Australian Town and Country

Inspirations: Woodland cafe

2012-01-03T20:20:00.000+11:00

Happy New Year everybody! I have been in New Zealand spending time with my family. While visiting my brother who lives at the top of the South Island in a gorgeous area called Golden Bay, we drove to a remote beach on the West Coast. On the walk to the beach, we stumbled across a captivating cafe attached to a tiny camping ground. Coffee and food were being served from a van nestled in a stand of old Macrocarpa trees.

The tables and stools were made from Macrocarpa and the tables were built around the trees.

Charming details had been added: coathooks and a tableau featuring an old stove. Everything about the cafe was very simple but beautiful quality.

One of the best features was a tame and no doubt very spoilt peacock named Archie.

I was captivated and enchanted and immediately started pondering whether I could create something similar one day at the country house.

2011-12-15T21:23:00.000+11:00

It has been a while since I've posted. I've been focussed on my work in the city. I did get time to make a couple of things for the herb and vege garden that I wanted to share.

I converted a small unused garden bed close to the house nestled under a rose trellis into a small vegetable garden. It's not irrigated, but I thought I'd have a go and see how far I get before the heat of summer kicks in. Here are my snowpeas on the support that I made out of raspberry cane prunings. I found the rhubarb forcer (seen in the background) on the roof of the house.

I also made my tomato trellises out of willow branches cut from the garden. About two weeks after I took this they sprouted! I'll have to remove them and dry them in the sun or they will suck all of the nutrients from the tomatoes. The half wine barrels are in an old pond that I drained and refilled. I like the shape of the stones.

Making a compost bin

2011-07-18T20:30:00.001+10:00

I know it's incredibly geeky, but I love composting. All of my food scraps and the paper that goes through my home office goes onto the pile. I don't bother with turning or tending it, and after about six months it has transformed into beautiful black soil. There's something great about my old tax records and junk mail being turned into food for my herb garden, and in turn me.

My current compost pile, made from an old wooden box has been slowly falling apart for a while. I thought long and hard about how to make a new one and how it should look. There's no reason for compost not be beautiful, I think.

I procured some old potato boxes for free from a local farmer and with Piet my trusty garden help we transformed one into a new compost box. Well, Piet wielded the chainsaw while I stood by giving anal retentive instructions such as, 'Could we just shave another centimetre off that side as it's not quite even'. And ...Voila! Here it is. Complete with shredded tax records.

My friend Lizzie came to visit and we made a drystone wall against one side of the box from some stones I had lying around. It even withstood a 4.3 earthquake the following weekend.

No. There is no reason why a compost pile can't be beautiful.

Two types of Autumn happiness

2011-03-22T19:35:00.000+11:00

Pruning of the lavendar yields a lovely bunch that I'll put on the fire to make the house fragrant over winter.

A little friend comes out for a sniff of lavender.

Christchurch

2011-02-26T11:43:00.000+11:00

I'm sorry about the lack of post for a while. The town of Christchurch in New Zealand, the place where I grew up, broke and crumbled in an earthquake this week and I feel very sad. Thankfully my parents, who live there, are OK and their house is not damaged.

Even though it has been many years since I have lived in Christchurch, I travel there every Christmas to spend time with my parents. I had assumed that the city would always be there, always be the same comfortable place, unchanged and waiting for me as old home towns do. Although hopefully wonderful new buildings will rise from the rubble, I'm grieving because the place that I knew is gone.

A pic of Lyttelton, where the earthquake was centred, I took from across its harbour last Christmas. It sustained heavy damage and along with the rest of Christchurch has lost many of its historic buildings.

Two types of summer weekend happiness

2011-02-07T10:25:00.000+11:00

Small but perfectly formed crops. I grew the potatoes. The blackberries grew themselves.

Birthday summer lunch 2010 (3)

2011-02-03T14:53:00.000+11:00

So, to the entree of my birthday summer lunch. (I wrote about the hor d'hoeuvre here).

