Life in a van - Australia

At the end of 2016 Laurent and I landed in Brisbane, Australia to begin our great Australian adventure. I’ve chosen to include this travel journal as the time spent in the van changed my life (in the least cliche way possible). If we hadn’t have chosen to live like this, I’m not sure that ameliso would even be a thing, so this time is something that I am truly grateful for. This is basically my life story lol. 

Our plan was to find a van which we could live in, and see as much of Australia as we could by working seasonable jobs and traveling in between. We didn’t really live that Instagram #vanlife, and couldn’t be bothered trying to make our minimalistic living arrangements look good for photos, so most of these photos are taken on our phones and aren’t necessarily ‘pretty’, but they are a real account of what our life was like. As Laurent is from France, he was required to complete 3 months of farm work in order to get a second year visa, so I tagged along for the ride. We found a cute blue van in Brisbane which we named Sonic who we bought off two English backpackers. They gave us the contact of a man from an orange farm in a town in Northern New South Wales called Moree. We knew nothing about this town other than it was 5 hours inland and had cotton and orange farms. Although the working holiday visa farm work scheme isn’t something that I necessarily agree with - not enough regulation to stop backpackers from being taken advantage of - it did allow us the flexibility of working short term jobs which suited us just fine. 

We worked on the orange farm in Moree for 2 months before heading south to the Hunter Valley - a well-known wine region a few hours north of Sydney. There we worked the wine grape harvest before moving south again - stopping off at the Blue Mountains, Mount Kosciuszko, Canberra and then Victoria. We found a job on an Apple farm an hour East of Melbourne, and stayed there for 3 months. After the apple picking season finished, we weren’t really sure what we our plans were until a lady in Perth emailed us about a job on a vineyard in the Swan Valley. We were literally on the other side of Australia - about 3200kms about from Perth, but said yes to the job and begun the long drive to Western Australia. The drive West took through some beautiful places like The Great Ocean Road, The Grampians, Adelaide, Port Augusta, Streaky Bay, The Nullarbor, Great Australian Bight, and then finally we made it into Western Australia. 

We were instantly transfixed at the beauty of WA - the endless red landscapes, clear blue water, and the types of plants and flowers that I’d never seen anywhere else in the world - the crazy Hakea pin cushions that looks like little starbursts, Bottlebrush that reminded me of the Pohutukawa at home in NZ, delicate little Leptospermums, bright orange and red Grevillea that looked like it could be from another planet. I was enthralled. We bought books so that I could identify and learn as much as possible about what we were seeing.

I started photographing what I was seeing and became even more interested in the functions and morphology of the plants which gave even more meaning to what I was photographing. We were working on the vineyard and living in the van during this time - so we were outside rain or shine. This direct contact with nature played a huge part in my growing love of plants. We became more in tune with what nature doing, which gave us a huge amount of gratitude for the seasons and all of the changes that happen over time.

Since then I have worked at different plant nurseries around Perth where I learnt how to propagate, seed and pot plants which gave me an insight into the vast plant world.

So that’s how living in a van changed my life, haha.