Fiona Stocker's Blog, page 3

They say it never rains but it pours. We’ve just had the news today that the abattoir we use for our business is going to close down in three weeks. It’s owned by a massive conglomerate and they’ve probably decided it’s not worth their while keeping it running.

It means the probable closure of our business. There are no other abattoirs in the north of Tasmania which slaughter pigs. At this stage we’ve only just found out and have not quite moved beyond the stage where we have to hope for a miracle. Government lifeline or intervention of some sort. Apparently they’re halfway through an $800k deal to keep it open. So that worked.

We have poured our hearts and souls into this business over the past seven years. It has taken both of us, and while I have tried to withdraw from it in part and set up my own line of business editing books for people, writing freelance journalism, and getting a travel memoir published, it is not much of or in any way enough of an alternative to keep us afloat. We will now be casting around for what Oliver can do that might keep our heads, and our children’s heads, above water, while I carry on doing what I do in the meantime.

We’re used to our lives being a roller coaster ride. We haven’t chosen a safe or normal route. We’re both self employed, and getting on in years. We’ve run a marginal farm business and I’ve launched a tenuous writing career. Every so often we start to feel as if we might be getting somewhere. My book has been published by an independent UK publisher and is currently showing in the Amazon bestseller rankings even though it hasn’t been published yet. I have a small, part-time roll with the Tamar Valley Wine Route. And I have managed to place some articles with national newspapers and magazines this year. Oliver has built a dedicated processing room and had it passed by Council, no mean feat. And we’re booked into a whole raft of spring events. And then this happens.

We have never been dealt quite such a body blow as this before. We’re reeling today, and currently wondering how we’re going to survive and what in hell we’re going to do. I can only say watch this space.

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We were interviewed, Oliver and I, for a place on the Sprout Program, which mentors small businesses and producers in the agriculture sector her in Tasmania.

The last question was one that took me aback. Oliver had a ready answer for it, but I didn’t – it was the type of question for which, annoyingly, you only think of the answer later on, after a bit of reflection.



The question was, what drives us to produce food for other people. Oliver spoke about producing food in a traditional way, the way people have done it for centuries, and his enjoyment of that.

For me, it’s about what we do for a living, and how we’ll look back on it at the end of the day.

Oliver used to be a cabinet maker. He made kitchens for people. That’s a good, solid thing to do, and if you’re the person who uses the kitchen, it can give you an intense, almost primal pleasure, as you produce food for your family and the people you love.

I used to be an administrator. An organiser. An executive assistant, an assistant this, an assistant that. I’ve worked in jobs I enjoyed and I’ve also worked jobs that were soul destroying for companies I despised. Before coming to Australia and for a while afterwards, I always worked ‘for the man’.

Coming to Tasmania enabled us to rethink everything, including what we do, which is part of what gives you a sense of your own identity. I’ve become the thing I always wanted to be, a writer. But I’m very much part of the farm business as well. I supported Oliver when he wanted to start keeping pigs. I’ve run small businesses before and I helped set this one up. We make all the business development decisions together, we run the stall together. I created the website and maintain it and do most of the social media and the marketing. He looks after the pigs but I’m out there sometimes too.

So it’s my business too, and I think about it a lot, and what it means to us.

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Food is important, it’s one of life’s basic necessities. We produce food that’s real, at a time when a lot of food that corporations are producing and selling is not real. A lot of what passes for food now is poisoning people, making them sick, with life altering diseases which may ultimately kill them.

We produce food the old fashioned way, which is real. We keep our pigs well, and we make them into food without using chemicals, into food which is tasty and good for you. Our food is not adulterated in a way which your body cannot cope with. Ours is food which your body is designed to eat and has the means to digest.

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Food is more than this, though – it  is also about love. As the person in my household who buys in the food, creates the menu and cooks most of the time, putting food on the table is an act of service for me, for my family and anybody else who happens to be joining us. So the quality of the food you produce is important and it affects the life you lead and the way you raise your children. As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says, life is sweeter. I’m intensely proud of the food we produce.

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Lastly, this business got its hooks into us because of something we never anticipated. We have come to have a great love for pigs and a profound respect for them, (although Oliver is a little sick of feeding them twice daily through winter, it must be said).

About three years into this business we had a massive crisis. We hadn’t been able to get into Harvest Launceston, the farmers’ market which would eventually stabilise the business and make it viable when we did get in. Until then, we were left with trying other, smaller markets which were ultimately unsuccessful, or wrong for our product, at Lilydale, Deloraine and Evandale. One day we spent a couple of hours sitting at our dining table, thrashing things out and at the height of the discussion we were forced to confront whether we should close the business, sell the pigs, get rid of everything and go back to what we used to do. I still remember the awfulness of that prospect, not just because it meant throwing away everything we had worked at, but because it would mean getting rid of the pigs. They had played such a huge part in our family’s fortunes, these noble, good natured, unassuming creatures.

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We persevered, and I never want to face another moment like that.

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Pigs should have more of a place in our communities than most people would understand, and indeed used to. My father told me that when he was a boy, lots of families had a pig and their children would go round the houses collecting waste and scraps from kitchens to feed their pigs. Then the pigs would be slaughtered and made into meat products that fed lots of people in that family or community. In France and Spain they’re still doing this today.

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In Tasmania, many more farms used to have pigs than do now, and pigs were used as the household waste processor, and this should be brought back. We are not allowed to feed our pigs any household waste as that constitutes swill and there are protective laws in place, rightly so. However, if you’re not selling the meat commercially, you can feed a pig what you like, and they will eat pretty much anything. Surprisingly, they will turn their noses up at mushrooms and onions skins and lemon peel, but you can put these in your compost heap. They will get rid of your meat scraps for you and pretty much anything else that you can’t put in a compost heap or in your recycling bin, and if you put it in your landfill bin, it will create methane and poison the atmosphere. Pigs will take care of this for you. Boy does the world need pigs right now. We all should have one.