For the entree I braved souffle. Souffle is something that I've always equated with angst and a high chance of something going horribly wrong. As there is already enough angst and chance of something going horribly wrong when I cook for others with even basic, let alone highly strung dishes, I've always steered clear of it.

But then in my beloved Australian Gourmet Traveller I found a recipe for double-baked Gruyere souffles that sounded so good that I decided to risk it. The recipe, aside from looking delicious, fulfilled one of my entertaining requirements: it's pretty much prepared the day before.

Basically you make a bechamel sauce base, add whipped egg white, the cheese and herbs and cook the day before. Here they are looking quite angelic and not angst-inducing at all.

Then half an hour before serving you add more cheese and cream and bake them again.

Pic by Nina

Next time I make them to this recipe, I'll go a bit lighter on the cream. I served them with a green salad to offset the richness.

Pic by Nina

They were REALLY good. I highly recommend this recipe.

Pic by Nina

The snakes are out

2011-01-31T10:06:00.000+11:00

So you're sitting on your front porch enjoying the sunset. It's a gentle rural scene. You snap a couple of photographs.

As you're downloading the pics a week later you notice something on the bank. Hang on, you think, what's that?

You check the photograph before, it's not there.

You look more closely.

You make a mental note to be very careful in the garden over summer.

Chicken houses, tears and boundary issues

2011-01-26T13:04:00.000+11:00

I was very excited when my neighbour G dropped into conversation that he was building a chicken house. Images of fresh golden yolks swirling in home-made custard danced in front of my eyes. I enthusiastically endorsed the project.

A few weeks later when I saw that he was incorporating our shared boundary fence into the back wall of the chicken house I was, to put it mildly, less enthused. I was upset. I thought I'd made it clear that I didn't want anything built too close to our boundary. I was also surprised because G has been an exemplary neighbour. We have spent quality time strolling our properties together, beer in hand, discussing our plans and dreams. He has done electrical work for me, lent me tools and machinery and been on call for bat and spider-removal services. He is always offering to lend me a hand, even though he has 27 acres, a job and a family and often needs a hand himself. So when I saw the location of the chicken house, it felt like a betrayal of our friendship. It felt, to put it mildly, like my boundaries had been breached.

The view from my front balcony of the part of my shared fence with G where the chicken house would have been clearly visible. I've planted out the garden bed, but it will take several years for the plants to grow high enough that we can't see into each others' properties.

I stomped around the garden yanking out weeds and reflecting. Then it occurred to me that from the day I made the offer for the property I had failed to proactively manage my own boundaries. Annoyingly, I had some blame for this issue, perhaps as much as G.

Four years ago I knew as soon as I turned into the front gate that I badly wanted this house. I stood with the real estate agent while he swept his hand in the vague direction of the property boundaries and that was good enough for me. Dear reader, I'm ashamed to say that when I signed the contract I had no idea where my exact boundaries lay.

My laxness continued. The property had been empty for over a year (it was a mortgagee sale) and another farmer who was owed money by the previous owner had been grazing his cows on my bottom paddocks (via G's land, which he leases). It suited me not to have to worry about mowing those four acres and I have no water for stock, so leasing my land without putting some mental energy and work into setting it up wasn't an option. So I let the cows continue to graze...without any formal discussion. When the fence needed repairs and when he made improvements, I let G do the work...with thanks, but without any formal discussion.

In my own defense, my property-owning experience before the country house has been with apartments where boundaries are very well defined and managed by a body corporate. I had never given property boundaries much thought. And I was overwhelmed with getting my mind around all of the other things that owning a run-down house on six weed-filled acres entails.

I gathered my courage and I went next door to talk to G. I told him that I realised that I had not taken my share of responsibility for our shared boundary fence and I apologised. I told him that a chicken shed so close to our shared boundary was not OK with me and I asked for a meeting to discuss it. It was a hard conversation for me to initiate and when he kindly pointed out that he recognised this, goddamn, I couldn't help but squeeze out a couple of tears. So annoying.

