Read – The Watervale Ladies’ Writing & Firefighting Society by Mette Menzies
This book has three elements important to me right now – friendships, writing groups and preparing for a potential bush fire. (Let’s hope I don’t have to fight a fire like the resourceful women in this book.)
Four women, with a variety of ages and backgrounds, join a writing group in an Australian country town. They soon find themselves besieged by issues including a land grab by big business and dastardly deeds by crooked lawyers and journalists.
The women are all facing various challenges and life transitions. Soon the pressures lead to friction in the group. Can they find the courage to question and prioritize what’s important in their lives? Will they find forgiveness for themselves and each other?
Importantly, the women are lucky enough to find great food and coffee in the township while they face these other hardships. This is worth celebrating in rural Australia.
The Watervale Ladies’ Writing & Firefighting Society was laugh out loud funny in places, with a romance thrown in.
Watched – Slow Horses (Apple TV)
In the industry, ‘Slow Horses’ is a derogatory name for this team of supposedly failed secret service agents. A team that usually manages to outsmart and embarrass England’s intelligence agency elite.
The show mixes thriller, drama, comedy and black comedy genres.
Jackson Lamb is the team’s boss. He’s both obnoxious and endearing. There’s multiple Reddit threads dedicated to his hilarious one-liners which get better with each new season.
There’s a sneaking mutual respect between Lamb and his team, even though he constantly belittles them. Many of the Slow Horses show symptoms of unprocessed trauma. A feature of the show is how they support each other through professional and personal challenges.
Live – Take me to the river
The river bank is still scarred and eroded, still littered with fallen trees and debris in places. Our community is still struggling to recover from the 1-in-500 year flood we suffered earlier this year.
This made the Take me to the River cultural riverside walk with a local historian and Aboriginal Elder all the more beneficial.
We learned our region was named by the Governor of the Bank of England who had never been to Australia. The local Aboriginal people refer to our region as ‘the place of the big hollow’ which indicates both the land’s fertility and propensity to flood.
The highlight for me was hearing a very recent Indigenous story. Over 1,000 members of the Aboriginal community came together to perform a dance to heal the land in December 2019. This followed four years of terrible drought, followed by the worst bush fires in Australia’s history.
After hours of traditional music and dancing in the sand, their feet found the fresh water beneath. A flock of yellow-tail black cockatoos soon landed nearby. These prehistoric-looking magnificent birds are considered to signal coming rain. It did rain soon after, and the drought was declared over in February 2020.
October farm happenings
It’s spring, which means lots of seedlings to plant for summer crops. Herbs were one of the first to go in. Charlie, loves helping in the garden.
Over the past four years we’ve planted lots of Australian native plants. We’re now getting to enjoy both the blooms and the bird life they attract.
More from the journal next month.
