For a growing band of older Australians, retirement has become an unlikely second act, spent rewilding mountains, counting sea slugs and coaxing damaged country back to life
When Susan Downes stepped into the hallway of an old farmhouse for sale in York, Western Australia, she felt an oddly certain sense of knowing. “Oh, this is my house,” the retired GP remembers thinking. There was just one problem: it came with 200 hectares.
Widowed and with her children grown, Downes, then in her 60s, was finally able to act on a long-held wish to move to the countryside. She had imagined something modest: an old house with “a little bit of garden and stuff”. Two hundred hectares was rather more than she had in mind, no matter how charming she found the high ceilings. “I thought, the house is lovely, but I can’t possibly do that.”
