Dearest Readers
I write this to you a week out from Christmas, or thereabouts. It is a time of year I love, though this year will be harder having only lost Hugo’s dad a month ago, I lost my own father 20 years ago only days before but with a little one who desperately misses her Tata, it is even more important to make a celebration of it.
Some of my fondest memories as a child are of Christmases at my family’s farm in New Zealand. How vastly different it was from my childhood home in a remote corner of the Top End and within a childhood that became increasingly hard and marred by the downward spiral my father’s life would take, I clung to the times I felt part of something bigger for this only child growing up in a world where the only other true family I knew were my parents.
Christmas can be joyous, it can also be especially hard for those who have lost those they love, or carry their own ghosts of Christmas’s past that haunt them still or for parents who are struggling to make ends meet on an average day in a world seemingly gone mad with living costs, let alone gift giving. So, for me, in a year we feel all of the above, I am reminded why the gifts you give and get, while lovely are not what matters and I know Nes will remember in her lifetime only a few “things” she ever got, like me, with my Young Talent Time mic and amp, a gift my parents soon regretted, a barbie Ferrari car and a book about a rabbit who lived in the country and got up to mischief.
In the spirit of giving I have opened up this journal to all readers.
Thank you for being here, especially during such a busy time.
Pip and family xo
I remember the smell of the earth, it didn’t smell like home did, where bauxite was mined and red roads stabbed straight lines through the stringy bark bush. Friesian cows ambled by lichen covered fence posts here, chewing lush grass, harmless and docile. Not the buffalo that sirens warned us had wandered onto the school oval and footy field, even mid game, at home. Buffalo that we provoked on our BMX, free as we kids of the cul de sac were to make our own fun, and trouble, the offspring of shift workers, with the bush as our backyard.
The deep, chocolate soil of farmland, an hour outside of Wellington, turned easily. I had never known the earth to be soft, only the sand of the beaches near my home, where it was soft and hot and blinding white and we were taught how to throw three pronged spears just off the shore and we’d eat around a fire by the she-oaks, fish and sometimes turtle, as the sun set. But the earth was always hard there, compacted, life forced it’s way through it with great effort and came out looking fatigued and tough because everything had to be, up that way, rough trunks and sharp leaves, serrated edges and pointy ends, orange monolith like ant hills and great grass trees metres tall with heads of crazy hair needles we took great delight in as kids. Days of heat that could melt your will to live and humidity you swam through to get anywhere, torrential wet seasons and violent cyclones that made light work of fibro mining houses.
There were no verdant greens there, except for after a burn and those greens perhaps only looked as vibrant for they sat against a blackened landscape. Here, at my family’s farm for four generations, everything was less drawn, less thirsty, in fact it seemed drunk on easy rain and deep topsoil and the foliage of everything that grew, from trees to flower borders to food, was dense, the deep green of wanting for nothing. The blooms that grew there didn’t grow, couldn’t grow where I lived, the size of my hand with ludicrous numbers of petals in shades I’d not seen in nature apart from the mauve of waterlillies against black water, these scarlet reds and pastels pinks, unfurled and fallen away in the gentle breeze within a day or two. So frivolous even they seemed that they could just waste all that beauty so quickly with no mind at all, for it would come again and again and again.
Apricots and apples, plums and peaches, the branches of so many trees in the garden hung with hundreds of baubles, like the giant fir inside the house, always sat beside the chiffonier that now lives to one end of my kitchen here at Moorfield, it’s wide mantle a Christmas village scene that Nes stands on a chair to act out the coming of a little Santa along the roof tops. There were great heads of lettuce, the size of mine put carefully into baskets, beans as sweet as a lollies, tomatoes and carrots, bowls and bowls of berries, and potatoes.
