Our one-year-old daughter will grow up unaware that most toilets use water. She has only ever known a flushless composting model. We fear that at new houses she will be referred to, in whispers, as "that dirty girl from down the coast", as she innocently leaves steaming surprises in flush toilets across Sydney.

The month Ivy was born we suffered a sudden, insane spasm of nesting and bought a footprint-friendly house, an eccentric timber kit home in a magically hidden spot along the stretch between Sydney and Wollongong known as the "coal coast". Three months later we packed up the baby and the city apartment, and took off. Here we sleep to a soundtrack of surf and frog songs, rather than the crashing tones of junkies breaking into the house or the wit who marched along the laneway at 3am shouting "Drugs! I love drugs!"

We have given up 24-hour services, local cafes, markets, shops and movies, and close proximity to all our family and friends. Instead, we have tank water, a composting dunny, a dirt road and a new community.

The urge to live a simpler, greener life came from my partner, a solar energy research scientist, surfer and bushwalker who found our city apartment cramped and bleak. It made him anxious. Me, I was happy with the caffeinated, squeezy, frantic pace of city life. At least, until I got pregnant. I started to find the traffic was frightening and stressful; the constant noise discomfiting. Books told me to prepare my nipples for breastfeeding by baring them to the air. I tried, on the balcony, until a neighbour got his binoculars out. I yearned for a little space to spread my belly out in the sun.

We debated over wild acreage in the bush before we found this magic spot - part town, part country - where the 12 residents of our unserviced community lug garbage along the dirt track each week, passing water dragons, bower birds, echidnas, blue-tongues and an elderly goat. We leave notes and buckets of lemons for each other at the letterboxes.

Our laid-back hippy paradise takes some maintenance. During breaks from Sufi twirling and rebirthing sessions we have to look after the systems that run the house. We have no town water, but three rainwater tanks, and a greywater pumping system to feed the garden. The greasy detritus of everyday life - escaped rice, nappy poo, chicken bits and hairballs - all end up in the greywater tank, caught by the filter, which needs cleaning every fortnight. This job requires heavy gloves and a good gag reflex. It smells like twice-puked parmesan sausage in there. Cleaning the filter is a perfumed polka compared with changing the pan of the composting dunny. Still, we love this toilet. It looks like an everyday model but without the flush. OK, not exactly alike, but if you turn on the overhead light and peer close you can find out more than you would like about your family's fibre intake. Every fortnight or so we tamp down the toilet with woodchips, and every few months rotate the pans, which rot down into rich matter for the garden. In the everyday sense, though, the rota-loo is very easy to clean, and the fan runs constantly, whisking away any odour before you can say "humanure".

Life is grand, if not as green as we could be - the autumn storms that battered the NSW coast gave us some insight into our dependence on electricity. We lost power - and off went the radio and the TV. Off went the fridge and the phone too. Off went the internet and the water heater - that did not really matter though, because the pump for the tanks went off too. There was no water at all, hot or not. Off went the stove with its half-perked coffee pot, and the freezer, full of the babies' carefully prepped vegies. Off went the heater but worst of all … off went the fan in the toilet. We quickly shut doors and lit incense, but still a fragrance wafted out, a cheeky aroma, redolent of an open latrine in a sandalwood forest. The power burst back on a couple of hours of thinking time later. Going off the grid? Dreams of the future.

Fashion-wise, I have gone from Billion Dollar Babe to Bjork. Funny how it doesn't matter when you have no full-length mirrors. We are blessed with a healthy baby who will grow up with her hands dirty. We hope she will learn how to climb a tree, identify a lizard and a good swell, eat a carrot straight from the ground and have secret bush adventures of her own - even if she cannot flush a toilet.