Feb
08

Today there is a catastrophic fire danger for the South coast of WA. It’s gonna be a stinker of a day and we’re just about to have another meeting to see if the Bushfire Brigade are going to issue a Movement of Vehicles in paddocks ban.

There’s a smoke haze from a fire to the north of us and the wind is a strong northerly that’s sending shivers up my spine. Today is not a day for a fire.

But first up, we had a mob of 1,700 sheep that we had to shift. We had bought them from our neighbours and it was time for them to see their new home!

We started at about 5am with two dogs, Anthony, the two kids, a mate and his daughter and me.

We had to push them across a main road and then down a side road to where we had laid down a fence to let them into our paddock.

The kids did an amazing job of being sheep shepard’s and we brought the sheep down the road without any problems! They’re now in their new home, awaiting some animal husbandry work that we’ll be doing on Monday.

On a Red Dust note, I found out yesterday from my publisher that it was the highest selling novel, across all of the Australian publishers, for 2009, from a debut author. I’d just really like to thank all of you who bought copies. You’re the only reason this happened.

Also, the winner of Sharyn Munro’s book, Woman on the Mountain, was Alison, who has been notified, although I’m just waiting for her to get back to me with an address so we can send it off.

Our guest blog next month is Helene Young, who will be giving away a copy of her new book, Border Watch.

**PS! It’s now nearly the end of the day and I think we had about seven fires across the Esperance shire. Some close to home. Right now I’m listening to the wonderful sound of rain on a tin roof, knowing that all the fires should be under control. Some spots have had terrential down pours and other areas have had a steady rain, that is just enough to dampen the fires and our worry. We are so thankful for rain on days like today.

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Feb
07

When you have a roadside mail box, it’s fair game for the young blokes heading home from the pub after a few drinks. The mailman has often had to put mail in funny spots because of the disappearance or change of shape of a box from the time he was out before!

This didn’t happen to our mailbox, though.

A mate driving a truck accidentally ran over it with his back trailer after dropping off a load of lupins! And the even funnier thing was that his two sons came to have a play one afternoon, got off the bus and said ‘Wow! Didn’t Dad do a great job of the mail box!’

If you’re going to do a job, make sure you do it well!

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Category: Country Life  3 Comments
Feb
04

One of the things I love about Australian’s is we love dressing up! Whether it’s for the cricket, the tennis, Australia Day, we throw throw ourselves into the celebrations!

I think the sky dressed up for Australia Day too!

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Jan
31

When Red Dust was on its way to being published, my nerves ran riot, I was unsure of the editing process and some days, things just got too much for me. I also had the deadline of Blue Skies hanging over my head and I was fairly sure that I wasn’t going to make it.

Enter Sharyn Munro! We met through our websites and Sharyn offered me straight, practical advice – most of which I took and my madness seem to retreat!

Sharyn and I have kept in contact and her life leaves me in awe. As a woman working in a man’s world, I understand how difficult it can be, but I have my husband to rely on if the generator won’t go or the header won’t start. Sharyn has only herself.

Living in a mudbrick, solar-powered hut, Sharyn has turned her mountain into a wildlife refuge, where even red-bellied black snakes are welcome – or at least relocated!

In her guest post, she tells you about her writing path to publication.

Sharyn will be popping back to answer any questions you might have – please ask! Or you can see her website - it’s worth a visit just to see her photos!

Photo by Brett Maguire

Growing up on a farm, any spare time from picking beans or packing tomatoes I spent indulging in the daydreamy pursuits of reading, writing or drawing.

From the time I was nine and allowed to go alone by bus to the town library, I have been hooked on books – and words, and the worlds they create.

My primary school teachers praised my compositions, but these would have been derivative pieces, with at least three adjectives per noun!

Much as I loved writing, it fell by the wayside as life dragged me through University, work, marriage, children – and divorce. After dozens of odd jobs, from teaching to selling spa baths, I had ended up writing copy for corporate newsletters and brochures; good training for precise and targeted language.

Otherwise, apart from sporadic jottings, my writing urges stayed buried until my children were grown up and I was back living in the bush. To be ready to accept turning 50, I made two vows on my 49th birthday: to stop dyeing my hair and to get serious about writing short stories.

