Listening to Longreach solicitor Jacen Carpenter talk about his experience of regional practice conjures up images of the many long-running Australian television shows depicting life in a rural town.
“You go to the IGA and you might just be going in for milk, but it will end up taking an hour and a half because everyone will have a chat,” Jacen explained.
“And one thing about Longreach is people will just talk to you about anything, anywhere, and they don’t really care.
“And I’m like, ‘Do you really want to be talking about this matter in the frozen food section?’”
While shoptalk in the supermarket is a quirky aspect of practice, for Jacen the sense of community and lifestyle are key to his enjoyment of practice in Longreach.
“I still think that being able to knock off at a reasonable hour and not have to come in super early, and – for the most part – having my weekends to myself to do Rotary activities and go riding, that’s pretty good, I think,” he said.
“It’s a good work balance out here because everyone’s a bit like that. At five o’clock or the weekend, they knock off.”
Until it rains, Jacen laughed.
“When it rains and they’ve got nothing else to do, they all want to get onto the solicitor and sort out that job they have been meaning to do for 12 months.”
When they’re in town on other business, the solicitor always gets a drop-by too. But Jacen said that’s part of regional practice and builds long-term relationships.
“People want to come in and they want to have a yarn,” he said.
“But here it’s like, once you do a job for a client and if they’re happy with it, you’ve effectively got them as a client for life.
“Most keep coming back and they’ll say, ‘Remember me Jacen, you did something for me 15 years ago’.
“The amount of people who just pop up out of the blue or come back to town years later and just pop in to say g’day or ring me up out of the blue to say, ‘we’re buying a place down here or my daughter’s doing this. Can you act for her for us?’”
He said while the town of almost 4000 supported two solicitors, the client pool extended much wider as many clients remained even if they moved.
“My clients, when they move away, they’re still using me. I do so much work on the coast and Toowoomba and all the places that they go to retire like Yeppoon and Rocky,” he said.
Despite being a stalwart of the community, after 27 years in the town Jacen is still unsure if he qualifies as ‘a local’.
“Look, honestly, I don’t think you’re ever a local unless you’re born here,” he laughed
“But I’ve been here that long enough that I’ve outlived most of the people that were locals when I arrived. And now I can almost claim to be a local because there’s no one to challenge it.
“I came out with a five-year plan just to see how it all goes and then sort of extended that for another five years. Now I’m here.”
But there was a touch of being an outsider when he arrived.
“I know they all paid me out when I first arrived in town because I was still used to living in St Lucia and putting my steering wheel lock on the car,” he said.
“And they were all leaving their cars running with the keys hanging in it out the front of the main street.
“They said ’you won’t need to put the steering wheel lock, no one’s going to steal your car’.”
The Longreach lifestyle has changed dramatically since he arrived, with Jacen now describing it as a “Parkrun and coffee town”.
“It was a bit more of a drinking town with 13 pubs or something like that,” he explained.
“It’s gone from 13 pubs to we’ve only got two or three now and there’s more coffee shops and there’s parkrun on a Saturday morning, there’s bike rides.
“Everyone’s at the gym and then everyone’s meeting for coffee afterwards.
“So, it’s a different lifestyle from when I first arrived when it was all shearers and pubs and drinking nonstop for three or four days.”
Jacen said his decision to move to Longreach gave him choices that he wouldn’t have had otherwise.
“I bought a house and then built a bigger house on the block. I probably couldn’t have done that at the same time down in Brisbane,” he said.
“My house is a five-minute walk from work.”
Regional practice is not without its challenges, with remoteness being one.
“There are some difficulties like the mail system is probably the biggest thing out here because we don’t exist for Express Post so there’s no there’s really no such thing as a next day delivery anywhere here,” Jacen said.
“And that’s the thing that always bamboozles firms from away. They say we sent that to you express and it’s like, ‘yeah so it’ll be here in about five business days’.
“And then the tracking stops at Rocky, so once it gets to Rocky, you don’t get any tracking from that point on, so it’s just hoping that something arrives.
“But you have to work around that. It’s become a bit easier now because, we can file a lot of things electronically and the courts have sort of changed that.”
With client chats in the cold section and non-express express mail the biggest challenges to recount, Jacen said he felt he made the right choice for his professional career.
“The life here is good. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. We’re paying the bills; we’re keeping the lights on. I’m not in it to make millions and millions of dollars. I’m quite happy to live comfortably and go from there.”
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