The ‘Pockets’ are a group of small bucolic hamlets tucked away in the lush rolling hinterland of Northern NSW, just a few k’s back from Brunswick Heads and nestled in the foothills of the Mount Jerusalem ranges. There’s ‘The Pocket’ and ‘Inner Pocket Reserve’, but if you had to pick a pocket, it’d be ‘Middle Pocket’ – an idyllic parcel of country covering some 10.68 square k’s but with fewer than 150 residents. It’s gorgeous – almost sub-tropical in climate. However, in this third consecutive La Niña year, it’s a particularly flood-prone part of the world. So living in the Pockets does have a downside. When it floods, and it has done some 6 times so far this year, the roads submerge beneath metres of water and properties are cut off, sometimes for days without power or services. 

But in the warm dry Spring week that we were there, the halfway point of a week-long road-trip out of Sydney, Middle Pocket looked like the Garden of Eden to me.