‘You're lucky I have clothes on sweetie’: Batchelor Butterflyfarm owner has a way with words
It’s unconventional to most business responses and will give you a laugh. Read the Top End business owner’s responses.
Northern Territory
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Most businesses follow the universal rule ‘the customer is always right’ but Christopher Horne disagrees.
So it follows that a man who quit his high income job to start a butterfly farm, would respond to negative reviews of his business in an unconventional manner.
The longtime Batchelor resident of 27 years, says when people complain about his butterfly farm, they’re complaining because they’re “not happy with themselves”.
This school of thought is evident in his bizarre responses to negative Google reviews of his iconic Batchelor Butterflyfarm, located 98km south of Darwin.
With an average 4.2 star out of five rating, only a small percentage of his customers who leave disgruntled decide to say what they really think.
A previous guest of the BBF, Adam, left a scathing review of Mr Horne’s “peaceful” world he has curated since 1996.
“Shortly after arriving at the butterfly farm hippy commune, we went to get a cold beer. The bar staff seemed higher than the kites we’d been watching soar through the skies earlier that day,” Adam said in the review.
“In the morning we were woken up by the many roosters crowing from 4am and then when we were out looking around the property the host was getting around in nothing but a towel all morning.
“Probably the weirdest place I’ve ever stayed. Would not recommend it.”
Mr Horne assured that Adam was most likely a “lovely person” but said his guest probably regretted leaving the review after receiving his upfront response in return.
“I always walk around in the towel as well and I think to myself, ‘I’m the king of a castle, and they’re all the dirty rascals’,” Mr Horne said.
“So my comment to him was, you’ve got to realise you’ve got to calm down, relax, take it easy, you know, what’s the goal? Don’t worry about the small things in life, that’s totally wasting your life.
“They complain about things. It’s not complaining about the butterfly farm. It’s their own life. They can’t find contentedness.
“Must be because I’m getting older, I never I used to get complaints when I was younger about being in a towel.
“I’m 64 now, so they might be complaining because I don’t look as good.”
These hilarious responses begs the question … How does one come to own a butterfly farm?
Since Mr Horne was five, he has harboured a dream to create a butterfly farm.
But that naive ambition slipped to the back burner during his young adulthood.
“I just forgot about butterflies until I was 32,” he said.
“I used to not be the kind of person you’d like to meet, I was in the army for a while so I was a bit arrogant and headstrong, not very nice and always fighting.
“So I decided that I was going to change and become a peaceful warrior.”
The former oil rigger was born in Adelaide but after three months was shipped to Yorkshire with his father’s army regiment, returning to Australia when was 21 years old.
Mr Horne is a vocal advocate for the unforgiving landscape that he calls home.
“We have the paradise of the Northern Territory, you can’t get many places better than Batchelor. It’s stuck in 1996,” he said with a thick remaining Yorkshire accent.
Living an insular life focused on Batchelor and its happenings, Mr Horne said he was not aware there was a war in Europe until about three weeks ago.
“All I know is what’s happening in Batchelor. It’s a beautiful life, not a thing to worry about,” Mr Horne said.
He said he had set an informal record for not leaving his Batchelor butterfly farm property for four and a half months.
“The best thing about the Northern Territory is the mosquitoes, the jellyfish, the crocodiles and the Build-Up,” Mr Horne said.
“Because if it weren’t for those four things, we’d have housing estates and petrol stations and shopping centres all the way to Alice Springs.”
See all of Mr Horne’s responses to negative reviews below.
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