It made my mind hiss and zing and sparked something in this girl from Arnhem Land, that I’ve never been able to set aside since and while I know the beauty now for what it’s worth, a great deal, of my childhood in such a wild and special place, to me it was as normal as any other life. Still I am drawn to the memories of Christmas’s on the farm, so much so I built my whole life, as an adult, around those happy memories, so rare happy childhood memories became by the time I was 12.
It lived in my mind as magical time, of world’s made dark and cool by dense canopies and heat that didn’t make you drag your legs and sweat dripping off your brow and into your eyes stinging them with salt and silt. At the height of the day, the land did not wave and quiver on the horizon, insects stirred from sun up to sunset. I could jump into rivers and walk barefoot through knee high paddocks and not fear I’d meet with peril. I did not need to think twice about what might lurk beneath the surface or stumble on by surprise. I did not need to think about the chaos my own home had become, this was home too, for generations of people who looked like me and did things like me and I began to have a sense from that which I’d come.
Everything just seemed more malleable, easier, a home my family had built the century before on cattle and sheep, and dairy too. It felt like the pages of my favourite chilhood books by Beatrix Potter, of vegetable gardens and oak trees, rabbits, hedgehogs and farmers in overalls. Not the adventure we lived in a far off corner of remote Australia where my dad had been the first yacht to sail in, long before the mine was built and his friends taught him all they knew of their country.
On the farm, I was someone else, part of a world, mine but not, where wide hallways and expansive rooms filled with the noise of my blood. Beyond the heaving household of the farm, my parents were the only relatives I’d ever known. Where kitchens teamed with generations of women, cooking the same meals they’d always cooked, at the times they’d always cooked them and shops weren’t used.
Milk came up the road from the sheds every morning, and became cream and butter too, became scones and cakes, porridge and pastry. Where summer’s past were kept in sugar syrups in a cellar, and vegetables in vinegars, rows and rows of vacola jars that would draw back and pop when they were opened.
Life had an order to it, it was more certain in some ways, so set it was in it’s ways it was as if we had turned back the clock to a another time entirely, a predictable rhythm to each day. The edges of everything about that existence, felt to me, to be more rounded. Well, except for the edges of my Grandmother, Gwendoline ‘Joyce’ and her sisters, my Great Aunts, who ran a very tight ship, born and raised under that roof, four chapters of women, their’s and those before them, who’d been widowed and left to run the farm on their own. They were the only prickly parts of that place, that I needed to be careful not to cross but at Christmas, even they seemed to relax and smile more. As long as you always used your manners, and never spoke too loudly, or too often, while the adults talked across the kitchen table. Milk prices while shucking peas, snapping the ends off bowls of beans, the business of other family, on other farms.
I had been instructed by my older cousin’s, me being the baby of the family, much like Nes is now, to dig the potato patch first thing in the morning, before the adults left for church, another farm tradition my own mum had been adhering to since she was a child herself….but there was a loop hole, I was told and if I did this thing, dug the spuds for days of Christmas feasts and keeping, I wouldn’t have to go.
So, I was up with the sun, though it was nowhere to be seen but for the hazy glow through thick fog. I dug a sacks worth of potatoes while my cousins slept in. Only the house dog, a huge German Shepherd, witnessed my toil, her less privileged peers already at work down at the sheds since before light, with my uncle and his son, where the ‘working dogs’ lived. Though someone must have woken to see my impressive productivity for there is a photo somewhere of a young me seated in the dirt with that dog, licking my laughing face, surrounded by unearthed taters.
I proudly dragged the hefty sack of potatoes triumphantly up to the house, to await my exemption from mass. My cousins stood grogily grinning, roused from their slumber for breakfast, standing behind my Grandmother and Great Aunts, my perplexed mum. I stood covered in dirt, proud as punch and was thanked for my efforts, plenty of potatoes for storing and for roasting in tallow for tomorrow’s Christmas lunch, for Bubble and Squeak the day after. As everyone began to circle back inside to the smells of bacon and eggs, and toast with homemade butter and jam, my Grandmother and Great Aunt Micky, told me I best clean up for breakfast, and church. I could hear my cousins snickering through the kitchen window.
