Lawrence Patchett
Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm by Tim Saunders (Allen & Unwin, 2022), 288pp, $34.99
Early in Under a Big Sky: Facing the elements on a New Zealand farm, Tim Saunders signals the twin issues that will preoccupy his narrative. The first relates to the elements. ‘Take any decision on the farm,’ the narrator says, ‘strip it back and you will find the weather’. The rain gauge is among the most discussed tools on the Glen Oroua farm, and in 2020 a searing drought makes it more important than ever. When the sun is ‘being a bastard’ day after day, and the seasons no longer behave the way they used to, it’s even more inevitable that your thoughts circle on the elements. Thus Under a Big Sky takes its structure from them, moving through sections themed on fire, air, water and earth.
The second preoccupation seems initially to centre on legacy. The narrator’s father is 82 and still a vivid, competent presence on the family farm. ‘He’ll never retire,’ the narrator says, as his dad rips into the chainsaw work when doctors say he shouldn’t and puts in his advice about how to manage the sheep. The echo of older ancestors lurks in quieter corners, those who built the cavernous woolshed and drained and fenced the land. And in the farmhouse and cottage, old photo albums are always at your elbow—there’s no shortage, in other words, of family figures to watch over the new generation. ‘There is no denying the fact that who we were affects who we are,’ says the narrator, ‘and who we are affects who we can be.’
Taking forward this legacy are the narrator and his older brother Mark, along with Tim’s partner Kathrin, an ex-pat German whose new perspective joins the brothers to nudge the farm’s thinking forward. Saunders is particularly strong on the specifics of their daily work, using clear language to break down farm jargon and enable us to be fully present in each task and appreciate its value. Treating flystrike, for example, is not a glamorous job. But precise writing and the relatable voice take us deep through the crimp of the ewe’s wool, right to the skin. We feel the warmth that comes back into the farmer’s hand as he clips out the infection and the vibration of Kathrin’s voice as she talks nearby.
Even in what turns out to be a surprisingly silent year, these noises of farm life sound through the book with an affecting force. The most lively ‘noise’ is the father’s dialogue. He’s up there with the best in swearing, but also genuinely funny, with that resilient, dry humour many readers will recognise. ‘Out of petrol,’ he says, when the chainsaw runs out. ‘It happens to all of us in the end.’ Another familiar sound from the country, the rackety call of a spur-winged plover in flight, is expertly rendered: ‘The plover landed gracefully back where it had started, happy in its successful mission to worry the silence.’ And another surprising hush delivers one of the most moving scenes. Before a worrying trip to the doctor’s, the dad asks to be let out of the car so he can stand quietly amongst his beloved steers, solaced by their gentle enormity.
Dad stopped and let the cattle gather around him. Their wet snorts drifted across the paddock …
He stood amongst them for a long time.
‘Right, let’s go,’ he said when he came back to the car. ‘I’m ready now.’
2020, the year of the book’s span, is a particularly difficult year. Lockdowns prevent the sale of stock on time, there’s a shock heart complication and a banker peers into their finances with startling overreach. He says ewes as young as eight months old should be put out with the ram, driving up income by reproducing early. ‘I’m buggered,’ retorts the narrator, sounding a lot like his dad, ‘if I’m putting profit over animal welfare.’
It’s a fraught moment, and the scenes of Under a Big Sky keep delivering similarly potent reminders of just what’s at stake. Crop rotations to reduce fertiliser use; why planting pines to sequester carbon might be a bad choice; how to reduce food-related emissions: these are all issues that get discussed, with real heat, by the characters. At one point—skip this sentence to avoid an image of animal cruelty—one of the farm’s ewes gets shot by a poacher and pulled, still alive, through a fence to be butchered, prompting rage and grief over this inhumane death. Yet a visiting truck driver blames it on the farmers themselves: ‘If you didn’t charge so much for meat, people wouldn’t have to steal them.’ It’s an understandable confusion about how the capitalist food economy works, ruining life for everyone, but the upset ripples on through conversations in the cottage that night, as Kathrin and the narrator worry through and re-form their responsibilities again. You might not agree with every position in Under a Big Sky, but it’s rare, I think, for outsiders to get such deep access, not just into farmers’ rooms and ute cabs but deep into their heads and senses, where these spiky tensions about resource-use are felt very directly.
