A well-known quote gave Hayley and Caleb Downs the impetus they needed to turn their lives upside down — “you only get 18 summers with your kids”.
“It just gripped me by my heart,” Mr Downs said.
Up until three months ago the couple lived a “comfortable” life with their three children aged 5, 3, and 8 months, a short drive from Queensland’s capital.
It was a life they thought they wanted, and to pay for it Ms Downs was a paediatric nurse while Mr Downs worked long, gruelling hours in the child safety industry.
But they were at breaking point.
“You work all week so hard to pay the mortgage, keep things going, just to do the day-to-day and you miss out on those moments, and just life in general,” Mr Downs said.
“You might be present in your body, but you’ve got your mind thinking a million other things.”
So fitting whatever they could into their car and caravan, and selling the rest, the family of five drove away from their Caboolture home and headed straight to the edge of the outback.
“No shipping container, no storage. We own nothing,” Mr Downs said.
They’re now caretakers of a sprawling 10,000-hectare property, where the nearest town is Injune and the closest landmark is Carnarvon Gorge.
Out here the landscape is spectacularly rugged and mostly occupied by cattle graziers.
“The traffic is awesome. Sometimes you don’t see a car for the two hours it takes to get off the dirt road,” Ms Downs said.
“The closest store of some sort is over two hours away and we go just over three hours to get our groceries.”
But why?
The Downs family didn’t take a sudden interest in farming.
Rather, they reshuffled their lives to prioritise what matters most.
“We made the decision to take this small window which can seem massive at the moment and exhausting because we’ve got three young kids, and the sleepless nights,” Mr Downs said.
“But I understand I will be wishing this back, and we needed to grasp a hold of this and take this opportunity.”
Mr Downs said working in the child safety industry, where the number of young people in need kept growing, showed him how critical raising his own family was.
“I can’t be helping or trying to provide support for families if I can’t even be present for my own,” he said.
“I want my boys and my daughter to be men and women who have the right morals and the right values and not what I’m reading and what I’m seeing.”
The Downs’ original plan was to travel around Australia in a caravan, but then the manager of a cattle station offered them an opportunity they couldn’t turn down.
The family gets paid to live on and maintain the remote property.
“It’s definitely the best decision we’ve made for a long time,” Ms Downs said.
“We do a lot of exploring the place together because there’s 25,000 acres [10,000 hectares] here.”
For five-year-old Jaxson and his three-year-old brother Oakley the creek that snakes through the entrance to their property has quickly become their favourite spot in their gigantic playground.
“Then we find all cows and all the wallabies,” Oakley added.
The logistics behind the dream
The move hasn’t come without a few hiccups and adjustments, like having no phone reception “a few steps outside the house”.
“Not having the luxury and the convenience of going to the shops every few days because the kids ate all this or I forgot something,” Ms Downs said.
“The closest hospital that would be able to do anything is over three hours away.
“It will take the ambulance about two and a half hours to get here if we needed someone.”
Ms Downs has also taken on the added role of teacher to their eldest son.
“I’ve never had any intentions of homeschooling my kids beforehand, but we have all day so we can take as long as we need,” she said.
Even making a cup of coffee isn’t as simple as flicking on the kettle anymore.
“I’m getting a bit more confident with getting the fire started, splitting the wood with the axe,” Ms Downs said.
Mr Downs has had his fair share of learning curves too, some days working as a contractor doing odd farming jobs.
“I’ve found myself getting bogged and had to end up walking 10 kilometres to get back to the station house to get contact — just because you’ve got no phone reception,” he said.
But the family is soaking in the experiences its new life allows.
“We were wanting to see confidence built in our children. But what I didn’t realise is that being in suburbia the comforts had withdrawn our own confidence,” Mr Downs said.
“Since we’ve been here I’ve just seen that explode in what we’re capable of doing or even putting ourselves out to do.”
While they have no set deadline on how long they’ll stay, they’re making memories to last a lifetime.
“We felt more homely in this tiny, little, old, two-bedroom cabin than what we did in the house [in Caboolture] that we put hours of effort and planning and hand-drew ourself,” Ms Downs said.
“You can’t stop living because of the what-ifs.”
This is the first in our weekly series Postcards From Queensland showcasing the lives of people who’ve made the big move to regional Queensland and why now they wouldn’t live anywhere else.
