Hillbillies

That's what we are apparently.

We have seen quite a few houses and blocks of land by now and every time we can only get really enthousiastic when it's in the hills. Plenty of houses with a nice backyard. Most of them have gumtrees and a bit of grass. It is not unusual to get a local loan-goat from someone else in the neighbourhood to 'cut' the grass. You can't really mow it yourself with all that steepiness!

Suddenly we were in love for a short while with a really nice block of hill-land, including a Skippy trail through the garden and a local Wombat.
So we put on our Sherlock Holmes hats to find out what exactly is involved to start building on it. Hmmm, that looked a bit more complicated than we thought: there's no water connection so that will have to come from rainwater (did we mention the decade low draught?). Also, there's no drain so that will have to be sceptic. And of course it's a 15 minute crawl uphill pitch dark back from the pub.
The final straw came from our new Rock & Roll teacher: his house got complete burned 10 years ago on his birthday in that same area. Extremely high risk of burshfires apparenlty. That's why the area is nicknamed 'the chimney'. The fire brigade doesn't even go there and everbody that lives over there always has a suitcase ready with valuable belongings, just in case...

OK, so we're cured from that, for now anyway.

The fire brigade does intentionally set of a small bushfire as well to burn off some of the dry leaves in a controlled manner (see picture) before they can cause an unscheduled bushfire.