Graft by Maggie Mackellar is beautifully written memoir about life on the land. The story carries us through an annual cycle of seasons on a Merino sheep farm in Tasmania. Maggie reflects on the land on which she lives and her life in a year of drought.

My older brother had pebbles in his mouth instead of words. His tongue is thick. It sticks out when it shouldn’t. At this time I am remembering, he smashed and grabbed and pinched and pulled and broke the world every day, over and again. 

Maggie’s youngest child is on the cusp of adulthood and heading out into the world. As her son’s world opens up, Maggie must come to terms with his loss to the world and recraft her identity as an empty nester.

I am hollowed by his going. By my children’s passage through me and out into the world. With their birth I put on the cloak of motherhood and now it’s time to take it off. I feel naked without it, a person I don’t recognise.

Anyone who has experienced farming life knows it is both beautiful and brutal because it brings us into an intimate relationship with nature, birth and death and how they interplay with the seasons and climate. These elements are rendered strikingly.

In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin.

Lambing season inevitably results in the lambs of some sheep dying and the mothers of some lambs dying. Part of Maggie’s job is to try to match up the orphans with sheep whose lamb died, with the hope that both will thrive.

Today we found a ewe cast. Her lamb had come with both legs back. She’d managed to push his head out but now he was stuck fast. 

Graft combines meditative nature writing and personal essay on themes including loss, mothering, identity and resilience. The memoir is the first of Maggie Mackellar’s books that I have read, but I will be adding more to my reading list.