The next weekend when I arrived at the house, the chicken shed had been dismantled. I walked my whole boundary line to check the condition of the fences. I called the local council and the local community law centre to find out more about my responsibilities. The next time I saw G it was a little uncomfortable but we laughed it off. Then we had a conversation about the work that needs to be done on the fences. I took accountability for my half. It felt good.

One type of summer weekend happiness

2011-01-12T09:53:00.000+11:00

...the promise of a bumper season of apples.

If the parrots don't get in first.

Birthday summer lunch (3)

2011-01-07T12:34:00.001+11:00

I'm stretching it a little when I say 'lunch', or rather it's the lunch that's stretched. When my guests are staying the night and thus there's no need to worry about an inappropriate mix of driving and inebriation, I like to plan the meal over a stretch of many hours. Say, from about 3pm to 10pm. Someone really needs to make up a word that describes a very late lunch that stretches on into dinner.

Hors d'oeuvre in French means outside the work (of art), i.e outside the meal, but I don't see why the hors d'oeuvre can't also be a work of art. I mean, just take a look at this cheese that my friend Andrew brought along with an sourdough olive loaf. A total work of art. French, of course.

We also had stuffed olives (a mix of almond, anchovy and sun dried tomato) and smoked salmon and prosciutto with a sour cream, dill and caper dip, which was also great with the olive bread.

I wrapped chicken legs in proscuitto with a dab of quince paste and oven roasted them with olive oil and fresh thyme. Here they are lurking in the foreground with the other hors d'oeuve essential...my favourite, Veuve Cliquot. Well, it was my birthday.

And here's everything ready to devour.

Pics by Nina

Birthday summer lunch 2010 (2)

2011-01-03T17:55:00.001+11:00

Hello and happy 2011! One of my resolutions is to blog more this year. First up, I'll finish posting about my 2010 birthday lunch in November. Here are a couple of pics of the table (pics by Nina).
I kept it really plain; bare wood with white napkins, cushions, paper lanterns and sprigs of olive.

One kind of summer weekend happiness

2010-12-01T09:54:00.000+11:00

A post luncheon stroll. Nina snapped these a few kilometres from the house in early November. Gippsland, where the country house is nestled, is a quilt of rolling hills and quietly grazing cows.

Not all flower arranging and luncheon parties

2010-11-25T09:02:00.000+11:00

In glossy country house magazines people perch on the edge of their fountains looking completely relaxed in their pricey gumboots. The photographs never show someone with gritted teeth making a third call to the pump installation man to inquire why the pump was not installed last Tuesday. Or someone riddled with PMT digging up 50 thistles in the paddock by hand.

So, lest I give the impression that developing a run-down cottage on six acres is all flower arranging and luncheon parties, it's time to talk about my project list. Here it is:

Cut and remove fallen tree in field, windbreak for orchard, new water tanks, clear and develop dam/lake, new driveway, landscape and plant front of house, remove trees from orchard area, plant orchard, remove trees in front boundary, plant front boundary, clear, landscape and plant bed behind deck, clear level two trees and plant, trim and remove trees obscuring view, prune Blue Gum, architect plans for deck and house, swales to direct water to lake, new vegetable garden, build BBQ and pizza oven, insulate house, get dock in the paddocks under control, new front fence and gates, new washing line, get creeping grass under control, new woodshed, paint house inside and out, install irrigation, weed and reshape front driveway bed, install gutter guards, install range hood in kitchen, finish herb garden, new compost bins, split pile of wood by the shed, get aerials checked, remove old tin and posts on third level, get roller door remote fixed, get scrap metal taken to recyclers, dismantle old vegetable patch, finish boundary bed.

