Growing Grapes Might be Fun is more than a memoir. Photo: Supplied.
Deidre Macken’s Growing Grapes Might be Fun (Allen & Unwin, 2023, cover design Deborah Parry Graphics, cover photos Getty Images/iStock) urges us to consider how late-life careers are a way of remaking a self we always could have been.
In growing grapes or whatever it is you pursue, she says, you are escaping “the cage of your age”. While this book is a tree-change memoir, I see it firstly as a work of philosophy.
The book pays homage to the land and our relationship with it; it explores the idea of country as the source of our nurture, and the obverse responsibility for us to care for it. It points to the strength of human relationships and the importance of community and it muses on who we are and how we age.
Taking on a rubbish-strewn hill in the Yass district and labouring to restore the place to its pristine beginnings was a Herculean task, but one in which, nevertheless, Deidre and her husband succeeded. The work of Charles Massey, Peter Andrews and the Mulloon Institute informed Deidre’s thinking about the pre-eminence of soil over livestock.
Deidre Macken writes well – as we would expect from someone whose first career was journalism. This is a book that invites us to consider what matters. It is a fluent and articulate work, one which speaks of astute observation and mastery of the pen.
We leave the book feeling exhilarated, not so much because of the success of the grape growing and its transformation into very drinkable wine, as a deep sense of optimism, a faith in the human mind to search for bigger horizons for ourselves, regardless of age.
Sally Hartley’s life story contains remarkable challenges. Photo: Supplied.
More inspiration is to be found in Sally Hartley and Sally Rynveld in Finding Strawberries (The Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney, 2022, design National Printing Press Bangalore India).
The final chapter of this biography quotes these profound words from American clinical psychologist Dr James Finley: “You are not what has happened to you. Only love has the final word in who you are.”
No words could better encapsulate the life of Sally Hartley. Sally Rynveld has skillfully sifted and sorted a vast amount of source material to bring us an engaging and affecting account of a remarkable woman and her remarkable life.
Sally Hartley’s early training was in the teaching of the deaf. She began working in Africa for a two-year assignment with the British Voluntary Service Overseas, a posting that was merely the beginning of decades of her life and work with very poor and disadvantaged people in various African countries.
She soon realised that traditional wisdom about treatment for deafness did not work in that setting and she began to try approaches that were considered revolutionary at the time (like promoting signing).
It is impossible in a short review to describe the vastness of Sally Hartley’s life. Her practical and academic work was highly influential in bringing about positive changes in the disability sector. Her personal life, though often very demanding, she has conducted with grace and humour, always looking for the good things, like the strawberries.
Can a sea cucumber gain self-confidence? Photo: Supplied.
The importance of supportive relationships and of finding the good things is also at the heart of the droll picture book by Amelia McInerney (words) and Lucinda Gifford (pictures): Neil the Amazing Sea Cucumber (Affirm Press, 2023, cover design Kirby Armstrong @ Affirm Press).
Neil is a sea cucumber with a self-deprecatory patter. In fact, he’s intent on convincing us of how boring and unattractive he is. He becomes quite down in the dumps, in fact, when his gal Sandra floats away one day in an undertow.
Later, thanks to her encouragement, life does look brighter and Neil recognises the good things about himself and about life, no matter how apparently mundane.
Barbie Robinson is co-founder and a content creator for Living Arts Canberra, a not-for-profit media outfit supporting arts and community in the Canberra region and books worldwide through its website, podcast interviews and a 24/7 internet radio station.
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