About the Books
Dion Perry’s doctor initially suspected he had asthma upon hearing he did not feel well.
So, he was sent to the local hospital for a chest X-ray and a lung function test. The results were definitive: He did not have asthma.
The mystery was solved when his doctor placed her fingers on his wrist to feel his pulse.
She told him his heart was beating out of step before returning with a senior doctor, who gave him a referral to a cardiologist.
A few days later, the author was breathlessly trying to chainsaw up, split, and stack some wood from some logs he’d dropped in the yard a couple of months prior. Later that afternoon, not feeling well, he went to see an acupuncturist who wanted to take him straight to Goulburn Hospital.
Instead, he went home, only to be phoned by a doctor who sent an ambulance to pick him up.
It was the beginning of a journey with lots of twists and turns that left him with a new heart more than two years later.
Clarke Island is a windswept place in Eastern Bass Strait that contained no other residents and could only be accessed by light plane or boat when weather permitted. Having never seen the place, Dion and his family moved there in March of 1984 with no plan B. They arrived with little provisions and few possessions to an old farmhouse invested with poisonous black house spiders and overrun with mice. With no way off, all they could
do was make the best of it.
Over the next six years, with little or no outside help, they had to contend with a blocked septic tank, a bee swarm in the house chimney, broken machinery, telephone outages, cantankerous horses, wild cattle that could not be mustered and the extreme isolation of living on an island.
To survive they had to learn to live in harmony with the island by forging a semi self-sufficient life style in which they not only grew a garden and kept milking goats, but learned to live off the bounty of the land and sea.
For one boy, living on Clarke Island was a once in a lifetime opportunity and this is his story.
About the Books
Dion Perry’s doctor initially suspected he had asthma upon hearing he did not feel well.
So, he was sent to the local hospital for a chest X-ray and a lung function test. The results were definitive: He did not have asthma.
The mystery was solved when his doctor placed her fingers on his wrist to feel his pulse.
She told him his heart was beating out of step before returning with a senior doctor, who gave him a referral to a cardiologist.
A few days later, the author was breathlessly trying to chainsaw up, split, and stack some wood from some logs he’d dropped in the yard a couple of months prior. Later that afternoon, not feeling well, he went to see an acupuncturist who wanted to take him straight to Goulburn Hospital.
Instead, he went home, only to be phoned by a doctor who sent an ambulance to pick him up.
It was the beginning of a journey with lots of twists and turns that left him with a new heart more than two years later.
Clarke Island is a windswept place in Eastern Bass Strait that contained no other residents and could only be accessed by light plane or boat when weather permitted. Having never seen the place, Dion and his family moved there in March of 1984 with no plan B. They arrived with little provisions and few possessions to an old farmhouse invested with poisonous black house spiders and overrun with mice. With no way off, all they could
do was make the best of it.
Over the next six years, with little or no outside help, they had to contend with a blocked septic tank, a bee swarm in the house chimney, broken machinery, telephone outages, cantankerous horses, wild cattle that could not be mustered and the extreme isolation of living on an island.
To survive they had to learn to live in harmony with the island by forging a semi self-sufficient life style in which they not only grew a garden and kept milking goats, but learned to live off the bounty of the land and sea.
For one boy, living on Clarke Island was a once in a lifetime opportunity and this is his story.