Real Dirt: How I Beat My Grid-Life Crisis
James Woodford
Real Dirt: How I Beat My Grid-Life Crisis
James Woodford
‘I had fallen completely and utterly in love with a small cow paddock near the sea, a few kilometres south of the then timber town of Moruya on the New South Wales south coast. She had been overgrazed down to short, dry crackly grass covered in cow pats. There were only two mature Casuarina trees, which, when the wind blew through their needles, made a sound that transported me back to a childhood of fishing on the Tuross River with my grandfather.’ Real Dirt is James Woodford’s story, the story of how he came to find a piece of land to connect to, to live on and to regenerate - not just the land but his life, too.
It’s the story of his journey from young adventurer, to greenie, to newspaper journalist and environment writer, to father, and to an understanding of Australia, its land and its indigenous people.
And it’s the story of how a house and a way of life could be built to be environmentally sustainable, comfortable, enriching, exciting - and real.
Review
Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly
Acclaimed nature writer James Woodford tells the story of his real-life sea change in this warm, wry and refreshingly honest book. He writes about his family’s purchase of a 120 acre block on south-coastal New South Wales, with the goal of feeding themselves with what they would produce.
At the beginning of the book, alone and capsized in the lake bordering his property, Woodford clings to his dinghy, surveying his new property, and reflects: ‘Blockies are meant to take on five-acre lots … They are meant to go to mohair workshops and take painting classes and then farm with a ride-on mower around their grove of olives. They aren’t meant to take on big paddocks and barbed-wire fences and stockyards.’
Woodford tells the story of one family’s big project, and it’s a messy – though satisfying – one. He also traces his burgeoning passion for the environment movement, from its shaky share-house beginnings, as he literally learns to spell the word ‘environment’, through his youthful explorations, his job as environment writer on the Sydney Morning Herald, and his evolution as an author. At its heart, this is about the things that drive a person and a life – and the fact that those things take work to achieve.
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