- Lyndall dreamt of living in an eco village, where neighbours helped to grow communal food and looked after each other, so she turned to tarot cards.
- The tarot cards pointed her north of Sydney where she’d find the land for her eco village.
- In 2012, 24 people pooled their money together to buy the land and begin to build.
- Now over 110 people of all ages live in the eco village. Lyndall Parris, 74, shares her story…
My son Richard, 10, ran up to the pool and jumped into the air.
“Cannonball!” he yelled, hitting the water.
It splashed his sister, Marg, 12, who was lying on her towel nearby reading.
“I’m going to get you,” she cried, jumping in, too.
I smiled as I watched them play.
“Look how much fun they’re having in that pool,” I said to my husband, Dave. “It’s such a shame it’s only our family that gets to use it.”
For a long time, I’d dreamt of living in a village where communities helped each other in times of need.
It was the 1990s and we lived on a sheep farm in the Snowy Mountains.
Dave worked as an engineer and I worked as an accountant, and our closest neighbours were a few kilometres away.
Read more: I speak to sprits through Christmas decorations

One day in 1997, a lady from a local women’s club approached me to do a speech for her group.
“Can you talk to us about budgeting?” she asked.
“I’d rather tell you about this dream I have,” I replied, explaining my community eco village idea.
She said that was fine, so that weekend I told the 40-strong audience about my idea for collaborative living.
“What if we lived in a space where we all helped each other out?” I said.
I wasn’t suggesting a hippy commune, more a neighbourly community where we could drop meals round if people needed, and look after each other’s kids, or take them to doctor’s appointments.
It was a radical idea for the time and received a mixed response.
The idea of raising a family as a village had become a distant one.
Some people were more private and didn’t want their neighbours interfering with their business all the time!
A few years later, two friends of mine sadly lost their husbands and had to bring up teenage kids on their own.
“I can’t help them as much as I could if we all lived next to each other,” I said to Dave, feeling frustrated.

The year I turned 50, we moved to Sydney so our kids could go to uni and high school.
At my 50th birthday party, I gave all my friends the same speech I’d given at the women’s club.
One man came up to me afterwards.
“I wouldn’t live in a place like that in a million years,” he chuckled.
My idea wasn’t for everyone, but I felt convinced there’d be others out there who’d love being neighbourly so I went on a TAFE course to learn how to create a website, and in 2004 I started to collect names of interested people into a database.
The following year, I met with developers from WA who wanted to use my idea as the prototype for an ecovillage that they could then use countrywide.
My biggest hurdle was finding suitable land for it. I searched and searched.
In 2007, I went to a tarot reader. “Where is this friggin’ land I’m going to build my village on?” I asked the cards, not hiding my exasperation.
I’d been convinced we’d find it south of Sydney but to my surprise the cards revealed the property would be north.
A couple of months later, Dave saw an ad for a property 90-minutes’ drive north of Sydney.
As soon as we arrived there, Dave turned to me.
“This is the place,” he said. Nestled under a grassy hill, the 68-hectare plot of land in Narara on the Central Coast included a huge dam and a creek. The tarot cards were right!

It was perfect, but then in 2008 the world had a global financial crisis and before we could buy the land, our developers went bust. They were funding the project so it was devastating.
I refused to give up though, and in 2012, 24 of us from the database pooled our money. The land was ours and we soon began to build. Years of council approval and civil works followed.
Finally, just before Christmas 2019, we moved in.
We called it Narara Ecovillage and it was an instant success.
There are now 50 houses, made of everything from brick to earth and hay bales; 110 people live here with 80 more moving in over the next couple of years. We have newborns all the way to people in their 80s.
One resident’s ‘hobbit-like house’ has received a lot of media attention.
They are all built to be energy efficient, and we produce seven times more power ourselves with our solar panels than we need. We store some in a battery and then sell some back to the grid.
Run as a co-operative, the whole point of it is to be neighbourly. We have potluck dinners, movie nights, and grow vegies and fruit in a shared garden.
We use what we call ‘sociocracy’ and hold listening circles in the village hall to resolve disputes and make decisions.

Adults commit to at least 52 hours a year of tasks that contribute to the upkeep of the property or to community building, like cleaning the village hall or teaching a yoga class.
During COVID, we were able to look out for our vulnerable neighbours without breaking any laws, and no-one felt lonely.
Interested people come to us all the time to see what we are up to so they can do it themselves.
My daughter Marg, 45, and son Sam, 37, now live here, too, with their families.
I babysit my grandkids when they need to go to Sydney for work.
My next goal is to tackle the issue of frail care.
“We did it,” I said to Dave, 73, recently, as I sat on my deck watching the village children play, just like I watched my kids play in the pool all those years before.
It took 30 years, but my dream finally came true.