…about people who change their lives to settle on the Range and why they choose to stay
Why did you come here?
We kind of landed here by luck really. We came up to visit some friends in Palmwoods. We stayed the night and then we came up again on a fully-fledged holiday. This place had a special lure for some reason, and that’s when we decided this is where we wanted to bring up our children. We also wanted some stability in our lives because we had been very nomadic because of my husband’s job in the defence force.
Our children are now ten and six and they were starting to establish their peer groups at school. Lily is now ten and Eleanor is six. We came here a year ago in August and it really feels permanent. There’s a nice sense of community and with the children at primary school age, you do get to meet a lot of people quite quickly.
What did you have to change in coming here?
Well, we’ve bought a business and that’s been a huge change. I was working part-time in Sydney, school hours, a little office admin job. In coming here we started running our own business and I hadn’t done that before. I was only a hobby gardener and I knew very little about bromeliads, so it was a huge learning curve. We did have a couple of broms in our garden in Sydney and that’s how we get introduced to them. But this was an opportunity to take it seriously. Where we’re situated is a beautiful outlook down to the sea and it provides an income-producing business.
Th
e previous owner had set it up 22 years ago, and we’ve got about 30,000 bromeliads. Bromeliads are native to South America but they are now hybridised extensively in Australia and around the world. We’ve got about 2000 hybrids from one hybridiser – it’s the Alan Freeman the collection we are building on. So that was our biggest change in coming here – a really steep learning curve.
At first we were up until midnight getting a grip on what we had to do because we didn’t really know very much about the plant itself. We also have a lot of collectors’ plants here as well, so we get a lot of questions from people who’ve been growing bromeliads for a long time. It’s been a big change for Andrew too. He commutes to Brisbane during the week and comes home on Friday. He does all the maintenance on the property, all the weeding, spraying for pests, irrigation. But it’s his dream too – twelve and a half acres, beautiful view, house to renovate. He’s in his element.
What would keep you here?
Well, I have to be here four days a week in the nursery, but a lot of our business is done on line. So, we have a website with an e-shop and we use e-bay. We haven’t even tapped the wholesale market yet. But we’ve spent a year finding our feet and learning about the business. So we feel confident to go forward now and develop it. The lifestyle is something intangible really. Now that we’re here and ensconced in the community, it’s the community that keeps us here. Because if the kids are happy then the parents can be happy. The children go to Montville School so that’s our primary community. We also have friends in Palmwoods, who by chance we knew in the Defence Force years ago. It’s just nice to do something simple like go into the IGA and they know your name, and you know their names. It’s having that comforting sense of continuity.
Andrew and Sue Lancaster settled in Montville in 2008 after years of wander lust brought them from Cornwall via Adelaide, Canberra, Malaysia and Sydney.
They acquired Bromagic – a specialist bromeliad nursery on the Hunchy Road – a fresh challenge but a dream come true .
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