Life

The author’s plan for a sustainable rural retreat became a lesson in the difference between engagement and control, and a reminder of the city’s charms. By Elizabeth Farrelly.

The real-life lessons of a rural retreat

Elizabeth Farrelly’s former farm, Broken Creek.

Credit: Supplied

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
– Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”, 1734

Self-knowledge is a fine thing but surprisingly arduous in the acquisition. “Ahem,” people would tut when, seven years ago, I bought my tiny farm. “Do you have any idea how much work this will be?” I didn’t, not really. “Work?” I’d reply. “Pah. I like work, including the physical sort.”

That was true. It was also, I discovered, wholly inadequate. Looking back, having sold my farm, you might call this whole thing a failure of self-knowledge – or maybe just a boot camp in acquiring it.

A key ingredient of self-knowledge is the self–stuff relationship – the sticky emotional web connecting the individual to their material world. Engaging questions of perception, knowledge, metaphysics and ethics as well as survival, this relationship generates meaning, delight and a sense of enduring identity. It spans psychology, anthropology, philosophy and was once a staple of religion.

Traditional religions, especially Christianity, are often torn in this regard – wanting both to revere poverty (“blessed are the poor”) even as they justify greed (think medieval abbots or modern prosperity religion). Contemporary culture is similarly equivocal, plaguing us with exhortations both to declutter and to acquire; to value access over ownership even as we buy, buy, buy. This bulimic tension informs the city versus country debate.

My love affair with the country wasn’t a tree change. It wasn’t even about farming per se. I wanted not to rewild my 40 acres but to experiment in food without destruction. This was regenerative agriculture – “regen ag” to its friends. Where industrial farming sees land as subject, regen ag makes it a collaborator, seeking to build soil, enhance rainfall and support a teeming biota even as it bears fruit. This struck me as very cool.

About that, I was right. What I hadn’t realised was just how uncomfortably this love would reshape my relationship with stuff.

Stuff is a form of empire – or, perhaps, umwelt. (Umwelt, literally “around world”, is any creature’s perceptual environment – habitat, hunting ground, weather et cetera.) Some humans have an umwelt so small – or a relationship with it so loose – that, like a naked sadhu, they own only the begging bowl from which they eat. Others feel driven to control not only all adjacent humans but entire continents or multinational corporations. Most of us occupy the middle of that spectrum.

The farm, which I christened Broken Creek, was a pretty, grassy paddock: a perfect square of shallow mountain valley with rickety perimeter fence, a dozen trees, a spring and a permanent boundary creek. It was designated “improved”, but that implied no infrastructure, just a one-time strewing of superphosphate and clover, despite which most of the grasses had (thankfully) reverted to native: kangaroo, wallaby, microlaena.

There I stood, day one, surveying my micro-paradise from the top gate, wondering where to start. It was drought, but the same would have held in sleet or snow. To do anything – sleep or make tea, much less grow or graze – I needed to build. A tent wouldn’t do. I needed a serious roof, protective walls, a lock-up for tools and a perch for solar panels, there being neither power nor phone access. Questions of the bare minimum loomed. What does survival demand? What do you need to farm, thrive, enjoy? With ultra-clear nights dropping to minus 10, insulation mattered. Before even that, a driveway.

It quickly became obvious why so many farmhouses hug the road. Driveways are expensive. Suddenly big things were happening – bulldozers, compactors, culverts, drainage channels and great piles of gravel. Next, a shed and the myriad tools you need for planting, fencing, composting, plumbing, wiring, insulation and waterproofing, closely followed by creature comforts – beds, cushions, furniture, rugs, books, pianos. And, of course, wi-fi.

Somehow my regen-ag dreaming had become almost dynastic, spreading over not just space but time. I now imagined my newly planted trees lining the drive grown to 60 metres, lofty with stately welcome, hosting generations of tree-house children, protecting bee colonies, mothering the future with fruit and shade and oxygen. I saw apples stored in haylofts, sleepy farm cats, filtered light, budding romances. All of that was decades away, of course, nothing to do with my here and now. But it was in my head.

It took me a while to acknowledge this, but slowly it dawned. Que sera, sera, for a start. The future’s not ours. But also, I started to see, my dreaming drew on a Downton Abbey version of country life, with dozens of ill-paid servants paddling frantically beneath every overprivileged toff and an entire compound of sheds, machines, creatures and equipment sucking in the world’s riches to keep the vast ship chugging happily along. It was based on empire.

Of course, we no longer operate quite that system of global theft, but the need for rural sufficiency remains. It’s the tyranny of distance. You can’t just call a man. Any farmer needs the full array of skills, strengths and machines to fix whatever breaks – and something breaks pretty much every day. It’s belt-and-braces everything – solar and diesel generator and candles, just in case. Pumps and troughs and springs. Even with regen ag, the scale is daunting. The effort to impose your mind and will across even 40 acres, much less 40,000, means even the bare minimum is immense.

It was this that became burdensome. I don’t really have an inner sadhu. I’ve never craved a tiny house or a remote cave. But as the rural need to own started to weigh on me I realised this was also what I’d always disliked about suburban life. As H. G. Wells noted with prescience in 1902, the suburb reifies “that craving ... for a little private imperium such as a house or cottage ‘in its own grounds’ ”. It’s a privilege that hides a trap. Traits that look like freedoms – the enveloping lawns, the wide roads, the distance between humans, the agglomeration of garages, sheds, trampolines, ensuites and pizza ovens – so easily climb on your back.

So I sold my farm, retreating instead to my natural umwelt, the airy inner-city apartment connected by a leafy 20-minute walk to pool and park, tram, cinema and shops.

The city is said to be distinguished by its nurturing of specialisms. Like a coral reef, it offers specific ecological niches to conservators of antique maps or teachers of Mongolian throat singing. A similar principle applies to stuff. To own less and drive less, as enabled by having immediate access to more, becomes not a deprivation but a privilege. It felt like freedom.

That doesn’t make stuff bad. Calvinism oversimplifies. Arguably, indeed, owning fewer objects lets you love them more, more richly. But it does mean we should rethink what we ask of the “city”. The difference between empire and umwelt is control. The city, too often traduced to cash machine or concrete jungle, is more like regen ag than you’d think, since it pivots on engagement rather than control. Which is why, at its best, it offers that greatest of freedoms, self-knowledge.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "From the manor torn".

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