For I love short stories; Alice Munro, Carol Shields and Jane Gardam write some of my favourites. Mine start with an observed or remembered scrap from real life; I imagine around it until the story takes flight into fiction – where to, I never know.

Treating writing as work, I revised my stories hard and often, cutting out all the purple prose bits that I secretly loved most, ensuring no bloopers of grammar or spelling or punctuation were lurking to baulk the reader and snap them out of the story.

I began sending stories off to competitions, and within two years little old grey-haired me had won a fairly major short story prize. There have been many since, including the Alan Marshall Award in 2002, a national prize that finally convinced me I was a proper writer.

I had also sent off a tongue-in-cheek contribution to the reader’s page of The Owner Builder magazine; they liked it so much they asked me to write for them – for money! Ten years later I still write articles about creative and persevering people who build their own homes, and still find it a privilege.

Yet I had no outlet for my jottings, funny or sad, about the animals and plants in my wildlife refuge, my struggles with sullen farm machinery, or my environmental concerns. After having many of these broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Bush Telegraph program, I approached Exisle, a non-fiction publisher, with the idea of a collection. They said only nature writers read nature writing; it had to have wider appeal.

So I devised a conversational, personal form of non-fiction, using selective memoir to weave the elements together. Exisle loved it and offered me a contract to write ‘The Woman on the Mountain’, which came out in 2007, causing me to be off the mountain more often, give many talks, and have a web site – which is how Fleur and I met.

Exisle then suggested a collection of tales about my wildlife neighbours for animal lovers to dip into; I illustrated them with black and white drawings, and so ‘Mountain Tails’ was born in 2009. An e-book on ‘Smart Shelter’ is almost out, and a collection of my stories is next, I hope.

Now, at 61, every day is potentially exciting because I may find time from chores like cutting firewood to sit at my Macbook and write.

It just shows that it’s never too late to reclaim dreams, to find that path you once knew well.

You can win a  free copy of The Woman on the Mountain by Sharyn Munro!

Just comment on this blog post before Friday 5th of Februrary.

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Jan
27

As part of our farming operation we run a prime lamb feedlot. It’s a management tool that gets the lambs off the paddocks during summer, which in turn helps keeps our soil structure strong and (hopefully) stops paddocks from blowing, when the strong sea breezes come in every afternoon.

We become quite friendly with the lambs over the time they’re ‘locked up’! Every day we go and clean out their troughs, check their feeders and generally make sure no one has an upset tummy from the rich tucker or is unwell.

And about every two weeks we get them into the yards and weigh the, – when we send lambs to market, they need to be a certain weight.

Trouble is with using the yards a lot in summer is the dust. When we push the lambs into the yards, the dust is a thick, choking plume that is hard to see through and every time we open our mouths (accidentally, I can tell you!) you can feel the crunch on dirt on your teeth!

But there are times that the dust, lambs and sun make a magic picture. Anthony took this photo on his mobile phone, just as the sun was setting on another day of sheep work!

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Jan
19

Here is the final packaging for Blue Skies! I just love it – and I love the blurb on the back.

So, meet Amanda and journey with her two best friends, Hannah and Jonno and her distant father, Brian. Feel the passion she holds for Kyleena, the sun on her skin, the dirt between her fingers and the heartache and loss she experiences.

I hope when Blue Skies finally hits the shelves that you’ll pop back and let me know what you thought of it.

For regulars to my site, thanks for coming along on this journey called Blue Skies – I hope your anticipation for this book is well worth it!

Must be time to start on Purple Roads now!

Blurb for Blue Skies

In the tradition of her bestselling novel, Red Dust, Blue Skies tells the inspirational story of a young woman battling to save the family farm no matter what it takes.

Amanda Greenfield dreams of employing all the skills she’s learnt at college to help her father turn their farm, Kyleena, from a debt-ridden, run-down basket case into a thriving enterprise.

Then tragedy strikes and, wearied by the long struggle to keep Kyleena a going concern, Amanda’s father decides to sell up so they can get on with their lives away from the vagaries of drought and fluctuation stock prices and crop yields.

Desolate at the idea of losing the farm that’s been in her family for generations, Amanda summons all her strength, grit and determination to save Kyleena. And things are just starting to look up for her in both life and love when Amanda comes face to face with obstacles from an unexpected and mysterious source…

With its wonderful heroine and spot-on evocation of life on the land, Blue Skies is an utterly compelling read.

