Island Life

Clarke Island is a windswept place in Eastern Bass Strait, that containedno other residents and could only be accessed by light plane or boatwhen weather permitted. Having never seen the place, Dion and hisfamily moved there in March of 1984 with no plan B. They arrived with littleprovisions and few possessions to an old farm house invested with poisonousblack house spiders and overrun with mice. With no way off, all they coulddo was make the best of it. Over the next six years, with little or no outside help, they had to contend witha blocked septic tank, a bee swarm in the house chimney, broken machinery,telephone outages, cantankerous horses, wild cattle that could not be musteredand the extreme isolation of living on an island. To survive they had to learn to live in harmony with the island by forging asemi self-sufficient life style in which they not only grew a garden and keptmilking goats, but learned to live off the bounty of the land and sea. For one boy, living on Clarke Island was a once in a lifetime opportunity andthis is his story.