Village Homes Realty
Hello there! Jordan Travers and Alexandra Saxby, here.
Where to begin except to share that we’re grateful just to know the Witchcliffe Ecovillage exists, let alone be a part of it. We’re honoured and over the moon to be putting roots down here in Cluster 3B, and are looking forward to watching the moon rise over stingray dam with our community.
In Nov 2020, we discovered Witchy while in quarantine, giving us our reading for the fortnight. We had freshly returned to WA after seven years interstate, having spent most of 2020 in Melbourne’s lockdown. Feeling a bit (very) weird, we were seeking the refuge of both wide-open nature and the restorative grounding of permaculture and its community.
An opportune Google search for “permaculture Margaret River” brought us to the Witchcliffe website and therein we discovered a true beacon of hope for our future – the potential Blue Zone we’d envisioned when we first met. Jo Thierfelder welcomed us on-site the day we finished quarantine, and six months later when our stars aligned and stage 3B was released, we applied. It happened to be the week before we were going down to Margaret River for a weekend permie course at Fair Harvest, staying (for research purposes!) at ‘River Blue’ Airbnb – a stunning straw bale guesthouse by Paul Lane and Paradigm.
After the weekend, we were snug inside watching the storm roll in and reflecting on the weekend’s learnings over a pot of tea when, fortuitously, Mike Hulme got in touch. He granted us our first block preference, one that we loved but was earmarked for another purpose when we initially inquired, now available to us. We are still pinching ourselves.
When we met eight years ago on a yoga retreat at Kookaburra Creek, among the seemingly infinite ways we connected, we shared this vision for our future: to facilitate wellbeing through the creative / healing arts and holistic health and fitness, to raise our future family on a permie wellness retreat, and play a part in establishing a Green School. Thus, we united to realise this dream together, seeking study, training, work and travel opportunities that aligned with the vision, taking us around the world and back to WA. In hindsight, there was serendipity all the way here. We’re soon-to-be-married and now ready as ever to start family life. For the creative future we want to build in harmony with nature, there’s no place we’d rather be.
While we are drawn to and inspired by the energy of the place, we are enamoured by the unsurpassable ground floor opportunity to cultivate a resilient village way of life applying permaculture values and ethics in an environmentally conscious and protected part of the world. We respect the intention, approach and extent of detail that Mike, Michelle and the team have demonstrated in selecting the location and ensuring the Ecovillage’s success.
Our work is cut out for us pioneering this village alongside our community, and this brings us peace of mind. What we see here is the basis of a future Blue Zone, the fruit of which will be the health, wellbeing, solidarity, longevity, and resilience of its inhabitants. To belong and be stewards of country, raise family and community, to take care of each other, grow old and one day ourselves become fertiliser for the gardens that cared for us – to us, that’s living!
