In the town of Beausejour, Manitoba, if you post on the community Facebook page that you’re looking for a place to live, the next day strangers will greet you in the grocery store by name. They’ll wish you luck, and they’ll already know your story. This is charming. It is also, depending on your temperament, deeply unnerving.
For one recently arrived family from Australia, mom, dad, and two kids aged 10 and 4, it’s been mostly charming. The Leat family arrived in late June with a plan: settle into a 160-acre property owned by an aunt near Steep Rock. They would live in one of the outbuildings, contribute labor in exchange for the space, and continue the self-reliant lifestyle they’d honed back home which included hunting, fishing, homeschooling, growing their own food.
It was a good plan, until the dogs arrived.
Technically, the dogs had been there all along, the aunt’s partner’s two canine companions, but the family had not yet met them in person. The meeting did not go well. Within hours, the new arrivals knew the arrangement would never work. Forty-eight hours after landing on the property, they were back to square one, the shed home they’d purchased still three weeks from delivery.
“It was really emotional,” Jenelle recalls. “We’d made this huge trip, nine months of planning, visas, citizenship paperwork for the kids, and suddenly it was just gone.”
So they did what any modern pioneering family does: They went on Facebook. The post was simple, a call for land within an hour or two of Winnipeg, preferably with trees for privacy, electricity, maybe water. In exchange for rent, they could offer cash or seven to ten hours of work a week. Dad had spent five years on permaculture farms; mom was a yoga teacher of twenty years with an online business.
Responses poured in. Many were kind. A few were… unrealistic. “Some people wanted us to basically run their property,” she says. “Like 40 hours a week in exchange for parking our shed. That’s not a trade, that’s a full-time job.”
Eventually, they found the right fit near Gimli. The shed home arrived yesterday. If all goes well, tonight will be their first night sleeping in it.
The move to Manitoba baffles almost everyone they meet. Both Australians and Canadians, it doesn’t matter. “Why here?” people ask, with the same tone they’d use to ask, “Why would you eat a tire?”
The short answer is that Mom is Canadian-born, raised partly in Calgary. The long answer is that the couple wanted their children to experience a different rhythm of life, different seasons, different landscape, a more deliberate connection to the land. In Queensland’s Noosa region, where they’d lived, life was warm, barefoot, and easy. Bananas grew like weeds. Winters were just the rainy season.
In Manitoba, they want the opposite. A challenge. A proper Canadian winter. Six months to store food and six months to make it last. “You have to be intentional here,” she says. “It’s not like Australia, where you can grow year-round and pick fruit in January.”
They’ve noticed Manitobans can be slow to warm up, guarded at first, then suddenly effusive once they know a little about you. “It’s like a hard candy shell,” she says. “Once you crack it, you’re in.”
The next months will be about insulating the shed, installing the wood stove, figuring out hunting seasons, and making community connections. Dad is looking for work, ideally in tourism; Mom is relaunching her yoga mentoring business. Both want to plug into local homeschooling groups.
Also, there’s a subtle mission: to love this place loudly enough to make others see it differently. “From a distance,” she says, “Manitoba doesn’t promote itself well. You have to dig to see what’s special here. But once you see it, you get it.”
And if you run into them in town, they’ll probably tell you about it.
