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7.30am: Linda and Trevor call their goats, Bella and Annabella, to the homemade milking shed where they’ll get about 1.5 litres of milk from Bella. “Annabella isn’t a milk goat; we bought her to keep Bella company,” explains Trevor, who can now make milking a goat look easy, even though it took him and Linda more than a few tries to get the hang of it in the beginning.

Learning to milk a goat, however, was the least of the family’s challenges when they embarked on the sustainability experiment. “I was a bit dubious about the whole thing when Linda came home from work ranting about her plan,” recalls Trevor. “I’d lived the so-called ‘hippie dream’ when I was in my twenties in the 1970s. I formed a commune with a few friends

on 160 acres where we built mudbrick homes and tried living off the land, but it failed because the soil was no good and the possums ate all our crops!” he says with a laugh. “But Linda convinced me the ‘70s model of rejecting society for complete self sufficiency was different from the modern idea of reducing waste and power consumption through domestic sustainability.”

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“We did a lot of research,” adds Linda.

“We wanted to get it right and knew little about installing solar panels, composting toilets or rainwater tanks. We also did a detailed financial plan as it was going to cost about $26,000 to have everything installed even before we began.”

 

Words: Linda Peatling. Photography: Scott Hawkins. Hair & make-up: Carla Rattle

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