Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

…about people who change their lives to settle on the Range and why they choose to stay

Helen and David Crewe moved to the Hinterland only ten months ago. Their treechange was seeingly huge – from the small Mediterranean island of Gozo to the Blackall Range. However, this English pair are used to regular moves. Now in retirement they are building their first ever home in Maleny.

Why did you come here?

HELEN: Well, we had never thought of coming to Australia but my daughter has settled here. She is the director of marketing for the National Trust in Sydney and we decided to come out to have a look.

DAVID: We like getting in a car and driving and so we travelled around Australia -went to Alice Springs, Uluru, the Great Ocean Road -all those major tourist places. Someone suggested that we have a look at Maleny which we hadn’t heard about. We looked at properties here but I think the decision to buy the land here in Maleny was a spur of the moment decision.

HELEN: Since we’ve been together we’ve moved 17 times. We lived in a Georgian townhouse in central London, a cottage in Kent, a cottage in France and a four hundred year-old fortified farmhouse in Malta. We are very much people who get on and do things. So when we went to see that lovely piece of land with its lovely rainforest the creek is lovely, the waterhole is lovely -we said, where are we ever going to do better than that? So we bought it and settled here in May. In coming to Maleny we are also surprised at the number of English people here. I’m a great mimic and I thought in no time we would be talking like Crocodile Dundee. But it’s quite the reverse. We’ve sat around this table with all English people. I certainly didn’t think Australia had many people who weren’t Australian.

What have you had to change in coming here?

DAVID: Well, we lived in the Mediterranean so one big adjustment for us is the non-existence of night life -the fact that everyone gets up early, entertains early and goes to bed early. We’re not used to that. We’re used to having people around for drinks at about eight o’clock, going out to eat about nine, getting back about half past eleven. So, I suppose it’s getting used to that different social time clock that we were used to in Malta and in London as well.

Helen: We are delighted with all the services here, and the shops, with just about everything that you want. And the politeness of 99 percent of the people has been quite staggering.

DAVID: We are certainly used to change. We were living in the centre of London and then we moved to this tiny island of Gozo, the sister island to Malta. We had moved from a very urban existence into the country really. So it’s not such a shock moving here but on the other hand it is different to what we have experienced. The weather and environment are certainly different to England and of course Malta is just a rock basically. Building our first house at our age is a big change.

HELEN: We got the idea for it when we were in South Africa in the January before we came here. We saw the design in a magazine and we both fell in love with it. We both liked the blue and the grey because we thought that reflected the sky. So, we thought we’d put the sky colours onto the green. It’s kind of like a low-set Queenslander.

What would keep you here?

HELEN: Well Victoria is my only child so it’s quite nice for me to have her here. For her to come to see us, at least she is in the same country. Generally though we are quite independent of family. So, it’s very much the here and now for us. If we decided we wanted to do something else, I’m sure we would do it. But there is so much we want to do in Australia. There is a great deal here in Maleny that will meet our needs and I think we have only just scratched the surface so far. My mother used to say, see the seasons through before you get committed, and I didn’t want to get involved until I was ready for it. Like David I am very interested in plays and singers, and I would quite like to do some voluntary work. But I need to be available on a regular basis to do that and I am not quite there yet.

DAVID: We had a public relations company in London I was always writing things for clients. But when I retired and we went to Malta I wanted to write more creative things. So I wrote a musical with a friend about the siege of Gozo by the Turks and it’s been performed three times and was very successful. Coming here I thought let’s see what I can do. I was under pressure really to write The Trial of Millicent Malville and being a journalist you’d understand that deadlines are always a help. I’m now under pressure writing a Cinderella pantomime.

DAVID: Just in the short time we’ve been here we’ve got involved with the Maleny Singers and the Maleny Players. The fact that people were prepared to put ‘The Trial’ play on even though we’ve only been here a few months, I think is very special.

HELEN: they didn’t know you from Adam but they trusted you.

DAVID: Yes, that said a lot about the nature of this community. People are very welcoming and that’s something that’s quite important. If you want to join something, you can easily be a member of ten organisations here. So I think you have to be careful to ration your time.