Calming scented candles help project overload

I've posted about how overwhelmed I felt when I first bought the house. I know it's a 20 year project, but at the beginning, the sheer scale of what needed to be done swamped my brain. Each individual item on the list above is a major project in itself. This year I instituted a three-project at a time rule and it has worked amazingly well. Instead of spreading my physical and mental effort across multiple projects, I now restrict myself to three. Nothing new goes on the list until something comes off. Only small one-off tasks can be done outside of the list. It works I think because I make progress more quickly, which gives me more momentum to finish things. It also limits the number of to-dos cluttering my brain.

Now that I've figured out how to do photo slideshows, I'll post about my three current projects soon.

Flax arrangement details

2010-11-24T09:14:00.001+11:00

Pics by Nina.

Flax, roses and lanterns

2010-11-22T20:45:00.001+11:00

Here are the flowers I did for a recent weekend lunch. Pic by Nina. More on the lunch soon.

Sausage making finale: la sagra della salsiccia* (4)

2010-11-17T10:03:00.000+11:00

So, finally to the sausage making.

Thank goodness that we had Jeanie, a trained scientist, in attendance because someone good at maths had to translate the American quantities for the recipes that we had chosen and adjust them for the amount of meat that we had. Some of the recipes in the book called for quantities too large for us. Even though we were making only three recipes: classic Italian, pistachio, and fennel, all of our six pairs of hands were needed on deck to chop, grind and measure.

We could have ordered the pork already minced, but we wanted to try out the grinding for ourselves, so ordered it in pieces. We chopped these into smaller chunks and chilled them in the freezer for 30 minutes as per the recipe instructions.

There was great excitement at the first cranking up of the grinder. We had a rosemary-cutting ceremony, to add to the sense of occasion. The grinding began.

And the grinding continued. And continued. Then a little cloud settled over the room as it dawned how long it was going to take to grind our seven kilos of meat, which didn't jauntily fly through the grinder as the picture on the box implied. It was slow going and we kept having to stop to remove stringy pieces.

So my trusty food processor was pressed into service and whipped through the grinding at a much better pace. This may have had an impact on the texture of the final sausages, which were very firm. The hand grinder looks beautiful and was great for stuffing the casings but I think I'm going to invest in the meat grinding attachment for my Kitchen Aid for future sausage adventures.

Then we mixed in the ingredients and tested the flavour by cooking a little of the meat in the frying pan. It was good.

We weren't entirely sure how to use our saline-packed casings (our recipe book called for dry salt-packed ones), so after having soaked them in lemon water, Stuart bravely stepped in, cut off a length and rinsed it by running tap water through. The fear of puncturing it proved unfounded, casings are much stronger than they look. We were less assiduous with our rinsing for the other batches and there was no discernible difference in the texture or taste of the final sausages.

Now. I'm not sure that there is a delicate way to broach the subject of stuffing the sausages. I'm preparing you out of love because it doesn't mention this in any of the books I've read: it is phallic. The knot was tied in the end of the casing, the nozzle was attached to the grinder, the ground meat was churned through and as it nosed its way through the first casing a group of adults literally collapsed laughing on the floor like school children. I blame the grappa.

Thankfully we had Lizzie to advise on the stuffing technique. She stepped in with a firm hand to make sure that the meat was being packed firmly enough. We had one person putting the meat into the grinder and turning the handle, and one to hold the casing.

A tip if you are planning to make your own sausages: make sure you remove any stringy pieces from the initial mixture. We did with some batches and not for others and it came through as chewy bits in the final sausages. Also make sure that you get your meat with at least 20 percent fat. Although this is what we ordered, our meat seemed a little on the lean side.

We cooked up our sausages and enjoyed them with salad, relish and roast potatoes.

We were very proud of our efforts. And stuffed.

*A sagra is an Italian festival. Salsiccia are pork sausages.
You can read the other posts in this sausage making story, here, here, and here.

Grappa and sausage making: la sagra della salsiccia* (3)

2010-10-14T20:43:00.001+11:00

So, there are six of us gathered at the country house ready to make sausages. Humanely-raised heritage breed pork? Check. Fennel, salt, chili, pepper, red wine, pistachio, coriander, nutmeg, rosemary, garlic? Check. Grinder? Check. Lamb intestines for the sausage casings? Er, check.