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Category: Blue Skies  8 Comments
Jan
17

Being a farmer and a mum, often my writing time is snatched in between feeding kids, husband or animals and every other job you can imagine. Because of this, I’ve been known to write in a variety of places.

Today I’m being very naughty and using the shade of a tree for my workspace. I’m scratching out some plans for my third book, Purple Roads. I have a notebook full of ideas and now I’m just beginning to work out each chapter so I’ve got an idea of where things are heading to. Now, that’s not to say that my characters won’t have different ideas and make me change what I’ve got  planned as I get further in. They often do – and most of my characters are pretty pushy when they get ideas!

And to tell you the honest truth, I’m probably procrastinating slightly, as it’s pretty daunting staring at a blank Word Document, wondering how the hell am I supposed to write the opening line, let alone 100,000 words! I’m just avoiding the starting bit!

The other couple of photos you may have seen before are my working desks. One is my outdoor office, that I use fairly often during harvest and the other one is my ‘normal’ office, that I’m particularly grateful for during winter!

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Jan
16

Treasure hunts are such fun things, whether it is at a kids party, out in the bush or at the beach!

As kids we were always poking around, looking under bushes for lizards, or climbing trees to look for bird nests. I don’t know how we never came across snakes in some of the places we used to hang out, but we never did!

Poking around in rock pools looking for crabs and checking out penguins has been some of the highlights of the swimming lessons. Often when we go to the beach we’re on long stretches of beach, chasing the deep water where all the yummy, large fish inhabit, not cruising around the rocks. So it’s not something we get to do often.

Amanda found this amazing starfish in one of the rock pools that shelter the bay where the swimming lessons are held. Alive and beautifully coloured, she brought it back so the younger kids, who aren’t allowed onto the rocks, could see it before carefully returning it to the exact place she found it. How she could pick it up was beyond me, but I found it amazing (having never seen a live one before) so with my hands tucked firmly behind my back, I studied it carefully!

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Jan
15

Every year huge amounts of people make the pilgrimage from Kalgoorlie, Esperance, the surrounding farms and other places, to be near these beautiful beaches.

And every year at Wharton Beach, they hold swimming lessons.

This year, in amongst the hum-drum of farming (of which so much is still happening), our two are doing the lessons and once again my inland-ness in coming out! Regular visitors to my site will know that I find things to do with sea rather difficult, having grown up in the mid north of SA and not a sea within sight.

I watched the kids swim in amongst the waves, diving in and out and having a ball. All the while I was cringing, imagining the seaweed wrapping around my legs and my feet touching something under the surface that I couldn’t see. Let alone what might be lurking in the deep. Nope: it’s swimming pools for me, unless I’m paddling only.

Not even this magic view of the bay where the lessons are held would entice me into the water! I’m happy to sit on the beach, chat to the other mums and maybe indulge in a glass of wine or two!

But I have to admit, when a little baby penguin came swimming over to the kids while they were having their lessons, I was tempted…

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Jan
13

Now if I had seen this sign first, I may not have gone exploring through the ruins! Well, perhaps not! Anyone would realise that this is the sort of place that snake would love to hang out, but I did think it was nice of the National Heritage Trust to warn us and perhaps take any responsibility of their shoulders! (Maybe that’s a bit cynical!)

The Telegraph station was associated with the Albany to Eucla telegraph line and operated from 1877 to 1896. (the same line that goes to the west of Esperance, which I refer to in Blue Skies.)

It is quite strange, that a piece of history as important as this doesn’t have a lot of information easily found. Even in Esperance’s own history book ‘Faith, Hope and Reality’ the mention of the telegraph station is restricted on a couple of lines in a chapter, buried at the end. A ‘Google’ search netted mainly weather reports! Gale warnings, mostly. Not all that surprising!

What I found fascinating, was the width of the walls and how hard it must have been to build this place. There is an old jetty in the bay that assisted in the building – the boats carried cargo such as the pole for the line and supplies for the early settlers.

The bush is so thick and to walk through it, let alone clear a large piece of ground, dig foundations and so forth, must have been a huge effort – but look how well built it is! 113 years later, with a small amount of renovation, it still looks like this!

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