Aloha!

[Zona]

Great datasheet Leonard. It warrants a long overdue +1 from me! I've spent a good deal of time in small, rural communities and pretty much everything you said rings true from my experience.

And for whoever it was (Fortis?) who asked about rural life in the desert, it can be tough.

I live in a very rural desert area and water is definitely an issue here. Many areas in the US have large bodies of water they can tap into or decent groundwater supplies, so wells are the norm. Not here.

Here you'll occasionally find someone who has a well (or sometimes multiple people will have a "well share" agreement where they all use a certain amount of water from the same source), but for the most part we have to pipe water in through the local rural water company. If SHTF and we somehow lose our water supply due to contamination or drought, pretty much everyone in this general area is fucked.

Then you add in the extreme heat, arid land that makes growing food difficult, the plethora of venomous/poisonous critters (rattlesnakes, scorpions, and spiders are very common, and they even find their way into the house occasionally), not to mention the heavy illegal trafficking activity…and rural life in the desert is no cakewalk. It definitely wouldn't be my first choice for riding out the end of the world as we know it.

For those of you who are considering this lifestyle, I'd suggest avoiding the desert unless you're really in love with its beauty or the climate. Personally, I'm trying to move elsewhere, but ideally I'd still like to live in the sticks if/when I decide to start a family.

[Leonard D Neubache]

(06-04-2017 03:07 PM)Kona Wrote:  

Leonard what do you and your family eat?

Do you grow stuff? Hunt / fish? Raise animals? If so what?

Do you just drive far to a grocery store?

If you do fish, where do you do it and what do you catch?

That's a lot of questions.

Aloha!

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to the thread.

Me and my family used to grow our own food to some degree but in the end it was a major time sink that was apparently more suited to retired people in the area and so we mostly just buy vegetables from them instead. The local butcher of course sources his products locally and the meat is on a whole other level to the stuff you would buy in the city.

I hunt, if you could call it that. It's really just vermin control for the farmers. Possums and wallabys breed faster than the rabbits out here and actually put a serious dent in the pasture levels of the farmer's fields. You can shoot a hundred in a night, come back the next night and shoot 100 more. Unfortunately they taste like crap. Kangaroos are about and they're a little more palatable if you cook them the right way. There are deer about but I haven't started hunting them yet. Like the duck hunting, it's regulated and I'm not interested in going through the paperwork. Maybe next year. Who knows. In any case, if the shit ever hit the fan then nobody out here is going to go hungry. You could knock over enough wild game in an evening to feed a small army, though they'd grumble about the taste. As for fishing, I'm about the worst fisherman you'd ever meet. I'm actually cursed. I once went to a trout farm. The ones where you can toss a pebble into the water and see it churn with fish like spa bath. I still couldn't catch a fish, even there. Nobody could figure it out. Not even the nice man running the place.

We have a small grocery store in town. The larger "proper" one is a half an hours drive away at a larger country town. Another hour on the road gets you to a small city.

Aside, it's interesting how people tend to find the natural hazards of foreign areas to be more frightening than the dangers of their own back yard. We have snakes and spiders but so do Americans, only our "bears" are as big as a middle sized dog and American bears are the size of a small car.

I once walked down a track in summer and passed by 23 (I was counting) deadly snakes sunning themselves. In each instance I waited for them to slither away and continued walking. To me, that's less concerning than the possibility of stumbling across a grizzly or a mountain lion.

[Leonard D Neubache]

A side note about young women being slim pickings in the country.

I personally get the sense that the trend of young women leaving for the city life is beginning to reverse.

It was an assumption back when the cities were safer and the jobs market was running full steam ahead, but now that things are more dangerous and there's more competition for work I believe young women are deciding that it's all a bit too scary and they'd rather play housewife for a living.

Silver linings in a declining society I suppose.

[Paracelsus]

(06-04-2017 07:11 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

I hunt, if you could call it that. It's really just vermin control for the farmers. Possums and wallabys breed faster than the rabbits out here and actually put a serious dent in the pasture levels of the farmer's fields. You can shoot a hundred in a night, come back the next night and shoot 100 more. Unfortunately they taste like crap. Kangaroos are about and they're a little more palatable if you cook them the right way.

1:37 - Leonard gives culinary tips to his kids.

[Laner]

Tasmania eh, now its starting to come together.

I spent a good part of a year down there when my boss sent me to a farm north of Bicheno to do ranch work for a friend of his. Mostly fencing. A fck load of fencing.

It was good except when the owner got shitfaced. He had a homely German girl to do the cooking and he would drink a bunch of white Russians and then hit on her horribly. It got real bad one night so I stole his ute and took her into Bicheno for the last time. He became aggressive toward me so I quit too.

I did a weed harvest near Deloraine for a bit as well. This was better, I had a Japanese chick in Davenport and a cute little country girl in Launceston. Clipping buds was perhaps the worst job ever as I sat in a room with a bunch of stoned out hippy chicks all day. I managed to flip a bunch of weed in Melbourne for the guy and was tempted to do some more runs but thought better of it. I am not much of a drug guy.

I do love Tasmania, and of all the rural places in Oz its still my favorite. Its patchwork of villages and towns is about perfect for rural living, as nothing is too far from anything, unless you get down into the south west. But its pretty wet down there, the rolling hills in the north are bit more ideal. Also the beaches of the north east are perhaps the best in the world for this climate. The white sand is so fine it squeaks under foot.

