Being a writer has its positives and negatives. The negatives include a healthy amount of doubt about the quality of your work, a feeling that, hopefully drives you to refine and polish your words until they shine. But my main quandary is one of twin passions competing for my time. When I’m holed up in my study staring at the laptop I’m trying not to be distracted by everything that is going on beyond the back gate. If we’re working with livestock I itch to be out there and I usually am. Even a writing deadline can’t always hold me back from my day job. Which is why my long-suffering publisher is rather used to me asking for extensions. It’s a bit like being back at uni. Their are few of us attempting to write full-time in Oz while being involved in farming enterprises. Quite frankly, you really have to have a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock to be involved in two enterprises that see you as the creator/producer in markets where you are both risk taker and price taker. But do I enjoy it? Of course. I love the challenge of juggling two jobs, of existing in two worlds. One is the people and landscapes I create in my imagination and the other is the land that my family has owned for 121 years. I stand on the soil and feel the wind in my face. It’s hot and blustery and we’re feeding again. It’s a dry, unenticing, droughty environment but one day the black cockatoos will come and perch themselves in a belah tree and sing the song that brings the rain. As I’m on my author tour at the moment I’m enjoying one of the great perks that outweighs weeks on the road in lonely rooms, although I quite enjoy not having to cook for a change! I see so much of our fabulous countryside. From Kingaroy to the Gold Coast, Warwick to Scone, Woy Woy to Camden, our beautiful country is so diverse. I only have to turn a corner and I see flat lands that stretch for miles, the glimpse of the ocean from atop a winding hinterland road or the pretty farm lands of Camden, which was once the food bowl of our fledgling colony. Today I’m heading into Victoria, through Yass and past the Dog on his tuckerbox at Gundagai. If the dog looks towards Goulburn he might just see the Big Merino and be keen to round him up. As for me it’s week three on the road. I’m missing home. But wherever I go, ‘it’s the wide brown land for me’.