Nathan Harvey LIVING OFF THE GRID!

Why the ’90s heartthrob has swapped the red carpet and magazine covers for a simple life under the stars

- Philip Koch

Ask blond-haired former TV star and top model Nathan Harvey for his address and he gives you map coordinates to a beautiful bushland spot on top of a mountain where he has retreated to try to live off the grid.

“If it’s a midlife crisis, then it’s a great one,” laughs the still handsome Nathan, who has been preparing to go off-grid ever since he turned 50 last year and decided he needed to shake up his comfortable existence. “My whole family think I’m crazy... Mum thinks I’m dead-set mental! But what I’ve found is that there’s so much joy in solitude. I love the peace and quiet and living life outdoors. I guess some people think it’s romantic.”

There was a time when Nathan was rarely alone.

If he wasn’t on the red carpet with the likes of Isla Fisher and Melissa George, he was in the studio working as a Channel V presenter or flying around the world for fashion shoots.

Fast forward 20 years and his trademark 1990s long blond hair has been cut short and he’s sporting a scruffy beard, after abandoning a conventional lifestyle to live alone in a campervan in rugged bushland, north of Sydney. “I’d been thinking about going offthe grid for a while, then I was unfairly evicted from a rental property on the Central Coast after a dispute with a nightmare neighbour, so all the signs pointed to it being the right time,” he says.