In 2017, a year after I finally got the courage to escape my marriage with my two children, Billy now age 12, and Eleanor now age 11, I met Valentino and moved to a 52–acre property in Murwillumbah, a town in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, where we started renovating a small shack on the property into a small two-room home.
Initially, we showered using water from the river and had to purchase water for drinking and cooking and at night we relied on candlelight. The kitchen facilities were nonexistent, with only a freestanding sink, so we cooked our meals on camp stoves, while a small portable gas fridge and an esky kept our food cool.
We had great dreams of creating a self-sustainable family life and consequently, with the help of close friends, we began installing septic systems, solar power, a kitchen, bathroom, and flooring. We planted a large vegetable garden and even purchased goats and chickens.
It was by no means lavish, but we were self-reliant and able to have organic, fresh produce at our fingertips.
Despite the challenges, it was a remarkable experience that taught us to appreciate even the smallest things. I’ll never forget the excitement our children felt when we installed a toilet. There’s nothing more satisfying than looking around your home, knowing that you built it yourself, as a family. Every minimal comfort we enjoyed in that place was a result of hard work and acquiring new skills.
In the years following, our family expanded to a family of six with the birth of our daughter, Rose-Aria and subsequently our son, Solomon.
When the pandemic hit, we realised that if food supplies ever stopped, we would never feel extreme panic because we were fortunate enough to have a small veggie patch of our own, the ability to bake bread and know where we could find food if the need arose – through our community. One of our neighbours has a huge vegetable garden, enough to feed all the families living here and another neighbour has cows, so we felt safe in that sense. Yet, we witnessed it being an issue in our community. Valentino and I subsequently began thinking and talking about food security. It became apparent that many people didn’t share that safety and we soon recognised the importance of knowing where your food network is. Ideas of developing such a safety net for not only our community, but others around the world became a frequent conversation from that moment on.
The rain that just didn’t stop
In early 2022, life abruptly once again came to a halt when it began to rain non-stop. At first, we didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary. It was the wet season and the forecasts predicted moderate flooding which is something we were familiar with. Even so, because we live right alongside the Tweed River, when it rains for days, and there is any risk, like our access bridge going under, we seek refuge on higher ground at our neighbour’s house. This was the case then. And although I really didn’t believe anything was going to happen, I insisted on cleaning the kitchen before we left, so I wouldn’t come back to mess. Ironically, the mess we would return to was more than a kitchen clean could have ever rectified.
A disastrous outcome
I remember lying in bed in our neighbour’s house listening to the relentless rain battering the roof and incessantly checking my phone for river level updates. By midnight I saw that it had risen to 12 metres and the heart- wrenching reality that our home would be completely flooded set in. Two days later we were able to return to see the damage to our home. It was completely destroyed. A tree had smashed through a window and all of our belongings including little things I was holding onto that belonged to my late father, the kids’ toys, books, and clothes, but most devastatingly our beloved home, where we had invested so much time, money, and energy, were submerged by the river. The garden was also nonexistent and the shipping container filled with our tools got picked up and swept away. I will never forget it.
It was a hard lesson for the children. The older children found it particularly upsetting as their Christmas presents from just a few months earlier were all destroyed as well as Eleanor’s birthday gifts received just weeks earlier. We walked through the home together afterwards and pulled identifiable trinkets from the mud. Damage to property and loss of equipment was around $200,000. Insurance didn’t pay out despite our coverage.
We were then stuck in our neighbour’s home for the next two-and-a-half weeks and as food began running out, as our access bridge was under, it became evident to us that knowing where our food source could be found was vital.
Literally homeless, the next few months involved couch surfing and relying on donations and goodwill from our community who were hurting just as much as us. Ironically, we had fought for so long to be self-sufficient and here we were being totally dependent on others.
On the verge of a nervous breakdown, we tried to piece together our lives and maintain some stability for our children. We leaned on light-heartedness and humour to pull not only the children, but ourselves through the darkest moments. Reminding them although our possessions were things we cherished, they are replaceable – they’re just ‘things’. What we have is each other and our health and those are things we cannot replace. Sharing stories with them of other flood- affected people was also helpful. In comparison with some stories, we felt extremely fortunate, and we held onto that when times seemed tough.
We also made the decision to sacrifice building a much-needed home on safer ground and instead poured what money we had left into starting our food-finding app, for people to be able to access fresh local food not only in times of crisis and uncertainty, but all year round.
A new beginning
Finally, after six months we were able to return to our property, where Valentino and a handful of family and friends had worked tirelessly to fit out an existing shed to safely squeeze in our family of six, where we still live today. We started regrowing our veggie garden, continuing on with our goals of self-sufficiency, settled the children back into school and into family life. In December 2023, we launched uForage, a mobile app for finding and sharing food: a free marketplace connecting growers, makers and bakers to people looking for local, fresh sources of food.
Whether it’s grown in a neighbour’s backyard, found on a nature strip, or foraged in the wilderness, uForage provides a platform for people to sell or give away the food they produce and, in the process, brings community back together. Keen foragers can also mark wild growing food locations they discover, enabling others to geo locate them through Google Maps.
Our mission behind uForage is to reduce household waste; our biggest ambition is to end hunger on a global scale. We believe we can solve hunger globally by solving hunger locally as there is enough food in the world for everyone – we just need to know where to find it. And that is where we feel uForage comes in. In the future we plan to add an education platform where people can learn how to become completely self-sufficient by learning how to grow, make, preserve and forage for food at home.
Today, the kids are happy and settled into their schools and at home. We once again have a thriving veggie garden and are back to enjoying the simple things.
Personally, I’ve learned through my life experiences to truly appreciate Valentino for the partner and father that he is, and the community who banded together to help their neighbours. The floods have shown me that we can’t control everything that happens in life, but we can control how we respond.
Although each person deals with grief and loss in their own way, my message to others affected in such a way is to give yourself grace. There’s no easy solution, plan, or methodology to apply here. Just give yourself the grace to feel it all, to grieve it all, to give thanks for it all and to move through it at the pace that feels right for you and your family.