We were all just a little intimidated by the sausage casing, as well as unsure what to do with them. My sausage book gave instructions for casings packed in salt, whereas this wasn't. It sat, resembling a piece of cod speared with plastic.

We put it into a bowl of lemon water and fortified ourselves with a caffe correto, which is a shot of espresso 'corrected' with a shot of grappa. Our grappa, sourced by Maria's Zio Dino, had the additional romance of being home-made somewhere in a Melbourne backyard.

Special sausage making tip: your sausage making event will be significantly enhanced by adding grappa to the proceedings.

Maria and Stuart had also brought some grappa that they had created from Zio Dino's flavoured with sultanas. I'm not normally much of a grappa girl, it's a little mouth puckering for me, but I really liked this. The sultanas added a sweet roundness.

Maria and Stuart got the recipe for their grappa from a great book called Preserving the Italian Way, by Peter Demaio, an Italian living in Melbourne. It's his quest to preserve authentic Italian preserving techniques. Demaio, who is obviously a character, says, "Essentially any fruit can be preserved in grappa. The basic principle is to pickle the fruit or berries in the grappa and then to pickle yourself with it when you drink it."

Here is his recipe for grapes in grappa:
Wash 1kg of sultana or muscat grapes. Place in a glass jar, add a piece of vanilla, a piece of cinnamon, the skin of one lemon and cover with grappa. Seal and leave one month.

I have digressed a long way from making sausages, but grappa will do that to you. Newly fortified the courage was plucked to tackle the casings. I'll get back on topic with actually stuffing them next post.

*A sagra is an Italian festival. Salsiccia are pork sausages.

You can read the other posts about our sagra, here and here.

Three kinds of weekend spring happiness

2010-09-27T13:32:00.000+10:00

This weekend it really felt like Spring. The sky was blue and the flowers bloomed.

A country summer birthday lunch (3)

2010-09-12T21:51:00.000+10:00

I wanted to recreate Elena's ragu for my birthday lunch main course. Elena is the mother of my Italian friends Guido and Paolo. Their farm, Petralta in Umbria, was my inspiration for the country house (I'll post about it soon). I cannot think or write about the food at Petralta without reverting to fawning adjectives. The memory of that food is seared into my soul... and my hips.

Elena's ragu with homemade tagliatelle featured during my first stay at Petralta (with friend Nina) ten years ago. Following the ragu that night was chicken, zucchini slices and flowers, and sage leaves all battered and fried in pig fat. Dessert was plum tart. Dinner was washed down with home made wine and a very strong walnut liquor called nocino which Nina and I subsequently became extremely fond of owing to its ability to extend festive energy late into the night.

As part of our strategy of ingratiating ourselves into the family, Nina and I had been allowed into the kitchen to watch dinner preparations. These started at 2pm and ended at 9pm and were punctuated with copious breaks for espresso, gelato and checking the dictionary. Alas, because of the language barrier my recipe for the ragu was annoyingly vague: "add finely chopped onion, garlic, oil, carrot, fresh parsley and another herb we can't pronounce to finely chopped chicken liver." According to Elena, who has been cooking traditional Tuscan food since she was eight, the ragu must be done in stages with much simmering of each. After the mysterious herb stage was wine and a chicken head. Then tomato puree, dried porcini, and stock, more simmering, then the rest of the chicken offal. The taste? [Insert fawning adjective here].

My plans to recreate Elena's ragu were derailed by my inability to purchase a chicken head. My naively hopeful request to my butcher for "One chicken head from an organic chicken, preferably a heritage breed please," was unsuccessful. Apparently it's illegal to sell chicken heads in the fair cosmopolitan city of Melbourne. So, I left with duck legs and duck liver.

