My suburb transformed our lives. Yet people don’t believe it’s real

October 12, 2026 — 7:00pm

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People don’t believe me when I tell them where I live. The Patch? That’s not a real place, they say, and I don’t blame them. I’d never heard of it either until 13 years ago, when my partner and I moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Carlton to a 10-acre property in the Dandenong Ranges.

What a steep learning curve it was! Although I grew up on a similar-sized property in NSW, by that point in my life I considered myself a city girl through and through. And while Oliver had worked briefly on farms in Italy, neither of us were really prepared for the work it would take to keep a semi-rural property going – the mowing, the pruning, the clearing of gutters and fallen branches, the woodchopping and constant weeding, the mud.

We had ideas for what to do with all that space – an orchard, berry canes, a vegetable patch, but where to start? All we knew for sure is that we wanted a change, a life lived closer to nature, and we got it from day one. Our new home was vacant for months before we moved in, and we discovered a lyrebird had taken up residence beneath the deck. On the first morning, our alarm went off and we heard the ringtone mimicked back to us.

We chose the Dandenong Ranges for our tree change because we were both working in the city and the........

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