Staring Down the Beast by Keith Livingstone

Author:Keith Livingstone [Livingstone, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504315234
Publisher: Balboa Press AU
Published: 2018-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The Inland Sea Change

In early 2004 we left Swan Hill and purchased Moira Lakes, a 14 acre historic property in the Barmah Forest, a 400 metre walk from the Murray River. I could kayak from my property border on the Broken Creek out into the Barmah Lakes in a few minutes. The plan was to run a bed and breakfast in the spare cottage, (a restored 1870s wooden cottage), as well as run a part-time chiropractic practice for locals in an office off the cottage verandah. The plan was thought out in great detail, but we forgot to tell God. He had other plans it seems. We signed for the property without realizing Joanne was several weeks pregnant, so that put a spanner in the works.

In June 2004, Henry the Fourth came along. We had planned a home birth for our fourth child, and for three days we had a midwife on call in our guest cottage, waiting for Henry to get going. Those few days cost over $3000, but we had to have the delivery in the Echuca Hospital, forty kilometres away, as Henry’s umbilical cord was twisted in a loop around his neck, preventing the delivery from proceeding naturally. When Henry finally did arrive, the poor little guy looked like he’d been in a street fight, with a swollen purple head and black eyes. He later turned into an adorable little platinum blonde kid with blue eyes and big dimples.

For about 18 months, I played hobby-farmer with the 1956 Massey Ferguson tractor and a ride-on mower, attending mostly to watering the 3 acres of lawn and gardens near the two houses, and pruning the fruit trees. We had a water-right that enabled me to pump water from the Broken Creek, a tributary of the Murray River. The Broken Creek formed the eastern border of the property for 700 metres, before it opened up into the Barmah Lakes.

In 2006, Joanne’s parents, Graeme and Junette Phillips, returned to Bendigo after a long stint of service at Yirara College, a Lutheran-run secondary boarding school for aboriginal youth from all over the Northern Territory, sited in Alice Springs.

We decided to move to Bendigo so that the children could grow up with their grandparents very close by. We thought we could lease the property out in the interim. We bought a large old home overlooking a park, in Bendigo. We also decided to start a new practice in Bendigo, and had a goal of making it a centre of excellence in chiropractic. We sourced an old brick house on a street corner, in a main thoroughfare in Bendigo just a short walk from our home. This was to be our twenty-year practice, with a view to putting the children through an education at an excellent local grammar school, and eventually running it with associates who we could mentor to a high level.

It was not to be. After many delays with builders and planning permits, we eventually opened our amazing new clinic in September 2006.

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