Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

For the most part, I have no desire to go back and re-live any of my pastimes. Growing up on a farm in isolation from a town, with no telephone and a trip to town maybe once a week was not something you’d yearn for.

When I went away to college for three years to complete my year 12, I didn’t mix often with any other students because of the strangeness of the school and its philosophy, which accorded with my parents beliefs but which I had to force. Indeed, when I finished my studies they would not let me graduate because I was deemed not to be a good enough Christian.

That news was given to me just prior to my sitting my year 12 examinations at state level.

Going back to the farm in my late teens and early 20s and working for four years for my father had its moments, but it wasn’t really too flash.

I went to teachers college and graduated from a two year course and my wife and I went to Warburton Ranges in the far east inland of Western Australia in 1970.

If I needed to re-live anything, I think it would be the fact that going to Warburton, isolated although it was and without any modern day communications, was indeed a wise move.

It taught us that we could live in isolation but in satisfaction with each other and with the job that we were doing.

It must have made a mark because at the beginning of 1974 after three years elsewhere, we went back to Warburton Range‘s again but this time with three children.

Going back or going to Warburton in 1970 is probably what I would revisit because it enabled us to reach a point where we were “our own people“ and in time “ with our own children“.

I’m glad of the move we made at the start of 1970. It was the right move for us. I would revisit it in “Groundhog Day“ terms – if that was necessary- to reboot the experiences that followed our move.