Welcome to the good life
Lesley Porter sees herself every day in the kids who come to her farm. The lost and lonely, the orphaned and abused – she has been every one of them. After losing her family in a car accident at the age of five, and shuttling unwanted from one relative to another for the next six years, Lesley wished that she had died too. “I was a pretty broken unit,” says the 58-year-old. “I cried a lot. I was shy, insecure, shut down.”
Animals, however, helped turn her life around. When Lesley moved to Healesville in Victoria’s Yarra Valley with her grandmother, the then-11-year-old horse lover offered to muck out the stables of a local riding school and holiday farm in return for pony rides. Soon she was working there after school and every weekend, seeking refuge from a grandmother who barely tolerated her. The couple who owned the place became her surrogate parents, and Lesley for the first time felt loved.
“It was an escape and a look at life how I’d never seen it,” says Lesley. “I remember [the owner], Josie, had this
