OFFBEAT PARADISE

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.

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 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

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

Working in the garden has given her a place to speak about what she knows to be true.

has given her the literal soil to stand on, so she’s talking as the person who has grown the food their guests are coming to eat. When she explains about healthy soil, compost and companion planting, it’s not something she has watched or read in a book. The evidence of her knowledge is under her ngernails and pressed into her skin.

We walk up the hill to the restaurant and Sadie checks there’s enough lunch for an interloper. There is, so I join the kitchen staff, WWOOFers and Matthew sitting in the sun out the back of the kitchen. It’s a perfect lunch. Pickles, cheese, freshly baked bread. The group is a mix of locals and foreigners. I sit on the edge of conversations and admire what Sadie and Matthew have built around a belief they can live lighter on the world.

As I leave, Sadie gives me a bucket of vegetables to take home. Carrots, beans, shallots and a bunch of the tiny, perfect Japanese turnips. I drive down to the river and pull up in the shade to jot down some thoughts. The car is quickly surrounded by a family of superb fairy-wrens; a small group of tourists and their slightly harassed guide are paddling down the lazy river; and I sit with the taste of pepper from the turnips lingering in my mouth.

It would be simplistic to say Sadie has stepped out from behind Matthew’s considerable shadow, and yet she has. Working in the garden has given her a place to speak about what she knows to be true. I’m drawn to her certainty. Her activism is a lived one, not curated for a social media account.

Instagram was still reasonably new when I started following Five Marys Farm and since then Mary Heffernan has gone on to build an

Sadie Chrestman, in her vegie patch, generously shares her produce and philosophy @fat_pig_farm. Photograph Matthew Evans

empire. I’ve happily signed up for the ride. But even as I do I have this uncomfortable feeling. I am a voyeur and for Mary to sell her meat, I get to watch her family’s triumphs and tragedies. Sadie of Fat Pig Farm is not an empire builder, not of the Five Marys sort. If Sadie has an empire, it’s built from the soil she has tended. Mary with her thousand-watt smile, her gorgeous hair, her American ease in front of the camera is far away from Sadie’s occasional humble appearances on Fat Pig Farm’s Instagram account. Yet both women share a passion for what they do and want to spread the concept of farmraised meat and produce grown ethically and transparently.

I’m drawn to them both for different reasons. I’ll never meet Mary; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever commented on her posts, but I too choose to write about my life in an effort to forge connections about how we live on the land, how we raise our stock to feed and clothe our country. The trick is, as Jeanette Winterson so acutely observed, to make my small experience a universal one and the words on the page a place where readers may recognise themselves.

In the end it is perhaps a matter of degrees between the three of us. I need the silence of my walk to be just that; I need to do the work on the page to form connections and not worry about turning my life into an Instagram opportunity. I take heart from the conversation I shared with Sadie in her vegie garden. Neither of us will ever be Instagram stars, but hopefully both of us will forge real connections with others through our work. n @maggiemackellar_

Chef Sean Moran has split his time between the Blue Mountains and Bondi Beach since the 1980s, immersing himself in creativity in both his homes.

Words Ceri David Photography Anson Smart

Below Creativity in the kitchen (and in the paintings on the dining room walls) is Sean’s realm. Opposite page One of the two dams, perfect for swimming in this magical setting.

‘The Bramley tree has blossom on at the moment, as well as apples,’ says Sean Moran, rolling his eyes. ‘The world doesn’t know what it’s doing.’

It’s true: the past year has forced all notions of normality to twist and tangle, to the point where, clearly, even nature is confused. Fittingly, perched at one end of the massive dining table in Sean’s Bilpin farmhouse, is an upside-down cake.

‘I picked the Bramleys this morning, cracked the walnuts, ground the cassia bark …’ He scampers, elflike, to the kitchen and brings back a glass jar, unscrewing the lid so I can take a sniff. ‘It’s like a grown-up version of cinnamon. Would you like some Greek yoghurt with yours?’

The 20 hectare farm in the New South Wales Blue Mountains has been home for 14 years to Sean and his husband, Michael Robertson—nicknamed Manoo ever since their young nephew had trouble with his real name. Neither of them has roots in the country. Manoo comes from a family of tinkers in the UK, while Sean is from ‘old Sydney convict stock, way back’. The couple fell in love with this part of world in the eighties, when Manoo was working at a guesthouse in Blackheath. The location was great—just 90 kilometres north-west of Sydney, where Sean worked in Bondi—and they could have the garden they’d always wanted. They rst bought a shack in nearby Mount Tomah, and two decades later they upsized to this place.

It’s unlikely the patch of dirt their younger selves dreamed of was anywhere near this size. Fields of vegetables stretch in neat rows into the distance, kept company by sheep, cows, chickens and pigs; the whole operation hydrated by two large dams—one spring-fed and over owing joyfully into the second. All up, the farm now supplies 40 per cent of the produce used at Sean’s, the Bondi restaurant—or perhaps ‘institution’ is more accurate—they’ve had since 1993.

Sean and Manoo divide their time between the two, driving back and forth a couple of times a week with crates of produce or buckets of compost scraps, depending on the direction of travel. They haven’t always made these trips together but, lately, says Sean, they prefer to. ‘Manoo had a heart attack a couple of years ago and he says, “I don’t want to die alone”.’

Their Bondi pad is ‘this kooky, dilapidated thing that overlooks the ocean, one level above the >

It’s a life Sean enjoys sharing, describing the farm as a drop-in centre.

Above The waratahs in the bedroom were Sean’s rst attempts at decorative wall art, before he moved on to the more ambitious project of painting the vegetables in the dining room. Opposite page Manoo (left) and Sean.