Good for you Len, you chose a fantastic spot to live your life and raise a wonderful family.

[SamuelBRoberts]

(06-04-2017 07:11 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

Aside, it's interesting how people tend to find the natural hazards of foreign areas to be more frightening than the dangers of their own back yard. We have snakes and spiders but so do Americans, only our "bears" are as big as a middle sized dog and American bears are the size of a small car.

I once walked down a track in summer and passed by 23 (I was counting) deadly snakes sunning themselves. In each instance I waited for them to slither away and continued walking. To me, that's less concerning than the possibility of stumbling across a grizzly or a mountain lion.

I think there's some truth to this.

I know how to deal with mountain lions. They're big, and they don't really want trouble any more than you do, I think, so they growl and make a lot of noise. So you just puff yourself up as big as you can, fix your eyes on wherever they're at, and walk backwards for a while until you're out of sight. Granted, I've run into one exactly once, but that seemed to work just fine when I tried it.

I don't know how to deal with 23 deadly snakes on the walking path, except perhaps by napalming the entire surrounding area, then getting General Mattis to lend you one of those MOABs to just blast the place flat. If that's not available, I might want to try getting one of those big old minesweeper trucks they use in Iraq to clear the place flat, or perhaps invest in a pair of cybernetic legs that they couldn't bite.

Pictured below: My new ride.


23 deadly snakes on the walking path. Jesus Christ. No wonder there's no refugee problem in the country. The refugees probably die screaming within the first 12 hours.

[fokker]

^ The refugees usually prefer Melbourne and Sydney. You'd be hard-pressed to find one in the rest of the country, but they're appearing in other states as well.

[Tex Cruise]

Excellent datasheet. I'll have a couple of things to add once I've thought about it but just quickly on this...

(06-04-2017 07:15 PM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

A side note about young women being slim pickings in the country.

I personally get the sense that the trend of young women leaving for the city life is beginning to reverse.

It was an assumption back when the cities were safer and the jobs market was running full steam ahead, but now that things are more dangerous and there's more competition for work I believe young women are deciding that it's all a bit too scary and they'd rather play housewife for a living.

Silver linings in a declining society I suppose.

I don't think they're coming back just to be housewives, but also to take up middle management and administration nothing jobs that didn't used to exist in "agribusiness".

Pick up any agriculture based newspaper. Not just a regional paper but a farmer's paper, (like The Land, Weekly Times, or Queensland Country Life) and look at the number of women in these type of roles. It's staggering. I often deal with one large agricultural company and by my estimates it has gone from 95% male to over 70% female in the last decade.

With a notable drop in productivity.

[Paracelsus]

(06-05-2017 01:22 AM)fokker Wrote:  

^ The refugees usually prefer Melbourne and Sydney. You'd be hard-pressed to find one in the rest of the country, but they're appearing in other states as well.

They're sometimes used as cheap labour in country areas where you can wholesale import large populations of uneducated Muslim knuckledraggers whose visas depend on not questioning their pay and conditions. There is a notable abbatoir in Western Australia that specifically uses camelfuckers at its plant in the middle of nowhere precisely because they don't speak a lot of English. Yay 457 visas.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Probably the most dangerous immigrants on a day-to-day basis are the Somalians and Sudanese.

As usual the worst of their criminality is covered up or there would be serious outrage.

Thankfully these southern areas are generally too cold for them, and given the chance to avoid it they don't come down here. Of course the usual characters are desperately trying to push through plans to brown our intolerably white island by any means necessary.

[Geomann180]

This is one of the most interesting threads on the forum.

More please.

G

[Leonard D Neubache]

I had an interesting moment today. I was cutting down a tree for firewood. It seemed like a no-brainer. The tree had a good lean. No drama.

Down it goes, and it clips another tree 30 feet away and maybe 50 feet high. The second tree whips back from the impact, suffering a broken branch in the process, and proceeds to whip back and toss this branch at me like a bloody missile.

Two things I did wrong. Once the tree started to fall I raised the visor on my helmet. Not only was it too early but the raised visor (acting like a giant baseball cap) meant I didn't see this thing coming until the last moment. I flinched enough that it glanced off of me and it still felt like I'd been kicked by a mule. When I figured out what had happened I found the offending branch. It was only two feet long and weighed a kilo at most.

Glass half empty, glass half full? The latter I suppose. A nice bruise is a cheap price to pay for a lesson about the perils of complacency.

[KeeperNine]

(06-04-2017 04:19 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

I live in Tasmania, the island state to the south.

This whole time Leonard has been masquerading as an Australian, as a true blue, fair dinkum aussie.
But the truth has finally come out, he's not an Australian, he's a Tasmanian. Real shame that is.

   

[Easy_C]

If you want quick acceptance in that community, I would also HIGHLY recommend getting involved in some kind of local fraternal organization. I'm personally leery of masons because of their ties to everything else going on, but there any number of others (e.g. knights of Columbus, vets organizations if you are one) that will help get you plugged in socially. Also you can join anywhere then transfer membership.

[Easy_C]

His thread also reminded me of another point about why city living sucks.

It used to be the case that "community" was a very real thing in the cities too. People would live and do business in their ethnic boroughs where almost everyone knew each other and the local religious leader helped cement the community together. That ended when people fled to the suburbs.