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​Describing a restaurant as a safe pair of hands is a damp squib of a compliment if ever there was one. So much better to liken it to the kind of friend it would be, or better still, what kind of lover.

If The Gorge Restaurant in Launceston were a swain, it would be worth swooning for. Competent, occasionally surprising, and with a full service offering from the brush of a hand on the thigh under the table at dinner to a cigarette shared companionably after the event, quite a long time later, propped up on fluffy goose down pillows against a padded bedhead in a swanky hotel.

The Gorge has been having its Casanovan way with diners for decades and like our Venetian friend is probably regarded as a bit long-in-the-tooth by some. However, such skilled and dependable hands should not to be sniffed at. Especially when hungry.

Set in the spectacular park-like grounds of the Gorge in a natural basin in the North Esk River, the restaurant is housed in a lovely old historic building that makes one fantasise about being a Victorian lady swooshing around the place with a bustle. ​

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On the outside, it’s classic elegance with a cottagey feel. On the interior, it’s deeply classic stuff. The scene is set the minute you step in the door, with decor that may not be heart stopping, but speaks of an old-fashioned quality and charm. Tablecloths are thick and creamy, silverware is long-serving and heavy, and the gleaming windows give out onto sylvan treetop views.

There’s none of your poncy modern stemless glassware here; the wines are poured into generous goblets with a restaurant insignia heavily etched on the side. The lighting and ambience reminds me curiously of the inside of a London route-master double-decker bus in winter – warm, cosy and golden, full of banter and chat.

While the menu hasn’t changed since the last time I was here two years ago, the place has enough tricks up its sleeve to make tumbling into bed with it a highly pleasurable romp. One of my party is disappointed but if you order an entree as your main then disappointment is probably coming your way. The rest of us are too busy to be sympathetic, hoeing into our twice cooked duck with sticky rice, our slow cooked beef cheeks with mash and jus and baby carrots, our seafood steak with local scallops.

 

The wine list is several satisfying pages long in a typeface from ten years ago, a comprehensive tour of the region, nothing too out-of-reach premium, but brimming with quality boutiques like Holm Oak and Sharmanns. To be picky, in company with tastes running individually from local Pinot Noir to designated driver to not knowing or caring as long as it’s white, a couple more options by the glass would be welcome.

The service is impeccably timed, obliging and personal, warmly smiley and unfailingly polite with a couple of interesting piercings. Rather like an early boyfriend who has wooed your father with chat about the property market and got your mum making him a cup of tea.

Since we’re middle aged females, we deny ourselves desserts. A low-carb and sugar life is an ascetic one. Too late for me, however. I’ve already indulged on a previous visit with my Other Half , and can vouch for the sumptuousness of the warm, chocolate hazelnut brownie, the fluffiness of the fairy floss and the velvety firmness of the panna cotta which we fed to each other with gleeful abandon and complete disregard of the GI count.

 

At the close of the evening, The Gorge is a keeper. If you set up home together and made it permanent, there’s a smidgen of a chance you’d find things predictable after a few years. But there’d be no denying that things were always done with a knowing assurance and an understanding of what a hungry woman wants. You could always depend upon your appetites being satisfied. ​​

A version of this post appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Tasmania 40 South magazine. 

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Early this year I had one of those ‘oh shit’ moments which I’ve since learned is commonplace in a freelance writer’s life, when you realise that you haven’t actually got any work.



Writing a book is quite an undertaking and since late last year I had been working with my publisher on the structural edit of mine. It was read by an editor and sent back to me with a report and changes marked in red. Going through the entire manuscript and re-writing and making changes took a long time. Longer than anticipated. Everything else got put on hold. Since this happened over the Christmas holidays, pretty much everything stopped anyway. Hence the ‘oh shit’ moment in January. ​

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Saying multiple prayers to the gods of freelancing, I sent a whole load of pitches out and did some research on how to pitch properly. It seemed to work. I got good responses back, and suddenly there were articles to work on.

Then I landed a small part-time contract too. Suddenly it was Easter, then school holidays again. And this past week, it has been chockablock.

This week I’ve been visiting wineries and meeting winemakers. If only we had scratch n sniff Internet – wineries smell amazing during vintage when the grapes are being crushed.

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I’ve also been juggling the kids, like hot potatoes. We had people staying on our farm in the AirBnB accommodation so sheets had to be changed, gourmet food provisions purchased. On Wednesday it was Anzac day and we went to a service, where one of the kids played in the band. The family had to eat, so the supermarket had to be visited.

Through all of this was the knowledge that I desperately needed to get to the copy edit of my book, which was waiting in my inbox. On Friday, the publisher chased me about it.

So that’s what I’ve been doing today. I’ve gone through 243 pages of corrections, most of which required nothing more than a click to accept a minor punctuation or spelling change, but some of which required thinking and rewriting. There were 167 uses of the word ‘just’. Now there are (just) 64.

The week to come is no less chockers. Tomorrow (Sunday, the day of rest), I’m visiting a local food maven who is making ham using a leg of pork from our farm. She’s doing this with the head chef from Saffire Freycinet, voted the world’s best boutique resort, no less. I’ll be interviewing him and writing something, I know not what yet, for a publication, I know not which.

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Then it’s two days of a Freelancers Festival in Launceston. Wednesday sees me interviewing chef Analiese Gregory during the Great Chefs Series, and from Thursday to Saturday I’ll be on our stall at Agfest, selling gourmet sausages in a roll to hungry punters. Sixty thousand of them. Not all of them will want a sausage, but it will be busy.

Next Sunday, I’m having the day off.  ​