A craft brewer’s wife came to give a talk at a farm tour I organized once. She was playing to her home crowd, a room full of farming women and some hopefuls just breaking into the niche farming and produce sector. Feed your curiosity. Nobody was surprised when she showed a slide with a list … More Small Farm Dream
Quite a long time, is the answer to that question. I found an image of me on my Instagram feed recently, seated at a table in the window of my office. In it, I’m beavering away on the draft of my next book, Saddleback Wife – Slow Food in Tasmania. The post was dated January … More How long does it take to write a book?
I started reading as a kid after bedtime, under the covers with a torch. Literally. I’m not sure where I would have got a torch from as an eight year old, but the memory is pretty vivid. Famous Five, Secret Seven, I had to finish them in one go. They mirrored my daytime life, out … More Reading in bed has lasted a lifetime and kept me sane(ish)
Leaving behind everything we knew in the cities of England and Australia, we moved our family to rural Tasmania before it was fashionable to do so, and set ourselves up on five acres. The adventures of our first five years became the material for my first memoir, Apple Island Wife – Slow Living in Tasmania. … More Saddleback Wife – more slow living in Tasmania
I read numerous brilliant books researching Sissinghurst Castle Gardens and its creators Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Here are ten random things I learned, and some I just thought about. As I read about the demise of wildlife in England since the dawning of the industrial age, it made me wonder what differences Vita and … More Ten things I learned while researching Sissinghurst and Vita Sackville-West
There comes a point in a person’s life where camping and outdoorsy pursuits must be compensated for. If I’m heading to Derby for a weekend’s biking with my son, hoisting my leg over a saddle during the day and sleeping under canvas at night, there will be no cooking on the camp-stove in the evenings. … More Where to eat in Derby, Tasmania
Being a woman and a winemaker can be a useful point of difference, says Fran Austin, owner and winemaker at Delamere Vineyards in partnership with husband Shane Holloway. While some people are cynical about it, she and many other women in the industry accept that it can generate marketing. The Fabulous Women in Wine Society … More Women in Wine
Ann Patchett is the kind of novelist we’d all like to be – successful, award-winning, a nice person by all accounts, and she writes a bloody good book. I read Commonwealth last year with no expectations, and found myself engrossed in a family saga. Well here’s another one – The Dutch House, every bit as … More The Dutch House by Ann Patchett – book review
Unbelievably, it’s fifteen years since we took the plunge and moved to Tasmania. We loved it from the moment we got here and haven’t looked back. Here are eight things we’ve loved the best. Gained a Sense of Space We’ve got five acres. That sounded huge when we first got here, but now we realise … More Eight things we’ve done since moving to Tasmania
Do your short stories consistently fail to hit the mark in competitions? When judging the Tasmanian Short Story competition, I found that many entries fell into the same classic traps, falling short of the mark and sending them to the bottom of the slush pile immediately. Here are my two top tips on how to … More How to begin a short story
Fiona Stocker - occasional blog 