Black Duck

When I was a baby writer, and Bruce Pascoe edited Australian Short Stories, I sent him a few of my attempts. He rejected them all, but sometimes he'd write a kind note on the rejection slip which was almost as good as an acceptance. In latter years I have become a big fan of his, for his revelatory work on Dark Emu and for his dignity and patience in dealing with the sometimes vicious and deeply personal criticism that the book has attracted.

Black Duck is a very different book from Dark Emu. It's subtitled A Year at Yumburra, Pascoe's Gippsland farm where he is putting some of the discoveries from Dark Emu into practice, growing and harvesting native grains and making delicious flour from them. I love the loose diary format of this book, divided into seasons, and I marvel at the amount of labour that Pascoe undertakes at a time of life when most of us would be planning rest and retirement. It's not just the heavy work of farming and managing a rural property (fencing, clearing, cool burning, chopping wood, mending, building, caring for animals), but the endless demands on his time from the media and from interested visitors. Some are just breezing through, some are more deeply committed, but Pascoe takes the time to show them around and explain his work. He's also deeply involved in the local First Nations community; though he doesn't go into details, there was clearly some conflict to sort out during this particular year, which also takes up time and energy.

What I loved most about this reflective, generous book was the model Pascoe presents on how to live in harmony with Country -- grateful for its bounty, tending it with care, sensitive to the presence of birds and animals and vegetation, always aware of its stories. It's a glimpse of an approach to life which holds the possibility of so much richness and nourishment for us all, just as the native grains might teach us to appreciate the flavours of our own place instead of food imported from the colonisers. The shadow of death, infirmity, the disastrous Mallacoota fires, and petty back-biting falls over Black Duck, but at its heart this is a joyous and celebratory book.