Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
The following episode was recorded as part of Adelaide Writers Week in Australia, when I met a shining local talent.
She's a farmer, a mother, a daughter and a writer.
She's written two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada and two memoirs, When It Rains and How to Get There.
Her latest book, Motherhood, Family and A Year on the Land, describes a year on a merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania and all of the life and death that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons.
Maggie McKellar, welcome to Meet the Writer.
Faggie McKellar, welcome to Meet the writers.
Thank you for having me.
It's a delight.
We are talking in Adelaide and the sun is shining, the sky is blue.
It all feels fabulous and it feels quite far away from your book graft.
Motherhood, Family and A Year on the Land.
And really quite a hard year is what you describe, but you also describe your life and it's a memoir.
Although you've written two other memoirs, this does go back and it takes us from your early days.
I really wanted to speak about being a child and your happiest memories, which all seem to be centered around your grandparents farm.
Yes, it's slightly misleading subtitle A Year on the Land because it makes it sound like a gap year.
But I wanted to honour tradition of farming and I wanted to write something that reflected both a way of life for farmers but also offered a way into how we grow our fibre.
We have fine wool merinos and they give us beautiful wool and we also have some lambs that we sell as fat lambs.
So it was.