Outback Heroines by Sue Williams

Author:Sue Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742535555
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2013-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

9

WORKING IN HARMONY WITH NATURE

Libby Maulder, Liffey, Tasmania

It was the start of one of the coldest winters Tasmania had ever known, and 27-year-old newly qualified doctor Libby Maulder shivered as she sat hunched in the draughty three-man tent, listening to the icy sleet slamming into the thin nylon walls.

For years she’d been dreaming of living in a wild area of Australia, close up with nature and far from the city and, despite feeling chilled to the bone, she’d never once regretted the move.

Even having to shower out of a bucket with a hose laced through the branches of a nearby tree, and cooking meals over a campfire outside, couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm. And she wasn’t daunted, either, when she discovered she was three months pregnant with her first child, and faced the prospect of having to spend her first few months as a parent, with husband Greg, nursing a newborn in a tent.

‘When you’re young, you can put up with anything,’ she laughs today. ‘I just knew that’s where I wanted to live, and I was ready to put up with any of the sacrifices that might entail.’

Those sacrifices, to anyone else, might have proved simply overwhelming. When the sun came up each day, Libby would wash in freezing water lugged up from the dam 50 metres away and dress quickly before she became numbed by the cold. She’d then set out along the mile-long driveway – little more than a ribbon of rocks and potholes that was so rough-going the couple didn’t have a single visitor for the next four years – to the nearby town to work shifts assisting the local GP. When she arrived back, she’d join Greg working by hand to build their house out of recycled timber that was so hard they had to drill into it first to be able to hammer in a nail.

‘But we’d bought some land above the snow line in one of the most beautiful out-of-the-way places in Australia, and somehow it didn’t matter that we had no more money left,’ Libby says. ‘It was hard, but it was a lifestyle choice, and we knew it would be worth it.’

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