In its cyclical worrying over these topics, the book’s pacing fascinated me. Mostly the book settles into sections of two to three pages in length. For a while, I wondered whether this was allowing the narrator to raise big questions without fully confronting them, not digging right down into their knotty depths in the way another book might. But then you read on and the book’s rhythm starts to teach you that this is how life and thought have to operate on the farm. Because new crises arrive, and you can worry your way towards a solution over time, but more immediately, there’s a new job to get on with tomorrow.
A striking example touches on another financial concern. Having paid the shearers and sent the shorn ewes back to their paddocks, ready for their healthiest lambing possible, the characters of Under a Big Sky confront the bald reality that the coarse-wool market has crashed and shearing costs more than the wool’s now worth. ‘[N]othing short of heartbreaking’ is how the narrator describes it. Kathrin laments the crazy-making economics of it all, where synthetic carpets seem worse environmentally but outcompete wool on price and availability, even in New Zealand. These ‘debilitating’ financial realities would seem enough to stop the whole wool-production cycle on-farm immediately, but there’s another job to be getting on with—repairing rails in the woolshed that got broken during the shearing—and then another task the next day.
The Oroua River borders the family’s 290 hectares. In the ‘water’ section, the narrator brings his troubles to its banks, learning from the river’s ceaseless flow, its fluid ability to adapt. So the wool-price crisis goes the same way as the father’s health shock, the pandemic, and the need to alter old farming methods—earth-shattering in its own moment but gradually absorbed into the ‘flow’ of farm life. And in between other jobs, meanwhile, Kathrin works on ways to use and market wool differently—spinning and crafting and researching—and you sense that, over a few seasons, something workable will emerge from that new sphere of labour and discussion.
I did have an occasional question about a minor issue of craft. Generally, the dialogue expertly captures the peculiar vernacular and humour of each character’s speech, the father’s particularly. But sometimes, later in the book, the dialogue between the younger farmers did the work of exposition a little too openly for me. In these moments, one character explains to another a reality about modern farming that it seems they’d already know or shares information in a way that sounds a bit clunky. For example, Kathrin tells her partner: ‘The old ways of crafting wool are fusing with new technology, techniques are being shared on social media.’ Dialogue is a purposeful distillation of real speech, of course, not an exact representation, and it’s difficult to hit that balance for every reader so that it has the purposeful efficiency the scene needs yet still sounds natural to every ear. Keeping perspective is important too—I devoured this book and, on the whole, admired its craft and larger project of thinking.
On that topic, I wondered once or twice whether some readers might want to hear slightly less of the narrator thinking aloud about his conclusions on how to farm responsibly. Sometimes, let the image or action speak for itself, some readers might say. But it’s what the book promised in the beginning, and personally, I loved this commentary. I wanted the opportunity to listen as someone with real skin in the game worked hard, via artful prose, to grasp his role in our time of accelerating climate change.
The book’s closing has a couple of scenes where the narrator welcomes the first lambs of spring. In the book, he’s already thought through the fact that livestock farming is ‘full of contradictions’, given that he sends away sheep and cattle to be killed for meat, yet cares deeply for their health and ‘dignity’ while they’re in his care, giving them ‘the best life we possibly can’. Now he coaxes milk into a weak and orphaned lamb, and then sits on his quadbike, with his partner pressed against his back, the spring sky moving overhead, while a new lamb totters toward its mother for milk, and a gull flies down to eat the afterbirth. It’s a deeply felt image of life on the farm as ‘interconnected’, where the farmer is a human smelling of lanolin and sweat and dirt, ‘working with nature’ and the seasons, not bulldozing right over the top of them. Coming back to the question of legacy, here the book does more than just find the rightful place of one man in his microcosm of family and farm history. Instead, it allows us as readers to feel his place as a creature inside the delicate seasons and systems of the planet we all inhabit—a rare and precious experience.
LAWRENCE PATCHETT grew up on a small organic farm/orchard in Canterbury and for a short time worked as a rural reporter. Now an editor and writer, his books include the short-story collection I Got His Blood On Me.
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