'This is a book about the human aspects of life on the land - the stories of success and failure, life and love, of hardship and celebration - and the passion and gritty determination that characterised every family I interviewed.'
Author Deb Hunt sets out to discover what makes what makes Australian farming families tick. She travels tens of thousands of kilometres to properties at either end of the country, from a vast, dusty cattle run in outback Queensland to the wheat belt of Western Australia and dairy and sheep farms in Tasmania. She introduces us to eight families who survive, even thrive, on the land despite fires, floods, personal hardship and uncertain economic times.
We see a different sort of family life, where the kids are expected to pitch in, the classroom is often the kitchen table, the nearest maternity hospital is a five-hour drive, and generations live and work side by side. We meet the French family, whose connection to the bush goes back seven generations, Philip the Philosopher, who by 29 was managing a property of more than one million hectares carrying 20,000 head of cattle, and the outspoken Roma Brittnell, who was awarded Australian Rural Woman of the Year in 2009.
Inspiring, moving and sometimes challenging, these stories provide a window into a way of life that defines the Australian spirit at its best.
Author Information
Deb Hunt was born in the north of England to Welsh parents, and she grew up in a small village in Gloucestershire.
Before Deb became an author she was an 'itinerant vagabond' who had worked as a teacher in Spain, a librarian in Bristol and Saudi Arabia, an actress, journalist and PR executive in London and a global event manager.
Deb has performed at the Edinburgh Festival and with Shakespeare in the Park in London and she gained her equity card playing a kangaroo and a crocodile in an obscure touring production of The Bunyip and the Black Billabong. Her efforts to earn money in the past have included setting up a service to read poetry over the phone (Say it with a Sonnet) running workshops on public speaking and dressing up as a crash dummy.
When she moved to Australia she worked as a freelance writer on interior magazines, including Australian House & Garden, and she later spent five years working in communications for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which took her to live in the remote NSW mining town of Broken Hill.
Dream Wheeler is the true story of a disabled woman in her late sixties who moved to France to start a new life. At the age of sixty-seven, Jane Lambert embarked on a series of disastrous blind dates and eventually met Rene, a cantankerous, opinionated ex-Parisian who turned out to be the love of her life.
Love in the Outback is Deb's funny, warm and light-hearted memoir that explores what happened when she gave up a job she hated, stopped stalking a man who wasn't interested and went to work for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The man she met in Broken Hill forced her to ditch her fantasies about romance and discover the truth about love.
Australian Farming Families is a book about the human aspects of life on the land. Inspiring, moving and sometimes challenging, the stories in Australian Farming Families provide a window into a way of life that defines the Australian spirit at its best.
She currently lives in Sydney with her partner Clyde and Maggie their adopted dingo (who was described as a Red Heeler/Kelpie cross in the adoption papers - imagine her surprise).