Millionaire businessman and philanthropist Dick Smith and his wife Pip regard themselves as Gundaroo locals, part of the community now for almost 30 years.
Their main home is in Terrey Hills in Sydney but Gundaroo is a retreat from the rat race.
"We don't get harassed or anything like that. Not that I think I would. We're just one of the locals up in the town," Smith said.
"We go and buy something to eat at the local shops and go to Matt Crowe's Wine Bar. We're just treated normally by everyone."
The Smiths bought the 1619-hectare property just north of Canberra 26 years ago after Dick had been appointed the crusading chair of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.
"It's just the most wonderful place," he said.
"I bought the property because I was involved in aviation reform and I thought that would go on for a long time, but it didn't so happen. So I wanted a place close to Canberra where I could drive to in half an hour and I've got an airstrip and I've got my steam engine here and it's a proper working property that makes money.
"The last few years we've had wonderful seasons and as you can see, it's magnificent at the moment. We're growing wheat and we've got sheep."
The Smiths have just made a major change to the property.
"When we bought the property, the homestead was called Bowylie," he said.
"And the lady we bought the property from, it was her grandfather who named it but she never knew where he got the name from.
"And what annoyed me is that everyone kept call it 'Bowy-lee' [not Bow-why-lee'] and one day we were doing some research into the property and its original name was Talagandra with one 'l'. And so we decided we'd take it back to its original name, because it's an Aboriginal name, we understand, meaning 'place of good water'. So, Talagandra Station is what it's called now."
One of Australia's National Living Treasures, Smith has at the age of 77 just published his autobiography, My Adventurous Life.
While it covers everything from his childhood to the start of Dick Smith Electronics and his swashbuckling adventures around the world, it is also a no-holds-barred comment on topics from ALDI to population control to what he really thinks of Canberra. Answer? Not much. Of the bureaucracy, at least.
He was first appointed to the CASA board in 1988 by then prime minister Bob Hawke but was worried he was not the right fit.
He found the "Canberra bureaucratic 'cocoon' offered an experience almost diametrically opposed to the free enterprise system I was used to, and any change takes a long time, if it happens at all".
All-day meetings were just not his style. Or making a fuss.
"My friends could only imagine how I, a person who famously had a nine-minute attention span and held most of my meetings by intercom, could be expected to sit nearly all day in a meeting in Canberra," he wrote in the book.
"There were other differences as well.
"Some board members insisted on being picked up by Commonwealth cars at the airport and complained when they considered the hotel they had been booked into was not of high enough quality. I couldn't have cared less.
"In fact, my time in the Canberra bureaucracy showed me why the Soviet Union collapsed."
