Real Dirt: How I beat my gridlife crisis has just been released by Text Publishing and is available from their website.

I am very keen to answer any questions you may have so feel free to either post a comment (see the comment box at the bottom of this page) or send an e-mail to jameswoodford1@gmail.com

Solar panels at Cudbugga Forest – waratahs in the foreground

Listen to Philip Adams interview with James Woodford about Real Dirt: How I beat my gridlife crisis

Here’s an extract of the Preface:

It was January 2004, nearly dark, and I was stranded in the middle of a wild lake beside a capsized dinghy. There was a north-easterly gale blowing and no one knew I was in trouble.
This was self-sufficiency? A seachange? Life on the land? No. More like, what the hell am I doing here?
I knew I wasn’t going to die, but I had to keep my wits about me. The lake was full of jellyfish and I was red with their stings. There were whitecaps breaking into my face so that I had to time my breathing; I was cold and getting colder; ropes and wires snaked all around in the water, waiting to snag me. I knew if I didn’t concentrate until the cavalry arrived I could get into some serious trouble.
I’d bought the boat a few months before. Our farm fronts onto a coastal lake on the New South Wales south coast and I’d become nostalgic for a dinghy, an old gaffrigged Heron like the one I used to borrow with my friends from school, learning to sail in the sulphurous waters of the Parramatta River. In my Heron I would teach my children to sail, show them the thrill of power and speed without an engine – you don’t need jet skis and sleek speedboats with twin 125 horsepower engines to impress children, I told myself. They would always remember their summers learning to sail with their dad. The new boat was sold to me by a weather-beaten southern highlands cattle farmer who cried when he parted with it, and my fantasy was complete.
The only problem was that as a kid I had never really learned to sail. I had always been a crewman which in a Heron means, at the end of the day, ballast to stop the boat capsizing. Never mind: I would head out with my new boat only in fine
weather. I’d sail carefully around the bay in front of our land, aware of my limits.
But on that January afternoon the weather wasn’t so fine. Prue and I were down on the lake by ourselves, all three children being looked after elsewhere, and the wind was a howling north-easter flecking the lake with whitecaps. ‘I’m going to have a sleep in the shack,’ Prue said. ‘Why don’t you go for a sail?’
‘No chance. It’s way too windy,’ I said, pointing at the lake and raising my voice above the noise of the wind and waves twenty metres away.
‘Wuss.’
As soon as she was gone I walked down to the lake where the boat was pulled up on the sand. Wuss? I unfurled the jib, shoved off and scrambled aboard without a backward glance.
The Heron took off as if she had been flung from a catapult. Before I knew it I was crashing through the chop on the lake and half way across the bay, the wind shrieking and the sails sounding as if they could tear at any second. But worse was coming. A headland jutting into the lake marked the end of the bay: beyond that there was no protection whatsoever from the gale. I knew I had to turn around, but when I swung the tiller the boom came at me like Friar Tuck’s staff. The boat was instantly flipped on its side. No worries, I told myself, clambering onto the centreboard.
Feeling panicked, but knowing I had to stay calm. I got her up, turned the boat around – and again she flipped. Four more times I righted and capsized her before I was too exhausted to try again.
As I clung to the gunwale, at least a kilometre offshore, spitting lake water and kicking at a water column full of jellyfish the size of dinner plates, I looked back at the tiny shack we had just finished building. The light was already gentle with the first hint of dusk. Prue was almost certainly fast asleep and I knew she could snooze deeply for hours.
Worse, the boat was sinking, mast-first, until it settled into the mud of the lake bed. No matter how hard I pulled I could not get it to rise and after a while, knowing I had to conserve my energy, I stopped struggling. I couldn’t feel the stingers anymore. I let myself float as calmly as I could, preparing for the fact that I might be in the water well into dark.
And for the first time I looked at the land from this direction, this new angle. From out there, even floating with only my head above water, I could see almost the whole block.
