of the undignified tasks we each face on our different farms. We had dinner once. We swapped podcast recommendations and I had that sliding sense of a rich friendship almost within my grasp. But we live a long way from each other: Sadie on a tiny slice of the Huon Valley surrounded by hills, orchards, a fat river and the wildness of the south west as her southern view. I’m two-and-a-half hours north on a merino sheep farm, where on our western boundary the fingers of the Eastern Tiers slide into farmland and to the east lie the white sand beaches and crystalline waters of the coast. But when I started to think through my hesitancy in once again publishing a memoir, it was Sadie I wanted to talk to.
in the kitchen behind us. It’s one of those startlingly hot days that can come at the end of the benign Tassie summer. Sadie’s different from the last time I was here. She’s grounded. Perfectly relaxed in her body. There’s an authority to her, a sense of purpose that I hadn’t seen last time I’d visited. We are interrupted by one of the WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) who work for Sadie and Matthew, their labour given in exchange for food and experience. I’m a little surprised by the abruptness of the interruption, until he says he’s just stood on a tiger snake. ‘Stood on it!’ We both leap to our feet. ‘Have you been bitten?’ He looks a little taken aback by our reaction. ‘No,’ he
Working in the garden has given her a place to speak about what she knows to be true. We have a few aborted attempts at meeting up. Eventually she offers to drive to Hobart to meet halfway. I almost agree and then I realise I want to have this conversation standing in the vegetable garden she has created. Though we haven’t seen each other for a couple of years, Sadie is the same. She’s dressed in khaki work pants and perfectly worn-in cotton navy work shirt. Her hair is salt and pepper and her body feels strong when we hug (this is COVID-free Tassie). She makes me a coffee and we cram sunhats on and sit on the deck overlooking her small kingdom. The day is perfectly still. There is no sound of traffic, only the hum and clang
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says, ‘it just slithered off. I took a photo.’ He shows us the photo on his phone. After he goes, I comment on how calm he was. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that’s the beauty of the English workers: they have no idea about snakes.’ We walk down to the vegie garden through the paddock. I’m on fairly high snake alert, but they’re soon forgotten as Sadie hands me a pod of the sweetest peas. I split them with my thumbnail and pop the little orbs of green into my mouth. There’s a row of scarlet runner beans above my head, strawberries at my feet. We pluck apples and munch as I ask Sadie what’s changed since last I saw her.
She tells me it was stepping up and managing the vegie garden. Their head gardener had to go back to the mainland and she’d been writing the job advertisement when she realised it was the job she wanted. So she put her pen down and pulled her boots on and, though it has been a steep learning curve, she’s loved every minute. As we move through the garden, tasting and picking, she’s swollen with knowledge. The garden, its moods and cycles, is a living thing and Sadie is aware she’s part of a conversation with it and beyond into the world. She pulls a tiny Japanese turnip out of the ground and hands it to me. I wipe the dirt from it and bite into its perfect whiteness. It’s delicious. I ask her if she feels differently about greeting guests and guiding them through the garden tour, which is part of the whole Fat Pig Farm lunch experience. I compare it to the part of my work I find the hardest: speaking on panels, meeting readers, answering questions about how and why and where. When I do it, when I give the talk, sign the books, meet the readers, I am always humbled by their responses. ‘Exactly,’ she says. She tells me that she draws on her training as an actor. As she walks from the restaurant to where the guests have parked their cars she steps into a role. Sometimes people don’t get what she’s trying to do in growing her own food, honouring the process from the earth to the table, gathering people together. But it’s a delight to see them experience the goodness of cooking, eating food they have just harvested and being changed by the experience. It’s that connection, that moment that makes it all worth it. As she’s telling me this, she has a new authority, as if the garden
