Art Life Chooks: Learning To Leave The City And Love The Country

I'd left my friends, my career and my whole idea of self, for what? Some half–baked hippie idyll? I would be living in close proximity to the family I'd barely seen since leaving home some thirty years ago, not to mention having Geoffrey's family at very close quarters. What was I thinking?

As a literary agent, Annette Hughes lived a life of launch parties, deal–making and endless manuscripts. It was a job that seemed to follow naturally from her work with painters, sculptors, actors and musicians. But then she gave it all up and headed back to the state of her birth, Queensland, and a farm in the Noosa hinterland with her partner, Geoffrey.

Now her life is digging the vegetable patch, watching the seasons, tending the chooks and animating a class of disinclined drama students at a local school. Some days she loses her voice. On others she may speak to no one or simply spend an hour or two communing with the cows or watching horrified as Geoffrey fights off pythons in the chook house.

This is an engaging, fresh, opinionated, funny and surprising book about moving out of your comfort zone.