Book of the Week: Women and chickens first

Newsroom

18-06-2025

There's an interesting cultural trend in this country where city dwellers yearn for country life. A place where your neighbour is acres away, you can have animals of all shapes and sizes, you can return to the rural life of your ancestors and you can cuddle up and be cosy.
So too is there a trend for books about it. I wrote my first book about living like my grandmother in 2010 and then moved to 2 hectares in the Hokianga and wrote three more. These types of books are not quite cookbooks, but they do have recipes and they are not quite memoirs but they lean heavily on life stories and they are not quite coffee table books but they have gorgeous pictures of their authors picking wild blackberries, hugging cows, or walking along the beach looking satisfied and free. I am guilty of all three of those images.
We struggle to name the genre but Whitcoulls, to my relief, have arranged them under self -help and green lifestyle.
What I know about the many people who read these books is that they are usually women who are yearning for something different in their life, have a desire to be more sustainable and just want to get their hands dirty for once. Some of them struggle to move to the country due to a partner who won't budge, the need to keep a job or the terrifying prospect of selling up in the city and never being able to afford to go back should the chickens get out of hand. But many are also just gazing with wonder and adoration at these books as a nice thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when women tend to find a patch of sunlight and disappear under a Mohair rug to read and dream.
The Good Life by Gillian Swinton is the latest book in a well-trodden path of aspirational living or modern homesteading, as she calls it. I had to look up the definition of homesteading because it sounded a bit Amish to me. Apparently it is a lifestyle centred on self-sufficiency, typically involving subsistence agriculture, home food preservation, and sometimes small-scale production of textiles, clothing, and crafts for household use or sale.
Gillian is gorgeous and very serious. Not for Gillian, the lying beatifically in a hammock in the orchard or beach walks in cosy boots and poncho. (Guilty again). Gillian wears shorts and pink Crocs, or overalls and pink Crocs, and her only nod to accessories are her dog whistle around her neck and sunnies on a fine day.
She also writes a mean chapter about processing a lamb.
This is when some of the Sunday cosy dreamers might find themselves averting their eyes and hastily flicking over the offending pages while they hum softly to themselves. Gillian knows her stuff and doesn't shy away from the very gruesome business of killing a lamb and butchering it. Hats off to her. 'Disembowelling or eviscerating is a straightforward process,' she writes 'but don't be afraid to take your time.'
What follows is a lot of cutting, pulling and separating before we get to the squeezing of lamb poop out of intestines. When it comes to actually chopping up the animal, Gillian is enthusiastic. 'I love this part,' she says.
For the faint-hearted there are also soothing recipes for honey marshmallow, stovies (she's Scottish) and a zucchini caramel crumble. There are equally well-informed pages on beekeeping, preserving, keeping chickens, producing great compost, raising lambs and calves, growing potatoes and garlic and trapping possums. Gillian has written a book about garlic which is just $10 on her website.
All of this takes place at her home, Lauderburn House, which is in Central Otago on the cycle trail. Publishers love lifestyle content from the picturesque Central Otago. Notable lifestyle authors and television stars are Annabel Langbein in Wanaka, Nadia Lim on Royalburn Station between Arrowtown and Wanaka, Matt Chisolm in Chatto Creek and now Gillian who is just up the road from him. It must be bedlam at the farmers' market.
There is something so pleasantly basic and reliable about the way Gillian writes. She worked in Western Australia as a station cook. 'I butchered my first bird on this farm,' she says. 'You might think an upside-down traffic cone is an interesting choice of killing cone, but it restrains the birds just the same as the fancy stainless steel ones.' More readers gently humming to themselves.
The best thing about this book is that it is written by a young woman who I'm guessing is in her mid thirties. This means that her generation, the ones we old hippy girls have been writing for and raising, have got it. My own daughters, who are Gillian's age, seem to have got the memo too. Just last week one came looking for my yoghurt instructions and the other asked for my beef broth recipe. (Gillian has a great one for chicken broth and we both agree that it's the apple cider vinegar which makes the difference).
She and her partner Hamish, who was raised on a farm in the Hokonui Hills in Central Southland, work while they homestead, which is a lot. The problem with many of these self help/green lifestyle books is that they look perfect but are quite frankly not achievable for anyone who has a mortgage or a family to raise. Original homesteading would have been carried out by women who were not breadwinners or went out to work. They toiled at home melting animal fat into tallow, feeding hungry men on the farm, raising children, washing and cleaning as well as hand feeding a few calves or lambs and butchering chickens for dinner.
Gillian is a digital marketer who works from home, while she runs the property's bed and breakfast. She also has a stunning website where she sells this book and an Instagram account to die for. The fact that she has 7589 followers will be a big reason she was approached by Allen and Unwin to write this book. Even if she sells a book to a third of her followers, that's a nice sale in our market.
She writes in her introduction that readers should take what is useful for them from her book but not try to do it all, a mantra which should be preached more often by women to women who already have enough on their plates: 'For us homesteading is late summer nights in the garden after a day of work. With a Mitre 10 bucket in hand, fixing some irrigation our dogs decided to play with.'
My one complaint about this book is that I can tell from her Instagram posts that Gillian is hilarious yet someone seems to have told her to put her serious hat on for the writing. Or edited it out. I am sure that the classic trope of good jokes when things go wrong are many and varied in Gillian's life and I would have loved the opportunity to laugh with her.
I look forward to her next book and having some laughs as well as learning even more things that even this former self help/green living writer had never heard of such as home testing your soil, banana peel tea for houseplants and making your own garlic powder.
The Good Life by Gillian Swinton (Allen and Unwin, $45) is available in bookstores nationwide.