“Dear Residents of Bellis,

I just discovered your web site and blogs yesterday. I’ve enjoyed making myself homesick reading them. I thought you might get a kick out of getting fan mail from the unlikely South Pole.

I grew up on a dairy farm in the Fassifern Valley outside of Brisbane. I dream of moving back…For the last 10 years we’ve been living in the Mid-West US and have been trying to live our lives as you have been – collecting our own rainwater (though the winter freeze is our big complication), growing our own food, providing habitat for wildlife, and living as sustainably as possible. Too bad about my work…

Gardening with a long hard winter has been a fun challenge for a couple of Aussie kids. Our favorite part has been the challenge of preserving as much of our food for the winter as possible. A great Mid-Western tradition which we will carry back with us.

After our success with keeping chickens we were about to move onto bees so I could show off to my bee keeping uncles, but then made the decision to move home this coming year and gave up on the bees.

Also thanks for the support against the dam building craze sweeping Qld. A less publicly opposed dam has been the one proposed for the Teviot Brook (Wyaralong Dam). This is in the valley below my family’s farm and I grew up in this area. This dam will flood a beautiful area of which I am very attached. Some of it has been degraded by unsustainable agriculture, but there are still many pockets of under appreciated and rare ecosystem in this area.

The only beneficiary of this dam will be the coal powered power plants of Brisbane. The creation stories of the Teviot and other nearby places were captured many years ago by Enid Bell for the Yaggarabul people. If you ever travel out that way I highly recommend seeking out her book before hand.

Thanks again for the website.

Yours sincerely,

Darryn”
Amundsen-Scott Station
Antarctica
11th December 2008

* Click on this link to visit Darryn’s blog

* Click on this link to read more about the Amundsen-Scott Station