We now had somewhere to live. But owning a suitable property and wanting to live there doesn’t necessarily mean you’re allowed to live there ... as we soon discovered.
Rule Number One when buying a section (or anything else, for that matter) is to check it out thoroughly. Even if it all seems straightforward. Even if the owners seem like genuine people. Even if your trusty gut-feeling is telling you everything’s just plain wonderful. Because that insignificant, inconsequential dotted line running through your section might just be a paper road everyone (well, nearly everyone) has forgotten about, and it’ll be no use berating your neighbour when he turns up demanding right of way with his thousand head of cattle. Because those genuine, salt-of-the-earth people might have forgotten about the mineral rights they’d sold to the local goldmining company (not that they ever expected anyone to actually use them), and it’ll be no use issuing trespass notices when goldminers start excavating under your garage.
A title search carried out by a reliable independent lawyer should uncover any historical anomaly or troublesome technicality which could otherwise create future havoc or generally interfere with your hard-won peaceful rural existence. The more you know about the property (having it all in writing is a bonus), the less traumatic future dealings with neighbours and others will be. It’s better to be fully aware of all matters relating to access, boundaries, rights and obligations before you sign anything, than after. And no matter how many times you wander over the property, no matter how many locals you talk to, no matter how many hours you spend discussing technicalities with the owners, nothing is going to give you a clearer picture of exactly what it is you’re buying than a title search.
That’s the theory anyway. But neither Marion nor I have ever been gifted rule followers. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I must confess my instinctive reaction is often, still, to obey instructions to the letter, and without question. Conformity has always been my family’s catchcry, and my childhood was one of unthinking obedience to authority of any description. Do as you’re told. Don’t stand out. Conform. Yessir, nosir, threebagsfullsir... So my rebelliousness isn’t so much emotional as intellectual. I’m willing to believe most instructions are largely accurate until proven otherwise. I’m no stickler. Rather, I assume any rule, instruction, direction, command, decree or ordinance has some degree of inherent flexibility.
Marion, on the other hand, is a complete natural. Even something as innocuous as a recipe is treated with scant respect. Laws are, at most, simply rough guidelines to what she could do. Speed limits are mere suggestions. And as for those other million-and-one regulations designed to maintain order in an ever-more-complicated and chaotic world, well, they might be well-meaning, but people can’t really be expected to pay any attention to them, can they? It’s not that Marion wantonly sets out to rebel and disobey and ignore and disregard such minor impediments, it’s just that she can’t see the point.
Needless to say, we never bothered to undertake a title search. After all, our gut-instinct was telling us everything was plum dandy, and the Wilsons were such genuine people ... Within minutes of embarking on our very first foray into property ownership, we’d already broken Rule Number One. But at least we’d started as we intended to go on.
Perhaps, in hindsight (what a huge leap forward if we could somehow learn to make use of hindsight in advance!), we acted with a degree of arrogance. We took it for granted that if we wanted to live there, everything would somehow work out, regardless of bureaucracy, rules or technicalities. In our defence, it all seemed so right, that we were simply overwhelmed by our enthusiasm and didn’t stop to consider any other possibility. Maybe we just didn’t want to find out anything which might deter us from proceeding.
The property was zoned Rural A. We knew that before we bought the place. But, being born-and-bred city folk (not to mention foreigners in this strange land), we had no concept of what this implied, and certainly didn’t take the time to discover the legal ramifications of such a zoning. After all, there were houses dotted along the roadside the entire route from the village, so nobody could possibly object to one more house, could they?
Unfortunately, the COD Council did object. (Central Otago District Council, that is, though COD Council seems more appropriate, since there’s always something distinctly fishy about local government.) The District Plan was a simple though somewhat free-spirited creature, easily led astray by the lewd promises of slick townies. In order to maintain its integrity, the council, as its sole guardian, had opted for a strict prevention strategy ... shotgun weddings just not being their style. A Rural A zoning provided for the “erection of a dwelling house only where such dwelling is accessory to agriculture, horticulture or forestry.” And although our house would make a lovely accessory to any activity, we certainly weren’t planning on being farmers, orchardists or foresters.
We could have exaggerated a little (well, a lot) and claimed to be wildly enthusiastic about all three (which wouldn’t have been totally false, because we were certainly planning on dabbling in a bit of everything). But that still wouldn’t get us over the first hurdle. In order to get planning consent, we had to prove the property was a viable economic unit.
The first part we had no problems with. Life would be entirely viable there - in terms of quality, if not always quantity.
The last part was also a cinch. The property was certainly a unit.
It was the middle bit that was the killer. Economic? Define economic! Living there was undoubtedly going to do wonders for our personal economy - the degree of self-sufficiency theoretically attainable limited only by our own insufficiencies. In the broader sense, the COD-sense, we needed more. The ability (and desire) to provide for our needs was irrelevant. We needed, first and foremost, to provide for society’s needs. If we were to be permitted to live on our section, we needed to prove we could convert each clod of soil into sufficient wealth to meet the needs of a growing economy (calculated using the formula - dollars/arable square metres x pesticide/fertiliser quotient divided by CPI-adjusted per capita GDP + 7). Proving that, was virtually impossible.
Of course, we could have lied. The section’s not flat enough (or rock-free enough) for intensive agriculture? It is if you’re buying the ultimate hill-hugging, rock-crunching cultivator tractor from an obscure (though highly innovative) Chinese manufacturer. Five acres isn’t enough for commercial orchards or forests? It is if you’re pioneering the country’s first ginseng plantation or a new strain of hardwoods which only take one year to mature. It wouldn’t be our fault if, once we were comfortably ensconced in our new home, nothing much ever eventuated. The mythical manufacturer might just have gone into receivership (happens all the time), or those dodgy rootstock suppliers might have ripped us off (happens every now and then). Of course we’d love to discuss it further, but it’s all sub judice, you know, and we don’t want to prejudice our court case. Hopefully it doesn’t drag on for too many years ...
We could have lied. But we didn’t. We had nothing to be ashamed of, we just wanted to live there. We didn’t care about economic viability, and we didn’t understand why it should be at all relevant to our plans. Marion and I were both intelligent, creative and industrious people - we’d manage to make a living somehow. At the moment we had enough money put aside to allow us the luxury of spending the next year building our own home. We’d think about economic viability then.
Our argument was solid. We had the right to live on our property. We’d established a secure beachhead on the moral and ethical high ground. We didn’t need to lie ... and we didn’t think they’d believe us anyway.
So, despite our enthusiasm for our section and our determination to live there, unless we could prove it was an economically viable unit (which it most certainly wasn’t), we were sunk.
To paraphrase my grandfather (and plagiarise the homoeopathic tenet) - whatever causes the problem can usually cure it. (In the strict sense he was an uneducated man, having left a tumultuous schooling early to become an itinerant roustabout working the vast stations of outback Queensland during the Depression. But his varied and challenging life had fostered a unique brand of bush wisdom mixed with a common-sense approach. He was never very big on reading, and I doubt he’d ever met a homoeopathist, so I’m quite sure this maxim wasn’t consciously garnered from any secondary source. Besides, its roots stretched back to his ringbarking years when he’d ‘cured’ himself of a particularly aggressive skin rash by burning brigalow bark and rubbing the ashes into the broken skin, not only relieving the itch, but preventing any further recurrence.) Economic viability was the disease, so therein must also lie the remedy.
The council had declared our section terminally uneconomic. All traditional treatments had failed, and the prognosis was bleak. They wanted to pull the plug, but we begged more time. Our only hope lay in pursuing an alternative, homoeopathic approach. And the only thing we really had to go on, were the Deeds.
No comments:
Post a Comment