Welcome to Rollick Farm.

We’re a land for wildlife property in Bumbalong, an hour south of Canberra. While driving down the Monaro Highway you may have looked over to the mountains to the west around Michelago and Bredbo, that’s the Clear Range. The border between the ACT and NSW runs along the ridgeline.

Our place is about five hundred acres of that rugged terrain and reaches from the Murrumbidgee river three kilometres back to the top of the range at 1350m above sea level. Up there, it’s a only few hundred metres to Namadgi National Park.

We’re in our fifth year out here so we’re still new, but in that time we’ve had a chance to meet the neighbours and find our stride. In the first few years we cleared old sheds and structures, sprayed weeds, worked on plumbing, water tanks, gardens, chook sheds and all the rest.

Our biggest achievement was planting, watering and caring for a thousand native trees to revegetate previously grazed paddocks. In January this year some of the eucalypts that we planted were taller than we were, and if you’ve met us that’s pretty tall.

It took us a while to think of a name for the place and it was also in January that we settled on Rollick Farm. We thought about writing it on the gate but decided against it. We expected the gate would be gone the next day anyway.

Over the next few weeks I’ll tell the story of the 2020 bushfires that burnt ninety nine percent of our property and the floods that followed.

Mid afternoon on Rollick Farm, 1 February 2020