And a movie career is still possible amid the rolling, granite-pocked hills of the Wheeo district, west of Crookwell.

Howard has a role is the next Mad Max movie, which was filmed in the desert of Namibia, a world away from the green-tinged farm (the rains finally came). These days he films his auditions on a smartphone, downloads it to a USB device and mails it to his agent in Sydney. (Yes, the internet does reach his home but don’t get him started on the slow speed.)

And in Mad Max: Fury Road he plays the villain People Eater in control of the petrol, appearing alongside stars such as Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron.

‘‘I look like a pustulating cane toad in what’s left of a three-piece suit with nipple rings and a filigree gold nose that has fallen away,’’ he said of his Mad Max character.

It is another universe from the farm where he has a very pragmatic view of his acting career.

‘‘Like most jobbing actor’s careers, it’s been rooster one day, feather duster the next,’’ he said. And he couldn’t be happier.

Apart from the dodgy internet, Howard has embraced country life after 35 years in Sydney. He has part-time jobs pulling beers at the Albion Hotel at nearby Grabben Gullen and as a guide at the local museum and waterworks in Goulburn. Otherwise he tinkers on his property where the farmhouse used to be a local post office and there is an ancient fruit orchard. He can sit under the spreading fig tree and happily watch his city-raised dogs Hazel and Maddy intoxicated by the country smells and space. He is equally taken by the place.

‘‘Even though I’ve spent a lot of time in big cities, I’ve never really been happy with all the fuss and bother, the desperateness of it,’’ he said.

‘‘And I’ve always treated Sydney, which has primarily always been my home town, as a whole series of villages, which you can do but then it changes over time and more and more people came in and money starts to mean everything. There’s not the same aggro here. I keep thinking I should have done this 40 years ago.’’

A very non-Bob Jelly take on life, nothing like the rapacious shire president and real estate agent he portrayed in the wildly successful SeaChange, for which he won a Logie in 2001 as most outstanding actor in a series. (He now claims to have lost the Logie somewhere.)

His wife, actress Kim Lewis, who appeared in Sons and Daughters, originally raised the idea of buying a farm. She and the couple’s 17-year-old daughter Morgan are staying in Sydney while she is finishing school. He also has a 23-year-old son, Max, who is a painter.

Howard has been on the farm for four years. He has a country background, born in Corowa in the state’s south, and spent holidays on both grandfathers’ farms, who had properties either side of Goombargana. His mother, Alice (nee Willis), attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Goulburn. The selling point for his property was the shearing shed with its lingering smell of lanolin, which transported him back to his grandfather’s farm (‘‘I was seven years old dagging wool’’). But he’s also had to learn to adapt to rural life.

‘‘You have to be self-reliant. If something breaks here, I have to fix it. I draw the line at electrics. But you can’t ring up and expect them to be here in half an hour. I had to learn a lot of skills,’’ he said.

‘‘I mean, I was so crap, I put my ride-on mower in the creek down there. And I had to call one of my neighbours and he turned up with his whole family, three generations of them and two dogs, and they pissed themselves laughing and towed me out, because I didn’t have a rope.’’

Howard, 61, who has also appeared in TV shows such as Always Greener, Packed to the Rafters and City Homicide and the classic Aussie rules movie The Club, recently filmed an episode of Janet King. Next month, he is off to Broken Hill to make the film version of Last Cab to Darwin, directed by Jeremy Sims.

In the meantime, he’ll serve you a cold one at the Albion.