Lacking a proper recipe, my plan was to recreate Elena's stages as best I could while slow cooking the ragu for at least four hours to make sure that the meat had totally melted off the bones. (A trial run the weekend before revealed that two hours was not nearly enough to get that thick ragu texture). Aside from a small panic in hour two about the liver quantities, it turned out fabulously. I served it with bread and garlic butter (made with home-grown garlic and garlic chives) and parmesan Reggiano.

Dessert was strawberries macerated with sugar and red wine and my home-made french vanilla ice cream. (I've written about that previously, click here if you want ice cream making tips).

We finished with chocolate birthday cake courtesy of my friend Andrew.

It was a great lunch. I'm already planning for this year's one in November.

Read more about the lunch here and here.

A country summer birthday lunch (2)

2010-09-08T13:37:00.000+10:00

It took me weeks of poring over Australian Gourmet Traveller to plan the menu for the lunch. I wanted food that I could prepare much of beforehand to maximise swanning around on the day.
For hors d'oeuvres I made grissini with rosemary from the garden wrapped in Italian proscuitto. The Gourmet Traveller recipe is here. I served it with a basil pesto and olives stuffed with sun dried tomatoes and one of my favourite champagnes, Veuve Cliquot.

The entree was also really easy. I slow baked ocean trout on a bed of herbs and served it on salad leaves with salsa verde.

The table still looks remarkably respectable given that we'd managed to drink almost a case of Veuve before the entree came out. Well, it was hot. And a birthday!

A country summer birthday lunch (1)

2010-08-30T20:42:00.001+10:00

I have winter-itis. It has rained almost every weekend for months now, which in our drought-stricken country I am grateful for. But, I am so looking forward to sun and warm breeze. In honour of the turn of season, I thought that this week I would post some photographs from my country summer birthday lunch last November.

I spiffed up the house and the deck with flowers from the garden. Photographs by Nina. So handy to have a friend who is studying to be a professional photographer!

La sagra della salsiccia (2)

2010-08-09T10:53:00.000+10:00

Back in December my friend Lizzie and I hatched a plan to have a Sagra della salsiccia (Italian for sausage making festival) at the country house. Not so much a festival really, but a small weekend gathering. I researched one possible provider of humanely and sustainably-raised pork (Fernleigh Farms) and Lizzie researched the best cut of meat (shoulder). Then we lapsed into inactivity until a couple of weekends ago when we met for a very long Sunday lunch at Lizzie's (pictured) for a Sagra planning session with our fellow sausage makers-to be, Maria, Stuart, Matt and Jeanie.

While stuffing ourselves with eight courses of Lizzie's very fine cooking, we divvied up the tasks and are back in action.

I have found us a Gippsland pork supplier an hour away from the country house, The Gypsy Pig. Michael and his wife raise heritage breeds of pigs humanely and sustainably. He is going to supply us shoulder meat off the bone with 80% meat and 20% fat, which he says is a good ratio for sausages. We are going to mince it ourselves to add to the sense of the occasion.

Michael's pigs range freely outside for the whole of their lives and the piglets stay with their mothers for a full eight to ten weeks. This is different to the pigs labeled 'bred free range', which in Australia means that piglets are outside with their mothers for three weeks, then spend the rest of their lives inside. If the welfare of the animals that you eat is important to you, check the 'free range' versus 'bred free range' label carefully. Micheal does point out to me that bred free range is still a big step forward in welfare from intensive pork production.

Michael is also going to supply us with the natural casings, which will be lamb's intestines, although these don't come from his farm. Unless you have access to an organic farmer who has direct control over the slaughtering of his or her sheep and thus the by-products, you can't source organic intestines for sausages in Australia. So when you buy a commercial organic sausage it won't have an organic casing (this is allowable under the law which allows five percent of a certified organic product to be from non-organic ingredients).

I also found a great how-to book for home sausage making, which has supplied two of the three recipes we will use.