After church I tore off my Sunday best and headed back out to the garden with my sweetest Aunt, Ann, to wander under the sparkling sun rays beaming down through the crowns of vast oak trees and off to the vegetable garden we would go. She was so quietly spoken, so timid it seemed, my Aunty Ann but really, she ran that place and had made her undeniable mark in her unassuming ways by the time we lost her to cancer.
Her kind smile and small frame at the kitchen bench, she cooked better than all of them and that was saying something for women who’d been cooking since they were kids and were now pushing a century themselves but Ann spoke least of her skills.
Her humility was a rare bird in that big old house, in fact, I suspect she might’ve been the first it had ever seen. Married in, she had missed the hereditary hallmarks my forebears had mustered so long in order to hold onto the farm without their husbands, a certain kind of hardness and haughtiness had become a genetic predisposition.
I was called into the kitchen with all the intention of a drill sergeant by my Great Aunt Mick, or Mickey as she was known, widowed young by a merchant who took his life and left her to raise their young twins, a boy and girl, at Oakview, still her mother, Shar’s household, handed me a three quarter full bottle of whiskey. I was asked to upend it over a crystal bowl I could almost sit in but for layers of madeira sponge fingers, berries, preserved peaches and red jelly.
“I’ll tell you when”, Mickey said to an anxious looking me, and then promptly walked off.
I don’t remember when I stopped pouring but I do remember asking mum if, as a child of 11, I was allowed to eat the famous farm trifle, to which there was a unanimous yes from every mouth in the room. I remember eating around the spirit drenched sponge and focusing in on the fruit, and custard and cream. Huge splodges of it in my bowl, a combination I still love and share with my mum and her sister, my Aunt Colleen. In fact, we cannot eat it without mentioning the farm. Today would be a very different story were I to be making that trifle there. I would pour myself a wee dram while I made it, a taste for the fine stuff I have now, in fact it is what I will do when I make that famous farm trifle, this Christmas.
I remember the beef roasts, reared and dispatched in the paddocks beyond the windows. I remember minty peas, all picked the day before across the lawn that was once used for tennis when my grandmother was a teenager and where they held parties, to where the vegetable garden had always been and my Great Grandmother’s rose garden. I remember homemade mint sauce for lamb that I would make a pool of my plate with. I remember how good everything tasted, carrots like they’d been soaked in sugar, potatoes that made them impossible to stop eating no matter how full you felt and I first came to understand the difference between store bought and homegrown and the privilege it was to be able to grow what you ate, no matter how much it was simply a fact of daily life on the farm.
I remember the stars of the show on the stretching stage of that long dining table that seated so many with ease. Great Aunt Mickey’s knock you sideways trifle, of course and my Great Grandmother Shar’s Christmas Pud. Both of these recipes, two of many that sit in a pile of handwritten pages of four generations of women who cooked in the kitchen at Oakview and fed my family down through two World Wars, the latter my grandmother a part of as a Red Cross Nurse, the Great Depression, birth, death, love, marriage and all that lies between, through the last century and more. I have plans to compile them all into a book for the family, for the new generation of only daughters, as a way of remembering before it is all lost, my grandmother’s generation all gone now.
As I write this, seated in the office of the former farm manager that ran Moorfield as the sheep station it was for almost two hundred years, for the Fletcher family who built her from their humble beginnings as grocers come from the same place as my forebears to find their good fortune where the largest gold seam in the world had been found, her history is not lost on me. The same legacy I was born to across the ditch, of family and farming, and the traditions of the mother country held steadfast to a million miles from where they were born that hold no relevance to the land on which they are now carried out but for our own attaching of meaning to them and clinging to that which was left behind.
Nor is it lost on me the land we refer to as hers, as Moorfield’s 900 acres that once sat within her border fences, that never truly was and never truly will be anything other than the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung, the same way that ‘Oakview’ was never truly my family’s land but for the removal of the Maori people from it, it became “ours”.
