Lloyd Morecom lives in the Sth Gippsland town of Foster and writes a
fine blog http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/ this is one of
his latest entries

The fundamental choice I made about how my life was to be ordered was
my decision to make attachment to place a priority over following a
career. By making such a choice a very different set of values then
follow from the ones dictated by climbing the slippery pole of career
ambition. This is not to say that I haven't had any sort of career. I
have, but it's been bounded and limited by a higher loyalty. I do
what I need to do to live in this place, although sometimes that has
involved working in other places for a while, such as in Indonesia
and Thailand in order to set myself up financially, or Melbourne in
the eighties when I needed more social stimulus.

By making such a fundamental choice, one's life is greatly
simplified. It's easy to work out what your subsidiary values are.
Because you will spend a long period of time in a local community,
the kinds of artificial aids one needs to bolster one's prestige in a
larger and more abstract social milieu aren't needed. What's the
point of a prestige car when for better or worse, everyone knows what
kind of person you are anyway? And in any case, the flash car doesn't
look flash for long once your wife starts carting her goats around in
the back.

Office and career politics can be a thorny issue in any job, but if
everything doesn't hinge on it and you were only in it for the money
and a bit of fun in the first place, if you fall off the slippery
pole, it's no longer a shattering tragedy.

Of course communities can be toxic too, or just plain unlucky. It
pays to back winners in this life. It may be admirable to devote your
life to helping lepers in Burma, but it's not likely to be a great
place to bring up the kids and you can forget the notion of
participation as a full citizen in national life. Even in this wide
brown land, there are places I personally would give a wide berth to.
What's the point of being president of the Wittenoom Progress
Association? In the same way and with the broadest and crudest brush-
strokes, I would not consider any where inland of the Great Dividing
Range. Too dry, too vulnerable to climate change and almost always
too vulnerable to changes in single economic variables (export
agricultural products for starters are exposed to market
fluctuations, climate variations and land degradation through
irrigation and dry land salinity).

I've got nothing against city or suburban living per se. There are
vibrant and sustainable communities in cities and big towns, and the
larger and more diverse a place is, the more reslient it is likely to
be in the face of the changes which are now upon us. So small
communities like Foster are liable to be less viable and more
vulnerable than bigger ones.

But I'm used to living here, I've lived in a diversity of other
places and looking at it with a cold objective eye it's got a lot
going for it. And that's what you need: a cold clear look at the
frying pan you're leaping from into which fire? What follows is
Lloydy's rough guide to thinking about this sort of decision.

Sea or Tree Change? Nothing wrong with that, but think carefully
about where you're moving to. No low lying coastal properties! And if
you're thinking about a move to the tropics, consider how you'd go
without air-conditioning, and the likelihood of extreme weather
events such as cyclones.

Again, consider location before all else! What are you really after?
Is what you're seeking a realistic vision which you know will work,
or is it just a remnant of a fantasy you had while trapped in the
cube farm? You remember that weekend you and your wife had in the
cabin tucked away in a rain forest a couple of years ago – that's
what you want! Whoa buddy! No it isn't! In the end, there is a common
human pattern which governs the good life. We need food, shelter,
love and companionship, meaningful work and community. You move into
your cabin in the woods and what happens? You'd forgotten about the
mosquitoes, the leeches. You run out of firewood in the middle of a
week of solid rain. Your wife gets run off the road by a logging
truck and becomes too traumatised to drive herself anywhere. You find
in winter you're driving into town in the dark and home in the dark,
dodging wallabies and wombats, not very successfully, and in eighteen
months, the gravel roads hammer your gorgeous little European car to
death. There are only two crappy TV stations. After your house
warming party, you don't see anyone for months at time, until
Christmas, when all your old friends turn up with their surly
teenagers and have a holiday for free. You discover your close
neighbours, who you made a big effort to befriend when you first
arrived, are barking mad. They borrow your tools and never return
them, and you find yourself having vague and troubling conversations
with them at the mailbox involving long running feuds, guns and dark
marital secrets. And all this is assuming the price of fuel still
makes driving hundreds of kilometres a month, in and out of town,
affordable!

Live in or very close to a town. Assume at some stage that you will
need to do without a car at all. Chose your town with care. It should
have a diverse population, with reasonable medical services and other
professionals, and not be overly dependant on one crop or industry.
Is it dependant on irrigation which may fail? Don't live in a place
surrounded by tall trees unless you want to spend every summer
terrified by the smell of smoke. Don't be sucked in by charming old
buildings. And don't buy low lying properties on the coast. Remember?
Global Warming? Sea level rise? Long before the waves wash over your
mansion on the beach at Mollymook, its value will have collapsed
through sheer fear of sea level rise. You won't be able to get
insurance on it either. Be sensible!

Look at the people. Try and gauge their feelings about the place. Is
it ruled on Saturday nights by gangs of drunken louts in noisy cars,
looking for someone to fight? Get the local paper and look at the
police reports. What sorts of crime get reported weekly? If it's just
lost wallets and speeding fines, with the odd break in of sheds on
remote properties, it should be OK. Is the shopping centre full of a
lot of empty shops? Look at the demeanour of the people you see in
the street. Do you see lots of people in conversation on busy days
with smiles on their faces? Are the young people friendly or surly?
Remember everywhere has its oddballs, so don't focus too much on them.

Talk to school teachers if you have children who'll be going to local
schools. You may be lovely cultured people, but the wrong crowd in a
small town can destroy your kid's lives, or force you to send them to
boarding school. On the other hand, the right crowd will give them a
confidence, straightforwardness, lack of cynicism and ability to mix
with all types which they would never get in the City. They will be
big fish in a small pond, and get the kind of attention to their
education which you'd need to pay serious money for anywhere else. I
know some remarkable groups of people who've grown up together in
country towns and who've gone on to adult life staying in close touch
with each other and doing great things, in particular a bunch of
people from Mallacoota in East Gippsland who I've worked with on many
diverse projects over twenty years, and who've become musicians,
builders, writers and film industry professionals, and with whom you
could trust your life.

So you decide to make your move. You find the ideal house, you have
work lined up. Good. Now you need to get some tradesmen in to do some
work and you've struck your first problem. It takes forever to get
the builder/plumber/electrician. And beware of someone who's too
available. The good tradies are always booked well ahead.

Now you will be starting to measure your dreams against the reality.
Just don't forget the locals will be doing the same to you. Everyone
is very friendly, but it all comes down to one thing. Are you a good
payer? If you want to discover whether it's possible for something to
travel faster than the speed of light, mess a local tradesman around
over money. Every other local tradie will know instantly and they'll
never return any of your calls. Oh, they'll nod politely to you in
the street and make vague noises about coming over sometime, but
you'd better call someone from out of town if you want the job done
in this lifetime.

This is the reality of life in a small community. Every act outside
your front door is public act, and there are no private
conversations. The small acts of kindness and patience will be
noticed, and so will every insult and act of deviousness. Don't run
the person you bought the business from down in conversation with
your customers. Let them do that, after all, it was their
brother/uncle/ daughter in law. Treat everyone with equal respect and
decency and you'll gain a reputation as a good person and it wont do
you any harm.

Everyone knows who the local dope dealer is, and who made a move on
the teenage baby-sitter. In the town I grew up in people still spoke
of a scandalous pregnancy resulting in a broken engagement which had
taken place sixty years before.

The upside is that when disaster strikes, like a serious illness, or
your house burning down, the community will get behind to help in a
way that will astonish you.

http://southgippslandfutures.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-foster-why-
south-gippsland.html