The faraway land of the house and two cows

Sewerage ghost towns. They exist. Just ask Sorrowing Father, Dear Daughter and Blackened boy, and Yankee doodle dandy that smiles with the eyes and his shadowy mate. They and other characters tell the untold story of the community once living on Melbourne’s Metropolitan Sewerage Farm through a timeless reality.

The faraway land of the house and two cows is a story like no other. Unique because it’s the story of a community once living beside land filtration and grass filtration paddocks being watered 24 hours a day with Melbourne’s sewage. And it’s told in a way that combines fact, memories and legendary tales, by characters with their own connection to the place.

The faraway land of the house and two cows is a must read story about the families that built and maintained the Metropolitan Sewerage Farm: from early workers and their families arriving in the 1890s to camp on the foreshore, living and working through the great Depression, both world wars and boom times of the 1950s, to ultimately move away from four main settlements on the sewerage farm to leave an abandoned town in the 1970s. The community was behind the making of one of Australia’s most important civic works projects from the 1890s into the 1900s, providing job security during the 1890s economic crash and the 1930s depression.

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