It is a different legacy but a legacy of mine, none the less, that I carry from my upbringing within unraveling of someone else’s story so that I came to understand as a child, born of a start in life most could never imagine, in a place most will never know and grants me this perspective to not feel the need to speak of them at all as if that history never happened, as if they are unattached, for they are not. Rather, I hold these two vastly different worlds both of which raised me, in my hands at the one time and love them equally but know that neither story is served by the separation of them, and we are not served as humans, to deny them.
I prepare for Christmas here, at Moorfield, a farm much like Oakview was, sold after over a century of my family’s lineage the very month Nes, the newest link in the chain, was born, the first child not to ever know it as home, or home for the summer holidays where family would gather and food would be prepared with great ceremony and revelry. Where stories of who we were and what had been of us long before we drew our first breaths into this bloodline, were regaled around the dinner table, all the big personalities talking over one another, correcting eachother’s facts and offering eachother advice on everything from footwear to sponge recipes. None of it taken.
So, Moorfield, is our Oakview now, where my family, a number having migrated to Australia from New Zealand 20 years ago, come and spend time in rooms with high ceilings and lofty proportions perfect for lots of visitors all at once, where the noise and commotion of youngsters echoes through and hallways lined with the pictures that once hung at Oakview, and art work painted by our aunts and grandmother. Where farmland still stretches out beyond the windows and livestock graze, where trinkets and keepsakes of a place that existed once at the very epicentre of our family, now gone, can remain as a reminder of the importance of family, of telling their stories so that we might better understand who we are. Of pieces made for my parents by the first people of this land to the far north, to ensure I never forget and teach Nes what it taught me.
Mum and I plan meals, her cottage in view from our living room, just as Aunt Mickey’s cottage once was on the farm. It comes up often, Oakview. Poignant memories, jests at the expense of those no longer with us but remembering their spirit and quirks, the sense they are still around us, happy we are here and remembering them in this way, remembering their food and how they grew it.
We talk of the young fruit trees that grow here, taking on great leaps every year and soon, hung like christmas trees with baubles of fruit, the Golden Queen Peach especially, my mum’s favourite at the farm is the strongest grower here and I often think it symbolises the resilience we were all born to, to strive ahead no matter what tries to hold you back because of what tries to hold you back. We talk of the berry patch that forms it’s first fruit as I write this, of the jars of jam to come, we toss up the idea of a house cow for the cream and home-churned butter. We talk of a vegetable garden overflowing with all you could ever need on Christmas day, of abundance enough to share and share we will, in time, food and goodwill for those who lived as my father later did, alone if not for my visits on weekends and school holidays, and often without a home of his own, off the generosity of others, as his father had after returning from both of those World Wars, soon lost to the street.
We talk of Arnhem, of taking Nes there before the elders I knew as a child are all gone, to walk her through that same land they walked me and my father, so that she too might come to see things through the lens that I do, to see the land her charmed country life is built on has another story to tell. We talk of the lions dad would sculpt remembering his family in africa and his time there, travelling with the Maasai and the documentaries we watched together when I was small, ‘The White Lions’ my favourite. We talk of the lions that came on his room that last night he was earthside with us, hwo it seemed to comfort me that there were good times too. How it felt to find Moorfield so serendipitously, in the land his ancestors came to, to find she known for the lions at her door.
We talk of apricot jam, of mud crabs from the mangroves, we talk of sploshing buckets of milk, of a setting sun behind the granite boulders at the ends of sprawling beaches, on the rolling hills of this land. We talk of puddings and what to put in them, we talk of army green landrovers and sleeping out under canvas, of chasing frill neck lizards on foot, of chasing cows on motorbikes, of uncles tying flies for fishing and showing Hugo the ropes……..we talk of empanadas and who will buy the all important meat for the assado. We talk of Cola de Mono making with his mum to the sounds of Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano, the one his dad loved, on Christmas Eve, the time for celebration, the Chilean way where children can be as loud as they like, as often as they like and stay up til midnight to open presents and generations sit up late to play cards, drink whiskey and have a second dinner in the wee hours.
