RENNIE gave me a lift from Miriam Vale, north of Bundaberg in Queensland, to Agnes Water, about 40 minutes away on the coast. Agnes Water is the last surf beach before the Great Barrier Reef.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Rennie told me he was going to throw himself in the sea. He had his surfboard stowed in the back of the ute. It sounded like there was something he needed to wash away.

He was 50 years old, with a heavy, but still-athletic build. He shifted constantly in his seat. There was a restlessness about him and the force of it engulfed the cab. He wore a shabby fedora-style hat and had a gap between his front teeth – the combination lent him the air of an old circus performer.

In fact, he was a shipwright by trade, a boat builder. At 14, during his school holidays, he began working as a deckhand on fishing trawlers. Then, at 16, he took three months off school and worked a stint as a cook at sea, and came back with ten grand for his troubles. School couldn’t keep him after that. He began his shipwright’s apprenticeship the next year.

I asked questions and Rennie’s tales tumbled out. He wasn’t a direct storyteller. “Bloomin” was his adjective of choice and he baited every line with it, twice over.

He’d worked on many famous boats and yachts built in this country: Australia II, Sydney-to-Hobart race winners, even Collins class submarines.

Some years ago he packed it in to start a business up north. “It was supposed to be about the simple life. I went to the Whitsundays with lots of money and left with none. It was the dengue. Nearly bloomin‘ killed me.”

Now he worked fixing up mining accommodation, moving from site to site and living each place a while. “All the ugliest places in the bloomin‘ country,” he said. “I never thought I’d be startin‘ again at 50.”

I mentioned that I wrote a column about sustainable housing and living.

“Don’t get me started on the building industry,” he said in a wild staccato, like I’d triggered an eruption, but his throat was too small a passageway for the flow of his mind. “The whole thing’s a bloomin‘ fraud. What’s wrong with this country is there’s too many rules and we’re too bloomin‘ comfortable.”

He told me that in north Queensland, all the coal money meant big, stupid houses. “In Gladstone, people are building garages with turntables in them, so when you drive in, it turns the car around for you.”

Rennie had chosen the timeless way instead. He had bought an expired mining lease on a hill overlooking the water near Gladstone, and was sculpting a small home into the rock, more than a kilometre through bush from the nearest car access. Sheer granite walls and benches.

“Gosh. Incredible!” I was the one gushing now. “I love hearing about handmade homes like that. Amazing. So how’d you do it? Can you just build anything you turn your hands to?”

“You could say that.”

He told me he’d carved a natural swimming pool deep in the rock behind the rest of the home, with a 40-metre skylight shaft. A few barramundi live in the pool. He used mirrors, like the Egyptians did, to shine light from the skylight throughout the other rooms.

He’d been working on the house for 16 years. “Started when my wife was alive. That’s the trouble with life, you know. You think you’ve got a plan and then your wife goes and bloomin‘ dies just to bugger it all up.”

The beach at Agnes Water

I STAYED a while at Crystal Waters, an ecovillage about half an hour from Maleny, on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Over 200 people live on 85 one-acre lots, spread among bushland and fields. No cats or dogs are allowed, but kangaroos and wallabies abound.

On my first night I woke after only a few hours. I was the only guest in the bunkhouse. The room seemed particularly familiar. As I lay thinking, I realised the room was set out exactly same way as the bedroom of my childhood. The bunk bed, the door and the window: they all fitted precisely. I looked up at the slats above me, at one moment utterly disoriented, and the next, so vividly a child again. The timing was slightly unsettling – I turned 30 this week.

When eventually I slept again, I woke to a sunny, steamy morning. The evening before I’d met Les Bartlett, who bakes sourdough loaves twice a week in his small bakery on Crystal Waters, and sells only locally. Today was a baking day and he’d said I could pop in.

In the morning I watched Les and Penny mix their doughs: sourdough starter, organic stone-ground flour, water, salt. Penny is from Melbourne, but is staying here to learn the craft. I came back at lunchtime and watched them shape the loaves with Leslie (Les’s partner), then returned again in the evening to watch the baking in a wood-fired oven – each time staying an hour or two to talk (or eat pizza and sip beer).

When the baking was nearly done, two young children knocked on the door. The boy said his mum had sent him for a loaf. Penny put a still-hot Pain de Campagne in a paper bag, and told him to set it on a cooling rack when he got home.

As they left, Les said, “That’s something isn’t it? He’ll never forget it.”

It’ll be a fine memory one day: walking to the community baker with your kid sister, and returning for dinner with fresh hot bread from the wood-oven.

It was a day to remember for me too. A gleaming day, a day when people are so kind and welcoming that everything clicks, like a turn at Chinese checkers where you jump all the way home.

Half a dozen Japanese hippies had set up camp during the afternoon. Les gave me a fruit-and-nut loaf for them. It was warm from the oven. The Japanese didn’t speak much English, but some things I understood: the murmurs in appreciation of the smell, the extended silence as they chewed, and then the contented mooing – the sound of satisfaction from their bellies.

Finally, one guy, called Nobu, held the remainder of his portion aloft and said: “It’s like art.”

Left to right: Penny, Leslie and Les 

AFTER a day’s dirty work in the garden, or painting ceiling boards, it’s always nice to have a shower to wash the humidity away. It is, however, especially enjoyable to shower at Mel and Ant’s place. They have an outdoor shower (see the photos below).

The water comes from a spring on their property, and Ant has rigged up a greywater system from the shower that feeds a banana circle.

The greywater runs down to a circular trench and mound (or swale), around which the bananas are planted. Bananas need lots of nutrients. In the middle of the circle you can put compost scraps and cut vegetation. Ant explained to me that to productively manage the circle, you should have banana plants in threes – a grandma, a ma and a baby. Only the grandma of produces bananas. Eventually she’ll be cut and composted in the circle and replaced by the ma, and so on: the circle of life (banana edition).

The shower looks like this:

The view from the shower looks like this (gosh):

LAST Monday I picked garlic all day. For a couple of hours in the afternoon the smell was so pungent my eyes went cloudy.

I was staying on Homeland, an intentional community in Thora, about half an hour from Bellingen. Brian, one of the residents, has grown a big curly afro, a thick mo‘ and two healthy patches of organic garlic.

We began at eight o’clock. The task was simple: pull the bulbs out of the ground without breaking the stalks, and group them in two rough clumps – big and small.

As the hours went on I narrowed my preferred picking stances to two: sitting cross-legged and scooting forward, and standing and bending down. Both caused me considerable discomfort, but in different ways, so switching over was brief, blessed respite.

Every now and then I shifted my gaze from the bulbs at my feet to the lush field beyond, then to the orange grove and to the purple-blue hills in the distance. Suddenly the deep lungfuls of air I inhaled seemed to smell sweet again. By knock-off time at five-thirty my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I felt overjoyed to be sore and finished, not just sore. 

A few days later I got talking with an Englishman in a pub. He had a miserable face, the kind you’d cast as a depression-era tax collector: sallow cheeks, a long, pointy nose, and arched eyebrows. He was a heater salesman before he packed it in for a round the world trip. He had blown 40,000 pounds (AUD$67,000) in just over a year, mainly on booze. He’d comfortably drink 15 pints in a night, he said.

I told him I’d been garlic picking for a day and that it was damn hard work. And he said, “Nah, can’t be hard, you just reach up and take them off the tree.”

The garlic patch, from a safe distance.