By Russell Bennett
FOR Annie and Lachlan Thompson, their journey into the world of hills bed and breakfasts hasn’t just provided a tree-change from what they’re used to, it’s a whole world away from it – quite literally.
Lachlan is an aerospace engineer and space vehicle design lecturer who has also had an experiment on the space shuttle, while Annie is extremely highly regarded for her work with the European Space Agency.
They came across their Emerald property – ‘Fernglade on Menzies’ – by chance around two-and-a-half years ago, and in doing so they’ve truly found their home.
“To be perfectly honest, it all started almost by accident,” Lachlan said.
“We were looking for a large house so that my brother, who had ill-health at the time, could come and live with us.
“This fitted the bill, and as we were signing the contracts the owner said ‘we’ve explained to you that we’re running it as a B&B … ’.”
The property was advertised as a house – albeit a large one. There was no mention of the bed and breakfast running out of it.
“We worked out a settlement date and all that sort of thing and the next thing they said was ‘we’ve got some bookings around the date you’re moving in’,” Lachlan explained.
“It was actually the day after we moved in – we moved in on the Friday and had guests coming on the Saturday.”
What Lachlan and Annie didn’t know at that stage was that the bookings were for two weddings – both featuring brides named Sally, who both lived in properties on their street.
This was the first indicator of just what a tightknit community they’d moved into.
“When we moved in we had boxes to the ceiling and we had 20 guests,” Annie said. “It really was a baptism by fire – we became bed and breakfast owners over night!”
But the change of pace for the couple was one they sorely needed.
“I’d drive to Bundoora, then I’d go to Point Cook – this would be a typical day – to teach flight test engineering, which is always good fun, and then I’d go to the city to teach air accident investigation so I’d spend more hours on the road than a typical truck driver basically,” Lachlan said.
“They were the worst traffic times too, so in the end I said to Annie ‘this is crazy’, and we thought we’d give it a go.
“Originally I thought I’d be working at the university until my seventies but, coming here, it was basically a tree-change. It was so wonderful – the wildlife is fantastic, and it’s all in a semi-rural environment. It’s basically like finding paradise.
“It took a year to exit from the university and we’ve been running this from the day we moved in – literally.
“It’s really absolutely fantastic. You wake up in the morning and you’ve got a bird chorus, you pat the sheep and give them a bit of food and tell them to go and cut the grass, and just enjoy life.
“This sort of lifestyle is one that my parents used to enjoy, but when I was in my thirties, forties or fifties it had vanished because I was driving so much for work that it was as if I was divorced from the community and it wasn’t real. You had a virtual community, but this is fantastic.”
The Thompsons have discovered that their business has doubled in size just through word of mouth alone. Many of their bookings are from people looking for that change of pace, desperate to take a step back for a breather – just as they were.
“You just reach that point in your life where as one chapter starts to come to an end, a new chapter opens,” Annie said.
“This was the right place at the right time and had Lachlan’s brother not been unwell at that moment we wouldn’t have come looking. It’s serendipity.”
But the Thompsons have maintained their space connection. They’re even in the process of building their own observatory.
“Coming here, we had a look at the place and fortuitously through someone we knew at London University we bought this whopping big research telescope and we’re putting an observatory on this site,” Lachlan explained.
“That will give us both a research connection with the space industry, because we can let people in Russia and America use it in our night time – their day time.”
It’s all in the name of ‘space junk’.
“There’s a lot of it up there but people want to know where it’s going and what it’s doing,” Lachlan said.
“Surprisingly, in Australia there’s only one other telescope system that’s actually looking for space junk. So, Arizona State University and Moscow University are leaders in international programs for tracking the stuff and they’ve said they’re really, really keen to have us on board.
“It turns out the telescope we’ve got is perfect for the job and we’ve put in a planning permit to put in an observatory very similar to Mount Burnett in size – fractionally smaller but with a much larger telescope.
“We’ll have the best of both worlds because people who stay as guests can look through it in the early hours of the evening and because of the time zones the people in Moscow and Arizona will want to start using it from midnight to 1am and they don’t even have to leave their offices.”
Lachlan and Annie have established a strategic partnership with the Mount Burnett amateur astronomy group and together they published a paper at the 17th Australian Space Science Conference earlier this year on the new observatory they’re about to build and the community outreach work Mount Burnett does.
