INSIDE OUT

GALAH’S AGONY AUNT

Dear Aunty Maude, There are mice in my walls. Or maybe rats. Vermin of some variety. They scurry like mad in there at night, scratching away, and recently they’ve started having such parties they wake the baby. My husband is ready to burn the house down. The issue is, I’m vegan. So I ask you, do rodents count?

With love, Sleepless due to squeaking

Dear Sleepless Vegan, The first thought that pops to mind is, ‘Oh, your poor husband’. Of course he wants to burn the house down. A house full of rats (maybe mice), a screaming kid and a vegan—who could blame him?

But then I wonder if he’s even there. Is he down the pub with his mates? Often? Eating steak? I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me that. I never had that problem with my Jim, but I see it happening to women all around me.

Betsy’s Fred came home after one of his long walks, smelling of Twisties—always Twisties—and announced that he needed to find himself. Unlike every other time Fred needed to find something (clean underwear, false teeth, remote control), Betsy was declared surplus to requirements in this particular search. I warned her that she needed to work on the atmosphere in the home, I told her she had to help him find things, but she didn’t listen. She didn’t even pack his bags for him when he left for good. Goodness knows what poor Fred has by way of matching socks. Imagine if he gets asked out to dinner? So that’s what Betsy got. And that’s why you’ve got the vermin. Sleepless, you’ve got to mobilise.

Stop lounging about flicking through the fabulously photographed, tear-stained pages of Galah and inject a bit of atmosphere into your domestic sphere. Set up a nursery for the baby in the garage, preferably your in-laws’ garage. Fry some steak, even just for scent, call your man and say, ‘Honey, it’s time to come home.’

THE BLOKE’S YOKE

Words Ryan Butta

Equality in domesticity is a hill I am prepared to die on. An issue over which I have staged many a protest, even gone out on strike for. When I feel the rotation of cooking duties in my household has not rotated enough, to my wife’s innocent request of ‘What are we having for dinner?’ I sit with arms folded and boldly declare that I am on strike. But if I am the Gandhi of ghoulash, the Mandela of moussaka, my wife is the Margaret Thatcher of domestic industrial relations, the Jaffle Iron Lady. Her weapon of choice, the toasted sandwich. For dinner, and the next four dinners, until I can take no more. I return to the kitchen, humbled, hungry and no longer on strike.

As a boy growing up in rural New South Wales, I can never remember Dad going on strike. There was never any need. Every day was like Christmas for Dad. He would eat, then retire from the table to sleep, sometimes via the lounge chair and sometimes directly to bed. On the rare occasions that he did cook he would proudly announce the feat as if he were presenting us with a Michelin-starred, eight-course degustation menu of local produce that celebrated the changing seasons of Mudgee. In reality, it was only ever cold meat curry, produced by adding three teaspoons of Keen’s curry powder to whatever mum had cooked the night before.

In his defense, Dad was up every morning at 5 am and off to work. I would hear Dad in the kitchen, making his own lunch, waging a one-man battle against 30 kilometres of plastic wrap and those corned beef sandwiches that refused to be wrapped.

The weight of domestic life fell on mum’s shoulders and, at the time, we never realised how crushing it was. There were days when we would run in from the school bus, gauze door banging and flapping behind us, to find mum, sitting at the kitchen table, head fizzing and bobbing like the toggle on the pressure cooker right before the corned beef was done. One afternoon we arrived home early to find mum meditating, or, as we gleefully told Dad that night over cold meat curry, ‘trying to turn into a cabbage’. But we never thought anything of these strange occurrences.

Perhaps the pressure of domesticity was the reason behind mum’s late blooming artistic career once we left the nest. There is not much room for artistic release in serving meat and two veg for two decades. In some of her more abstract pieces I can detect hints of plates being thrown at walls and I sometimes think I catch a glimpse of myself and my brother and my father’s faces in the strange blobs of her work, as she doesn’t so much ‘apply the paint’ to the canvas as hurl it with more force than I think is really necessary.

Looking back from where I stand now, in front of a pile of dishes that just won’t wash themselves, it’s hard to see how I managed to miss the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a household, if not sparkling clean, then at least habitable. The tasks that now drive me crazy always seemed to get done. Like many men, I never questioned how or by whom. I placed my faith in the Domestic Goddess, an omniscient and omnipotent being who ensured that dinner would miraculously appear at 6 pm. But even the Divine are not alone; they have the Holy Trinity. Not Mum.

