Thirst for a “bit of a tree change and adventure” saw Anna Gaw and her family pack up their Brisbane home and move 12 hours, “sight unseen”, to Bungendore – a village of 5000 people in south-eastern New South Wales.
First raising the idea during the pandemic, Anna says the six-week lockdown gave her and husband Tom, the time to have “lots of conversations around what we wanted to do with our lives”.
Seeking an opportunity for their children to “experience more than Chapel Hill”, where the family were living in Brisbane, Anna says they initially moved with the intention to “just do it for a year”.
Putting Canberra on their radar, as they had friends there, Anna says “we thought if we are going to move, it would be nice to have somewhere where we at least had a contact. But we didn’t want to go from Brisbane city to Canberra city.”
Trawling through “Google maps for smaller towns close to Canberra” and relying on word of mouth, Anna says they had to “literally just pick somewhere” as they couldn’t travel with the border closures.
“We rang our friends in Canberra and said, where do you suggest we live?
“There were all the suburbs on the outskirts of Canberra, but we wanted to go more country,” she says, “so then they said, Bungendore is quite nice.
“So we Googled it and made our decision based on what we found on Google.”
Drawn by the relatively small population size, the town amenities with its school, dog park and pool, as well as its “ideal location between the coast and the mountains”, the family packed up and moved just five days before Christmas in 2021.
Anna says while she initially questioned if she “would like it here”, being so far from friends and family, she started to “slowly fall in love with the village lifestyle”, which has seen the family extend their initial 12-month stay for at “least another year” while they decide if they will “stay indefinitely”.
With Tom able to continue working remotely with Telstra, Anna applied for a job at the preschool and now divides her time as a teacher at the preschool and local public school as well as, starting her own business to work in early intervention and learning support.
Anna says securing local employment has been instrumental in “making connections and friendships”, with their children also “embracing the freedom that village living provides”.
“It has been really welcoming,” she says. “It was never like here’s the new people. It was, come on in, come and meet my kids, let’s go to the pub for a drink, there’s a festival on in Canberra if you want to join us.”
For those also looking to take the plunge and move regionally, Anna advocates to “just do it”.
“Do it for twelve months. Twelve months is a very short timeframe and if you don’t like it, you can always go back home.”
Anna says ensuring their children were involved in the decision-making process also helped the family adjust more quickly to the move.
“The kids will be fine,” she says. “You get a little bit anxious for them and hope they will be ok but we just made sure we included them in all the plans and the decisions and asked them for their input.”
Fifteen months in, Anna says Bungendore now feels like home.
“I didn’t realise how beautiful this part of the country is, we have done a lot of camping, Tom goes off fishing and there is all the mountain biking and hiking,” she says.
“We have been so lucky in landing where we did. It has been absolutely phenomenal.”