We will be steering away from the Squirrel Sausage, and the Moose Sausage in lieu of a classic Italian (coriander, black pepper, red pepper and garlic), Pistachio (black pepper, nutmeg, rosemary, and pistachios) and Fennel (black pepper, sweet paprika and fennel seeds). The fennel recipe is from Mangia Mangia, a website dedicated to preserving traditional Italian recipes, that is well worth a look.

The Festa will be on August 21st, so not long to go!

One kind of winter weekend happiness

2010-07-20T13:12:00.000+10:00

The clean soft citrus fragrance of the wild quince I picked for the bedroom.

So, I just got off the phone from the snake catcher

2010-07-08T12:34:00.232+10:00

My favourite description of Australia comes from the late Douglas Adams:

Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it's not so much a country as such, more a sort of thin crust of semi-demented civilisation caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and hopping things.

Until last weekend my encounters with Australian wildlife had been more Eric Bana (cute, humorous and admired from a distance) than Jack Nicholson. Take this echnidna I met bumbling about his business a couple of weeks ago.

I grew up in New Zealand, where meeting a busload of tourists on a Lord of the Rings tour classifies as a scary wildlife encounter. For most of the twelve years I have been in Australia I've been safely tucked away in the city and never encountered anything remotely dangerous. I have always been particularly bemused by how terrified many Australians are of snakes. One of my neighbours will not go out and walk in his fields in Summer. I guess growing up with news reports of innocent old ladies dying from backyard snake bites will do that to you.

My innocent belief that I didn't really mind snakes was undermined on the weekend by the velocity of my screams when I lifted a brick in my shed and found this hibernating fellow.

Piet, part of my new garden support team, leapt into action grabbing a large metal pole and waving it around authoritatively, while I even more authoritatively sprinted outside still screaming. The snake happily slumbered on. This is when I found out that killing and snakes only goes one way in Australia. They are protected and you can be fined $5000 for dispatching one from this mortal coil. As I hate killing things I was actually quite happy to hear this.

Because I have a healthy appreciation for the law and because I am part English we adjourned inside for a cup of tea and a fruitless search for a snake catcher. When I checked later, the snake was gone.

Today I managed to get hold of snake catcher Dave who had a soothing manner and infectious love of snakes (he takes payment by small donation in case you were considering this a possible lucrative career option).

Snake catcher Dave: I'm pretty sure that he would have been a Copperhead. They are a very quiet snake and don't attack.

Me: Oh, good.

Snake catcher Dave: "If he was pretty small he could have been part of this year's litter from February or March.

Me: Oh, OK.

Snake catcher Dave: A snake will usually have about 10 to 15 babies.

Pregnant pause while I imagine 15 baby snakes rampaging around my property.

Snake catcher Dave: He will probably have about four shelter sites that he likes to visit. Your shed will probably be one of them.

Me: Fine, I guess.

Snake catcher Dave: He'll be attracted to anywhere that he can find skinks, frogs and mice so it's important to keep grass down around the house and mice under control.

Me: Can I expect that there are always snakes around?

Snake catcher Dave: They range over a very large area but you can expect that they will always come through. I live a few hours away but can come out in an emergency. Give me a call if you find one in the house. Occasionally they will squeeze in UNDER A DOOR [emphasis mine] to find mice.

Twin-sized pregnant pause while I consider the new information that snakes can SQUEEZE UNDER CLOSED DOORS and make urgent mental note to purchase steel draught stoppers and locate snake catcher who lives in the vicinity.

After cheery goodbyes from Dave, I speak to snake catcher Nick. Nick said he didn't get out enough and offered to come and visit to take a look for the snake and to let me know what I could do to reduce my risk. He thoughtfully checked whether I might actually want snakes on the property then regaled me with a story about a wealthy client with a large spa and a $1000 annual rat (chewing through electrics) problem. Nick had innovatively solved the problem by releasing two tiger snakes that now lived under the spa. Five years later the snakes had saved $5,000. Everyone was happy, including the snakes.

It sounds like a visit from Nick will be highly entertaining. I'll keep you posted.