Matt Taylor from the North Coast Post sat down to chat to new Deloraine resident, Tom Crowley about his move to the town. This is the first of two interviews with Tom. The second interview focuses on Tom’s work and new business in the region.
Matt: Where did you move from?
Tom Crowley: We moved from Adelaide at the end of November, 2023.
Matt: Were you anywhere before then?
Tom Crowley: Yes, many places. The road to get to Deloraine has been very long and winding. And so before Adelaide we lived in Barcelona in Spain. We lived there for a year.
Before then we lived in Edinburgh in Scotland for about five years. Before that we lived in London for a couple of years. And in between there was lots of traveling around in vans and on bicycles and just playing music.
Matt: Can you tell us a little bit about your family?
Tom Crowley: Yeah, so I grew up in England.
My mum’s from Scotland. And my dad’s from England. My mum was a 10 Pound Pom back in the 60s. She lived here for a while and then she went back to the UK. Had a family and when we grew up she came back out here. I’ve got a brother here as well. My wife is from South America. We met in London. She’s a musician as well.
Four years ago we had our first child, Beau, and then a few years later we’ve had our second child. We’ve also got Charlie the dog living here, so we’re all here now.
Matt: What drew you to Deloraine?
So we, we’ve been wanting to move to New Zealand for For like, 11 years. We, we had some friends in Edinburgh, who were from New Zealand.
And, it just, I dunno, it just sounded like an awesome place to live. We were always heading towards New Zealand, and it was just so hard. You know, we just didn’t know how to begin it. Everything was so complicated. But we just kept pushing, we were like, ‘this is just a hard thing we’ve got to push to do’.
And then, about a year ago, our dog died, Rags, who we’d brought from the 12 years, and that was the beginning of a really hard time for us. Then a few months later, my wife was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. And then New Zealand was just, ‘this is too hard – it shouldn’t be this hard’.
So we just thought we’ll leave that for now. And then we just came on holiday to Tasmania – just for a break. I mean, we did think maybe Tasmania would be a nice place to live. We didn’t know much about it. And then when we came here, just like the first breath of air, after getting off the boat, was very soothing.
And we’re just blown away by the landscape. Everything just felt, nice. People were nice. Everything was. So, we stayed for a week camping. And then we went home. And then we thought we’d just look to see if there’s any places. While we were on that trip, we came to Deloraine.
So that’s how we found Deloraine. We were staying in Longford. And we’d just gone for a drive, and as soon as we drove up the high street (in Deloraine) my wife just said, “Oh, this would be a good place to live”. And it just, I don’t know, just felt like an intuitive feeling. It had a real magic about it, you could just tell it was a creative place and just the scenery was stunning.
So we got back to Adelaide and started looking around to see if there’s any houses and straight away, this house came up, this 120 year old house, beautiful old house, just lovely light. With this huge garden, sort of close to half an acre. I thought, oh, it looks really good. I don’t know if we’re ready yet, but let’s apply.
And we applied, and they just said, “Yep, you’re good – you can have it”. And then, yeah, so two months after we’d been on holiday, we were here. And everything’s been very easy. I mean, we’ve had to work hard. But our neighbours have been great – we met them the first day we came. And they’re just awesome people, just really helpful and just making us feel welcome and meeting other neighbours as well.
The community is too – everywhere you go. It’s great just making connections with people very quickly, with a lot of like minded people. The art side and the natural nature side. We feel at home here, which is a really rare thing for us. I’ve never lived anywhere that I wasn’t thinking about where I’m going to move to next, apart from Deloraine.
It just… it ticks all my boxes. It’s such a nice place.