Christ, there was a lot of it. Over 120 acres rose up from the lake shore, all of it wild, and all of it now our responsibility.
From out there in the water it was obvious we barely had a toehold on the eroding shoreline. On the lake’s edge, which curved around in a crescent for half a kilometre to form our southern boundary, there were a degraded row of dying casuarinas and a couple of ancient remnant swamp mahoganies. The sad line of trees leaning over the lake looked like the mangled eyebrow of a rugby player, with patches ripped out and scarred. Behind the row of casuarinas was the paddock, a bald and furrowed forehead, rising up for five hundred metres on a gentle slope. And behind the thirty-acre paddock was an impossibly dense seventy-acre forest, as thick as the mop of hair on a New Hampshire Democrat. The forest was so wild it truly seemed like our own little national park. It was actually bigger than the forest in Sydney where Prue had worked as a ranger for six years.
To the west of the bush was another twenty-acre paddock, an asymmetric appendage to our new kingdom we hadn’t realised was ours until long after we exchanged contracts. Months after we settled we still hadn’t even begun to consider what to do with that triangle paddock. There were several drainage lines and a creek with a crazy name – Cudbugga. Our boundary was nearly five kilometres long. Some of our neighbours were so far away that if we lived in a city they would be in a different suburb.
It was a massive blank canvas and we were going to have to do everything – build a home, establish an orchard and vegetable garden, fix fences so we could run stock without them grazing on the sensitive lake shore and further eroding the drainage lines and creek. There were thousands of trees to be planted, erosion to be halted, neighbours to be courted and thwarted. What were we thinking?
Blockies are meant to take on five-acre lots, like the one around the corner that we had sold a few months earlier in order to upgrade to this supersized seachange. They are meant to go to mohair workshops and take painting classes and then farm with a ride-on mower around their grove of olives. They aren’t meant to take on big paddocks and barbed-wire fences and stockyards. Nor the goal of trying to feed their family with what they can produce themselves.
I felt overwhelmed by how little I knew about anything practical. My current predicament was proof of that. This would be one for the neighbours – ‘You hear about the new city bloke who nearly drowned on the lake?’ Belly laughs all round.
Finally Prue appeared, ant-like on the shore. I waved and yelled. Had she seen me? I watched her fanging the ute up the paddock. ‘I’m doing fine,’ I tried to communicate telepathically.
‘Go and get a friend with a boat, don’t make a big deal.’
About half an hour later I saw her run down to the shore with a borrowed surf ski and start paddling out towards me like Grant Kenny. ‘Don’t worry,’ she yelled over the wind, ‘I’ve called triple 0.’ I felt like asking why she hadn’t called the local paper while she was at it. I imagined the rescue helicopter winching me out of the lake. How many trees would I have to plant to stay carbon neutral after that?
As she paddled back to shore, I could see the local volunteer rescue speedboats racing towards me from the other direction. Thank god. I was exhausted, freezing and absolutely covered in jellyfish stings. For all I cared, the lake could have the bloody boat. The rescue guys, whom I had never met before, scooped me up then freed the mast from the mud.
They dragged my semi-submersible back to shore and left me next to it.
‘When you’re on this lake,’ one of the men advised, laughing as I shivered and wondered whether it really was that hilarious, ‘you always have to have a big water bottle tied to your mast. Like a float, so it doesn’t sink.’
For days, even weeks, afterwards everybody thought it was very funny. Farmer Jim had just taken a cold bath.
I could see the ridiculous side of it myself, yet the capsizing and time spent treading water on the lake had also been a warning. I knew that a part of me had been justifiably scared out there in the gale. Not everything here was a game: if these paddocks and forests really were to be my new life I would encounter a hundred disasters like the capsizing. But that night, as I looked into the fire, I felt I had been given a second chance. I comforted myself with the Russian proverb that a beaten man is worth two unbeaten men.
At the same time, I wondered: could there possibly be a water bottle somewhere I could tie to my head so I didn’t sink?

The Sydney Morning Herald also had an extract.