We’d found jobs before we left, a must once upon a time before moving to Tassie with it’s small population and even smaller jobs market. Hugo had serendipitously contacted the one company in all of Tassie that did what he did and they had had a position open up that same week, he didn’t even need to interview, grossly overqualified, and soon to be, grossly underpaid.
I too had found a job, in events again where there seemed always to be work, a profession which chewed up and spat out its would-be lifer’s, contract after contract, creating a neverending swathe of former event manager’s turned ‘absolutely-anything-else’ but I didn’t care. I/we would do anything to make this work including being paid a third of what we had been back on the mainland. Besides, I thought, I had been promised far less responsibility for my more meargre wage and I thought, a lot less stress.
We didn’t care that as a couple we had more than halved our household income and doubled our mortgage repayments from zero, to two at once. We had done the math, we could do it, we just had to learn to live off less, A LOT less and we were going to fill our days with bushwalking and fishing, garden tending and animal rearing, at least two of which we had little to no understanding of as to their real costs and exactly no idea of where one might find the time to pursue such things while working, commuting and fixing up an old farmhouse but we didn’t know any of that yet. Over the next ten years we would call Tassie home, we would meet so many people who did what we’d done and like us, had no idea.
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