Not waving, drowning

After a breakdown, Kate Halfpenny's dream of a midlife sea change turned into a nightmare. Her book about the experience has become an Aussie hit.

- BY SARAH CATHERALL

A few years ago, Kate Halfpenny felt as if she had lost everything. The former magazine journalist had suffered a breakdown brought on by a stressful job, her three kids had left the nest, her Melbourne apartment was heavily mortgaged and had needed remediation work. The world was also in the midst of a pandemic.

Facing all these challenges, Halfpenny and her second husband, Chris, decided to chase the midlife, middle-class dream of trading city life for a quieter, coastal one. They figured things could only improve with a move out of town.

Within three weeks of selling their flawed but cool warehouse-conversion apartment in central Melbourne's Collingwood, they had bought a house with a 700 sq m garden in Ocean Grove, a small beach town a 90-minute drive south of Melbourne, popular with retirees and handier to Halfpenny's elderly parents. Their mortgage slashed, in early 2021 they drove away from Melbourne to start their new, chilled life.

But the dream quickly soured, as Halfpenny writes in her brave, compelling and at times hilarious memoir, Boogie Wonderland. While she wasn't quite prepared for the conservatism of a small town after buzzy, multicultural Collingwood, she was even less prepared to be dealing with a problem that became more apparent in their new setting: Chris's alcoholism.

"I felt like I was running away from something rather than running to something," says Halfpenny. But asked if she would make the same shift again, she says, "I absolutely would. It was difficult for us because we were supertraumatised by the Covid lockdowns, and the pressure we were under with our $1.8 million leaking apartment.

"Menopause, the bad job, it was all hitting at once. Ideally, if you're doing the sea change or the tree change, do it when you don't have another whole lot of dominoes in your life. We left under pressure."