Welcome to Burrabadine

Well, we're finally here. After months of prayer and planning we've finally made it to The Burrabadine Centre in Dubbo. It's been an amazing journey to get here and we wanted to share some of our initial impressions with friends and family through the medium of blog. Hopefully this will give us a chance to keep many of you updated with little titbits of information every now and then.

The trip from Heathrow seems like a distant memory but it wasn't even a week ago. What to say about the flight? We managed to get our obscene amounts of excess baggage on to the plane without having to pay or repack anything. Calvin watched Aladdin about six times. We ate some nice food and hardly slept. We changed flights at Singapore where I bought some UK/Aus plug adapters and was treated like royalty by the shop staff. In future I will have to remember that having two hours between flights is just enough time to convince yourself that you really don't want to get on that second flight. The flight to Sydney was, thankfully, about five hours shorter than the initial leg to Singapore but it was still long enough to make you forget what it's like to have room to lie down.

After landing at Sydney we got stuck in immigration behind a family who didn't seem to have the right paperwork, but when we eventually got through we were rushed through customs pretty easily due to not looking like your typical group of contraband smugglers. We were met by Andrew Vincent (and his youngest son Ben) who drove us the five hours west to Dubbo. Our camera was stored away in the trailer, otherwise we would have taken some photos of the most amazing territory I have ever seen. The Blue Mountains are incredible.

Arriving at Dubbo we were welcomed by a great group of people, but were far too tired to appreciate it. Ruth is astonished at how similar life in the Aussie Bush is to her childhood years spent in Africa. There's a definite mission compound feel about the place (according to her. I wouldn't know, but it has a volleyball court so I guess she's right).

Our flat has two bedrooms, an open-plan kitchen and lounge, a bathroom and a laundry room. The laundry room currently has no washing machine (it's sitting in our veranda waiting for the laundry room floor to be finished), we have no hot water (the plumber is 'waiting for a part') and we had a working fridge for a grand total of eight hours. Our water is pumped directly from the Macquarie river, and we have a separate tap for our drinking water (i.e. rain water). It's definitely not quite the same as our last home in Haywards Heath. It's not all bad though. We have fans in every room which keep the house cool whenever we want it (which makes them very comfortable in this summer heat), a bunk bed for the boys, nifty wooden floors and broadband pumped straight into the living room. Without hot water I've been having my showers in the boys shower block. It's a bit like being back at Spurgeon's.


It's as hot as you might expect for February in Australia. People tell me that it's quite mild at the moment, but I don't believe them. If this is 'mild' then I can't imagine what 'hot' is like. Crazy Aussies. It's a very, very dry place - and typically we've had downpours of rain for the past two days. People are already saying that we've brought the English weather with us, but that's OK because they're big fans of rain over here. It's quite rare. And what with England winning the cricket just before we arrived I think that some of the locals think that we have powers above other mere mortals.

Speaking of the locals...I've been amazed at how wonderful every single person here is. The community has been so helpful and supportive, they've really made it a lot easier to move country than it should be. It's not just the community though - Bush Australians are a very friendly bunch as a whole. I don't know if it's the same in the cities, but out here it's really easy to get into conversations with random strangers, and we've been a source of interest in the local shopping centre due to seemingly being the only English people in the area. I love Australians and I begin to see why people like Laurie are so good at talking about Jesus. Australians are very happy to talk to you about anything and everything. A fair few of the people we've spoken to have heard of the Cornerstone Community - it seems to be a well respected and known Christian witness in the town, despite it's unorthodox nature. As the minister of the local Presbyterian church reportedly said about Cornerstone "You don't produce good Presbyterians, but you produce good Christians". That's fine by me.

The boys are very popular here - as is Xanthe of course. They love it. There's so much space to run about and people to play with. We've got a sandpit in the garden, a playground attached to the school on the community, a swimming pool and so much more. It's an absolutely unbelievable life for children here.

The best news of all, however, is that Australians drink mammoth 375ml cans of Coca Cola instead of the microscopic 330ml that we get in the UK.

We'll be starting community life proper next week. I think that I'll just be fitting in to the third year course as a student to begin with and we'll see what happens. There's a real sense of this being a place just for growing in your faith and seeing how a Christian community can really function well. Watch this space!