We talk of time spent in the company of those we love, we distract Nes from picking up every present under the tree once again, by directing her to the advent calendar. We talk of bowls of beans and what booze is in the liquor cabinet for Aunty Mickey’s trifle, we talk of minty peas we will have to buy this year after missing the final throws of spring here for funeral. We talk of next year, when things will feel less raw, we talk of all the Christmas’s to come here, of the family that will join us and fill this old homestead with raucous anticipation, we talk of all will grow in preparation, of potato patches and rising with the sun, with Wednesday in tow, to dig that easy soil and turn them out for roasting in tallow.
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas surrounded by the people you love, and who love you and the company of good friends and laughter, full bellies, and hearts.
Thank you for being here with us throughout this year, for supporting what we are trying to build, for cheering us on as many of you did at Little Oak for all those years. And thank you most of all, for hearing my stories.
Pip xo
TOP 10 FAVOURITE……GARDENING BOOKS I WANT FOR XMAS.
(A Special Request from a Reader as to the books I am coveting most this Christmas)
The Compost Coach by Kate Flood
Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
Bedside Companion for Gardener’s: Garden Enlightenment for Every Night of the Year by Jane McMoreland Hunter.
Rekha’s Kitchen Garden by Rekha Mistry
The Preserving Garden by Jo Turner
The Avant Gardens by Gestalten
The Gardening Book by Monty Don
RHS Resilient Garden: Sustainable Gardening for a Changing Climate by Tom Massey
The Seasonal Gardener - Creative Planting Combinations by Anna Pavord
What Gardener’s Grow by Bloom
PIP’S PLANT PICK
Echinops ‘Ritro’
I have been enamoured with this plant for many years but struggled to grow it in Tassie for reasons that still elude me, perhaps the beds were not free draining enough but here at Moorfield it grows like a weed and flowers profusely, the most unnatural of colours, a blue unlike any other, that jumps off the landscape.
The soil is rich here but free draining and it requires very little effort to get it to flourish and I am expecting it will probably have set seed in the Long Border by next spring, where it will be quick to get to size and bloom spring to autumn.
Echinops look incredible planted alongside ornamental grasses, as the image below shows of the ‘Ritro’, growing happily in our Long Border alongside Panicum virgatum ‘Rubrum’, with the silver foliage and steeples of mauve from various lavenders in the background. It is hardy once established but ma require a little fluffing about at first if your conditions aren’t quite right but it is effort, well worth it.
GROWING DETAILS:
CULTIVATED SOIL 💩 NEEDS FREE DRAINING SOIL 💦 WILL FORM A CLUMP 📏 FLOWERS IN SPRING TO AUTUMN 🌸 PROPAGATE THROUGH DIVISION EVERY FEW YEARS ONCE ESTABLISHED ✂️ OR GROW FROM SEED 🌱 LOW MAINTENANCE ONCE ESTABLISHED 😌 HARDY 🥵 BENEFICIAL INSECT ATTRACTING 🐝 PERFECT FOR FLOWER ARRANGING AND DRYING 💐 CUT BACK AFTER FLOWERING IN AUTUMN OR LEAVE OVER WINTER AND CUT BACK IN EARLY SPRING 🪚\
Once again, thank you from us to you for being here. We look forward to seeing you again in the New Year where much is planned for Garden at Moorfield and she will morph once again, closer and closer to our vision.
Merry Christmas xo
Your writing paints a picture for me 🥰
Thank you once again for sharing. What an amazing heritage you have and what wonderful memories at the farm. I pray you have a wonderful Christmas with those dearest to you and 2024 brings your family many happy memories.... and yummy fresh food and flowers from your garden. 🎄💐🍅🥕🥒