Mum’s generation never had a choice. We do. We get to decide how much or how little of the drudge of domesticity we choose to bear or shirk. The portioning up will never be perfect nor smooth. There will be strikes, negotiations, détentes and sometimes toasted sandwiches. For dinner. It’s a small price to pay. n

inside

out For years now I have been mildly obsessed with a family I follow on Instagram. I can’t remember how How do you sell your goods without selling your soul? And where do you draw the line or why I started following them, but it began when they moved from suburban San Francisco to a ranch in rural California, USA. They have four young daughters between public and all called Mary, known by their private? Author Maggie second names—a family tradition MacKellar considers. after their mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and so on. Their ranch is called Five Marys Farms. The reason I continue to follow is because the mother of the family, who runs the Instagram account, does not seem to mind collapsing the boundary between public and private; in fact, she recognises that space as a business opportunity, a way to sell their products. When they rst started they were quintessential American suburbanites and their inability to tell one end of a cow from another only made for more fascinating viewing. They learned fast and established a thriving multifaceted business. They now ship their meat (beef, pork and lamb) all over the United States; they run workshops, are ambassadors for the clothing brand Carhartt and they have their own cookbook, bar and restaurant.

Mary is an entrepreneur with capital E. But I skip through all the business content because what I am curious about, what keeps drawing me back to their account, is just how much of their lives they share. Over the years I’ve watched Mary’s girls go from barely being able to sit on a horse to competing in roping competitions in rodeos. I’ve watched them raise poddy

The Heffernans of Five Marys Farms share their everyday lives via Instagram and other social media @ vemarysfarms.

lambs and calves, go on date nights, take family holidays, celebrate birthdays. The girls have grown up in front of the camera. And it seems that the more they share, the greater their following, the greater their exposure and the greater their business growth.

It’s a model replicated all over Instagram. Our fascination with looking into other people’s living rooms has given rise to thousands of small businesses. I love that I can buy a shirt from a one-woman business in Sydney, a jumper from a sole trader in Narrabri, a pair of shoes from a small business in Orange, riding pants from South Australia, birthday presents from a gift shop in Coonamble ... and all of these tiny businesses tell me about their products and, to a greater and lesser degree, about themselves through Instagram.

These platforms have also given rise to the celebration—even a deification—of the domestic. I’m thinking of a number of accounts where a carefully curated version of the domestic world is captured in neat squares and these (often very beautiful) images offer a portal of calm that I love to slip into. I’m sure, if you are similarly inclined, you have your own favourites: accounts that capture tiny snippets of golden peace. Of course the temptation is to imagine this as an extension of the person behind the camera. To imagine that this is a world you too could curate, if only ...

This brave new world of access. It requires the sort of self-belief, an arrogance perhaps, that I think life has stripped from me. I feel uncomfortable on social media, judged, misunderstood, and often as if I’m wilfully misleading my meagre followers when I post a photo of a sunrise or a smiling dog or a lamb. Yet I recognise the perversity of my position, for I am a writer of memoir. My impetus is to be as open, as authentic to myself as possible to connect with my reader. And so despite my discomfort online I persist in recording my life in words. I record it privately in my journal and then use that journal to write about my life for a public audience.

What I’m working towards is connection from my small existence into a larger experience; perhaps what I’m searching for in writing this way is to be seen, which is a very different thing than wanting to be recognised.

I’m thinking through this conundrum as I’m on the cusp of

finishing my third memoir. Tentatively titled Grafted: A field guide to being, it has at its heart the experience of working alongside my partner on our farm where we run merinos. I’ve taken the journals I kept through drought and lambing seasons and stitched them into a narrative about my changing identity as a mother and a woman, as my youngest child is on the cusp of leaving home. I’ve struggled to write it, not because of the subject matter or even the writing itself, but because of a sudden lack of confidence, the feeling that it’s an indulgence to write from the personal outwards. My feminist self takes my inner critic to task, but the lack of confidence is real and what I need is some super self-belief like the Five Marys have.

‘The trick is to turn your own life into something that has meaning for people whose experience is nothing like your own.’ My friend Sadie Chrestman sends me this quote the day after I have visited her on the flimsiest of excuses to talk to her about how she juggles the boundary between her public and private life. The quote is from the writer Jeanette Winterson—who is most famous for her autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and her brilliant memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? And it speaks directly to the heart of my work and perhaps Sadie’s too.

I first met Sadie about five years ago when I was asked to write a feature on her husband, restaurant critic turned farmer and TV star Matthew Evans. I’d driven down to the Huon Valley in Tasmania where their new farm gate restaurant had just opened. I wrote my story on Matthew and his passion to teach people about where their food comes from and how to grow it; a story about determination, commitment and vision, but I left wanting to know Sadie more. She told me she didn’t really enjoy the role she played as front-of-house jack-of-all-trades in order to get their business into shape. What she loved was to be in the garden, but they needed a professional gardener to run it.

We have kept in touch, sending stupid video chats with updates >

The lack of confidence is real and what I need is some super selfbelief like the Five Marys have.