An Australian mother says her rural dream has spiraled into a waking nightmare after the wealthy brothers who bought the 385 acres surrounding her Australia property began erecting 10-foot dirt and manure walls around her home — leaving her family too frightened to go outside.
Megan Perry has lived on her modest plot in Dooralong, New South Wales, for 12 years, raising five children amid free-range chickens and open countryside.
That quiet life shattered roughly 15 months ago when brothers Elefthrous and Petros Karagounis, otherwise known as Terry and Peter, paid $10 million for the farmland hemming in three sides of her $625,000 property.
What followed, according to Perry, reads like a rural siege.
Motorbikes and buggies began circling her fence line at all hours. A camouflaged military truck parked facing her house with its high beams blazing through the night. Someone mowed a motorcycle track in a loop around her home, grinding the grass to dirt within days.
Then the dump trucks came.
“Piles and piles of it,” Perry said in an interview with the Daily Mail, of the manure deposits left roughly 3 feet from her fence. “And they just left it there for six weeks.”
The dirt mounds grew higher. Perry says Terry then plowed up the surrounding paddock, built the 10-foot earthen walls and used them to trap the manure between the barrier and her fence line. He allegedly began walking the perimeter of her property from atop the mound at odd hours.
“We have cameras. I can see him,” she said. “He uses it as his own personal footpath and is just out there walking around our home, sometimes at 3 a.m. just whistling.”
The fallout has been severe. Dust coats the house. Her pool sits unusable. The tap water runs brown. The flooding has spread across the property. A real estate agent told her the home is now unsellable.
“Our house has been deemed unsellable,” Perry said. “I can’t even move if I want to and our living environment is horrendous.”
Perry said she had a brief conversation with Terry shortly after he took ownership of the property, and it did not go well.
“I told him riders often get stuck inside the property and I would let them through my gate when that happened,” Perry said.
He told her that anyone who trespassed on his land “will get shot in the leg.” A week later, she says, the noise campaign began.
The family’s distress has taken a medical toll. Perry has been diagnosed with chronic stress disorder and says police connected her with a victims’ counseling hotline.
“Our whole family is too scared to be in our home,” she said. “As soon as I hear those engines my heart starts pounding and I’m not sleeping.”
The matter has gone before the courts five times, resulting in an interim Personal Violence Order against Terry. Two other neighbors have reportedly obtained similar orders. Perry has also submitted a 100-page evidence journal to Central Coast Council and says she has spent roughly 12 hours with a detective assigned to the case.
Still, the walls stand.
The council ordered their removal in January but has since paused enforcement while Terry pursues a development application. Perry says she has no money for legal representation and is fighting entirely on her own.
“I have over 100 pages of evidence, countless event numbers from police,” she said. “It’s become so crazy.”
Terry previously informed her that he is willing to buy her property, but likely at the fraction of the cost, knowing no one else will buy it.
“They paid $10 million for that property and I paid $625,000 for mine 12 years ago and now it’s not even worth that,” Perry said.
