Good People
Living life in Dunedin
Busy careers and burnout inspired photographer Isabella Harrex and chef Aidan Dickson to move to a half-acre block on Dunedin’s Otago Peninsula, where they now spend more time with their daughter Daisy, have chickens and grow their own vegetables.
Ending up in hospital and needing drugs to sleep and calm down was a big wake-up call for successful photographer Isabella Harrex.
The experience galvanised Harrex and husband Aidan Dickson to make the conscious decision to choose a slower and more sustainable lifestyle, and they’ve never been happier. Both now balance part-time work with spending more time together in their bountiful garden.
“When our daughter Daisy was three months old I decided to go back to work,” explains Harrex. “I immediately got caught up in the same pattern of stress and deadlines that I’d left behind when I went on maternity leave."
Harrex ended up becoming so stressed out with a new baby and large jobs with short deadlines that she stopped sleeping entirely and ended up in hospital for a week with severe anxiety.
“I felt like I was on fast forward all the time, never stopping to enjoy the moments. Slowing down, being in the garden, rediscovering old hobbies and pastimes, and having people to stay through HelpX [volunteer work] have all been so wonderful for my recovery,” says Harrex. “I firmly believe that technology, stress and lack of community in our modern lives are probably a main reason why many parts of our societies are breaking down … if we all just eased up on ourselves and took some life advice from our grandparents’ generation we’d all be much better off. I’m not saying throw out all of our modern technology and start knitting (though it’s very relaxing) but just a few changes, like growing vegetables, baking bread or practising a hobby can allow our minds that much-needed rest, and give us the satisfaction that you just can’t get from our ‘instant gratification’ lifestyles. I grew corn and outdoor tomatoes in Dunedin this summer and it’s given me more satisfaction than any work achievement I’ve ever made!”
Isabella, you used to work weekdays as a commercial photographer and on weekends shooting weddings. Aidan, you’re a former private chef who has cooked for Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. How have you made your new lifestyle work?
A: We’re both perfectionists [in our work] and it was starting to take its toll on everything so we sat down and asked ourselves, ‘How much do we need to earn to pay the bills, and how much is our time worth?’ Now we both work part-time and save a lot of that money we were earning by doing things ourselves. I’ll spend two days to go and get some firewood instead of working two days extra paying for it.
What does your working week look like now?
A: I work at [Dunedin restaurant] Nova part-time. The working environment is always really busy; everyone works hard but everyone’s really light-hearted and for me, a massive part of job satisfaction now is the environment you are in.
I: When an awesome opportunity comes up we talk about it. We’re really aware of getting caught up in the prestige and awesomeness and idea of it – it’s finding that fine balance between not throwing everything away, because we love what we do.
What’s your vision for the future?
I: Eventually we’d like to be pretty much self-sufficient. We swap a lot of stuff for meat. We did a test – Free Food February – to see if we could live on the food we produce and catch and swap food for a month. A: It was actually easy and a good experience because we didn’t go without anything. I love spear fishing and it’s fun and it’s normal for us to have fresh fish, but for someone who’s buying fish nowadays it can be more expensive than meat. So we’d say to the neighbours, ‘Here’s a whole fish – do you mind buying us a bag of coffee beans or some craft beer; or a bag of flour for a kilo of courgettes?’
What else did you learn from that experience?
A: We would bake every couple of days and thought we’d eat way healthier but we didn’t, because we’d always have awesome white bread baked fresh every day, so you just ate the entire loaf in one day, or chocolate chip cookies. But one thing that we became aware of was packaging. There was no wrapping for any of it because it was baked and then put in a tin or eaten before it even got to the tin. When you buy biscuits they sit on a plastic tray and are wrapped in plastic. Cucumbers are wrapped in plastic, iceberg lettuce is wrapped in plastic – when you take yourself out of it, even for two weeks, then walk into a supermarket it’s like ‘ Whoa’. It’s just becoming more conscious of it and it’s so unnecessary.
You’re big fans of HelpX.net. Tell us about that.
I: HelpX.net is an online listing of farms and homestays for volunteering holiday makers who want to stay with local people on their travels and gain experience. We love sharing what we have and showing people Dunedin. It’s really opened up our lives and made us more relaxed and happier having people around.
It’s good for Daisy too because she meets people, socialises and hears other languages, and gets to spend more time with us because we’re not trying to do too many things. It’s great because you end up doing things like baking together or painting a trike for Daisy instead of sitting in front of the television. It’s just so good. In that same way it’s going back to what we should be doing, like ‘rewilding’, going back to nature, making our own food and socialising around a fire. And we’ve ended up creating what will be lifelong friendships.