About

We are Maude and Neil - a couple of city-slickers who have made the move to the country after Wwoofing our way round New Zealand and Oz.

After reading John Seymour's Fat of the Land by accident at age fifteen Maude decided she wanted to be a subsistence farmer. She forgot about that dream when she moved to Melbourne a few years later and got caught up doing other stuff including being an illustrator, library-geek and environmental warrioress.

When Neil was fifteen he dreamt of joining the New Zealand cricket team, so moving to the country wasn't specifically his idea, but he's gone along with it anyway on the proviso he can have a shed.

Rumpty Doo is a word we learned from the wonderful Polly & James in the far-out far-north of NZ where it is used to describe almost everything. There is no exact translation into the Australian vernacular but it is an approximation between the terms "dodgy" and "charming". We love it. It sums up everything we want our lives to be – functional, modest, MacGyvered and most of all, lovely.