Graft by Maggie MacKellar
“Today we bring home three ewes, and spot a sea eagle circling and maybe fifty murdering crows. We see flashes of red and yellow and blue – parrots across a dusty paddock. I try to take in all I’m being asked to see. It’s impossible. The life and death of it, heave, swell and sigh.”
Maggie MacKellar is no stranger to loss. Her first memoir When It Rains (2010), detailed the tragic death of her husband three months before her son was born, and the death of her mother to cancer a short 10 weeks after his birth. Her second memoir How to Get There (2014) explored her move from her family farm in Central West NSW to a Merino wool farm in eastern Tasmania, following new love.
Graft (2023), her third memoir, picks up where the last left off, spanning a year that marks a significant turning point in her life. Her youngest son C is in his final year of high school and poised to leave home, and Maggie must now reckon with her own identity as a mother once both her children have departed.
“I am hollowed by his going. By my children’s passage through me and out into the world. With their birth I put on the cloak of motherhood and now it’s time to take it off. I feel naked without it, a person I don’t recognise.”
With the loss of her husband and mother, Maggie was thrown into grief and unsupported, single parenthood – and now she must come to terms with being an “empty nester,” while at the same time, living through one of the lengthiest droughts she and her new partner J have ever experienced.
Land, belonging and motherhood are closely interwoven in the memoir. On her own family farm, she felt a sense of home and connection, yet this farm is located on unfamiliar Poredadareme Country. As she says, “Even the name is clumsy on my tongue.”
Maggie attempts to orient herself to this new region, beginning by saying, “But what I’ve learnt, or rather what I’m learning is that to be received in a place I must be alert, open. And I must be quiet.” As the author of two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada, she is well aware of the complexities of belonging to place on stolen land.
She also attempts to orient the reader to farming life in sections called “Words that are useful to know,” with definitions of farming terminology and jargon. She explains that a “cast” sheep is one that for whatever reason is unable to get up, and that to be “dry” can either mean no rain or a ewe that is not pregnant.
Interestingly, the word “graft” has many definitions, but the one that is most relevant to Maggie does not appear in the dictionary:
“The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t include sheep in its examples of the word ‘graft’, but that’s what I do. Grafting: that act of joining together two things to make them one – a motherless lamb to a lambless mother.”
Maggie is determined to graft mismothered and abandoned lambs to ewes who have lost their own, and this determination often borders on obsession – mirroring her own anxiety around her children leaving, as well as her grief at the loss of her mother.
“I wonder if the emptiness of being motherless is a longing I am enacting not on the pages of a book but rather on the maimed, disfigured and weak of our flock.”
As Maggie reflects on motherhood and identity throughout the book, she also looks back on her childhood and her own mother’s lifelong duties as a carer for her oldest brother, who has a neurodevelopmental disability and is non-verbal. She says:
“My older brother has pebbles in his mouth instead of words. His tongue is thick. It sticks out when it shouldn’t… he smashed and grabbed and pinched and pulled and broke the world every day, over and again.”
As a child, their family life with a mostly absent father is one of shit, shame, loss and the burning knowledge of being different. Her mother is often described as sacrificing much for her children, and in many ways, it is heartbreaking.
“My mother, a woman of faith, never received her miracle. My brother never spoke. But out of the ashes of our childhood she gave all three of us the miracle of herself.”
The book is organised into four parts, from autumn to summer. Maggie is clearly sensitive to and reverant of nature, as she details the changing seasons, the endless drought, her invigorating ocean swims, and the fauna and flora around her (you can read more of her nature writing in her weekly newsletter The Sit Spot). The book is also interspersed with illustrations and facts about different bird species to which she has a personal connection, from wedge-tailed eagles, to black swans, to robins – fellow nesters and empty nesters, perhaps.
As life on the land is both beautiful and brutal, the writing mirrors this. It is rich in texture, dense with lyricism and meaning: poetic, certainly, although a little overbearing at times. Yet Maggie’s relationship with the natural world is always one of respect and reciprocity:
“In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin.”
Ultimately, the drought is the dry, beating heart of the book, and the story that I found so relevant in our time of climate crisis. Maggie does a fantastic job of giving you a detailed look into the day-to-day life of a sheep grazier in a time of such uncertainty, when everywhere she turns there is dead grass, dying sheep and desperation.
In the end, this is a memoir about resilience and connection in the face of loss, fear and uncertainty.
“J sees me struggling with the now black-tagged ewe in the yards. ‘You can’t win ‘em all,’ he says. ‘I know,’ I reply, ‘but I’m winning this one.’”
You are absolutely with her in this struggle; this woman who has lived through so much loss, ignited with desperation, determination and grit. I couldn’t help but cheer her on.
Graft is out on 25 April 2023. Many thanks to Penguin for an advance review copy.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal and Cammeraygal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can say hi at emily@anikopress.com.