About Melanie!

I currently live  and manage a small island retreat on the Gippsland Lakes in South Eastern Australia with my husband David. As romantic as it sounds, I honestly don’t enjoy it. It’s called a “lifestyle job”, work your butt off, for not much pay. The upside to the job is that it is in a beautiful environment. We (David & I) also have a canvas printing company, that is purely online, it is a super competitive market and using the information we are learning with internet marketing we are trying to build it to a point that in the next 12 months it will help us to get off the island and build a house on our land in a place called Metung. The aim is to also build our IM business’ and then sell the Canvas Printing business.

I was born and spent the first five years of my life in New Guinea and then grew up in Brisbane. I also have a Bachelor of Health Science, majoring in Acupuncture, but in the small town of Metung, around 700 permanent population, there is very little call for an acupuncturist. 

I have been lucky enough to travel and travel is something that I want to do plenty more of. I love a good adventure and just love places of natural beauty, like the fjords of Norway and the isolated islands of the Exuma chain  in the Bahamas. I lived in a Chinese Hospital for 2 months to complete my studies and then spent a further month traveling around China. David and I also ran a charter yacht in the Bahamas and Caribbean for about 18 months. We then went onto England, brought a camping car and spent 6 months driving around Europe. One of the biggest problems with travel is you just want to do it more, go to more places and see more places!

Somehow since getting back from overseas, we have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle with our lives, who knows how. Probably from lack of proper planning! We are doing ‘o.k.’, but are definitely not where we want to be. I have some pretty big and clear goals and reckon it’s about time to make myself accountable.

My Ultimate Life

1. Quit the job in 12 months. Have the time to travel and work with and rescue more horses.

3. Build a straw bale, post and beam, modest home on our land in Metung and develop a lovely horse property. Including two arenas, one for jumping one for flat work, a round yard for breaking and post and rail fencing. The horses are standing where the house will be built.

4. Buy more land,  I love land! 

Short to medium – land surrounding our current block

Medium term – A property in the high country

Long term – This is my wildest imaginable dream – 1000+ acres in the high country

 5. Buy  the latest version of the yacht on the right – a Leopard 46, in 3 years they will be retiring from then from the Moorings fleet in the Caribbean and there will be some 

great boats available! Part of owning the yacht is doing more of the fun things like kiting and diving! The plan is to cruise for around 6 weeks at a time while gradually cruising back to Australia. Seeing some of the amazing places we have already been lucky enough to see and well as new places.

Stay tuned to this part of the blog if you want to see the fine tuning of how I am going to reach these goals. I have started with the ultimate life as much as anything to get something ‘out there’.