This month Stella celebrates Graft by Maggie Mackellar, longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize.
You describe the word ‘graft’ as the act of Joining together two things to make them one. Can you tell us more about the book’s title choice?
I love the idea of taking two things foreign to each other and through some strange alchemy – exposure, exchange, time, work – they become something new. The book is based around my observations of life on our Merino sheep farm on the east coast of Tasmania and one of my jobs was to take ewes whose lambs had died and pair them up with orphaned lambs. This is frustrating, time consuming and incredibly satisfying. The metaphor worked on multiple levels. For me, the word graft summed up the work of learning belonging, whether to country, family, or to self.
Graft, among other themes, is a story about the harsh realities of our climate emergency. What role do you see literature playing in the climate crisis?
Literature can be a mirror. In the reflection it offers we can see things in ourselves and our world which perhaps we don’t have the language to articulate. So, I was writing about drought, both for those who have lived through it and for those who had perhaps not fully appreciated what a drought is – beyond photos on the news or social media. Literature expands and connects. It’s a powerful tool to explain the realities of climate change.
“It is hard to think of a finer example of writing the cataclysm of drought particular to Australia than this.”
In Graft, you transition seamlessly between shifting tenses, phases and seasons. How did you patchwork these fragments together?
With great difficulty. While on a writing retreat I printed the manuscript out and took to it with a pair of scissors. The living room of the cottage I was staying in was covered in pieces of paper. I bought five legal pads in different colours and stuck my pages onto them according to theme, tense and season and then rearranged them, so they were in a constant conversation. It was crucial not to have to tidy it up but to walk amongst it for days working out where everything fitted.
You describe yourself as ‘anchorless’ as your identity as a mother shifts with your children leaving the nest. Has writing become your anchor, or something else?
Writing has always been an anchor, as is nature. Now I am also reconnecting with my teenage self. I have a horse of my own (for the first time in decades) and I am loving rediscovering the freedom and pure unadulterated happiness of working with a horse.
What significance do the bird profiles hold in your story?
The birds are my favourite part of the book. They are also beautifully brought to life with the pencil sketches done by my friend Sarah Bird. I love playing with different ways of seeing things. With the birds I combine the scientific descriptions of them alongside my lived experience. They are placed through the book like stepping stones – moments of beauty where the reader can take a breath. I hope too that they work as teaching moments, to encourage readers to stop in their daily busyness and notice the birds who live around them.
Nature writing’s resurgence continues to grow in popularity. What need is this genre fulfilling for our culture?
I hope nature writing offers us the opportunity to understand the complexity of our place in the world. It teaches us awe and we need to feel awe to understand our physical and spiritual survival as a society and culture is reliant on nature. We are nature. We can’t separate ourselves.
About the Author
In her 2024 Stella longlisted book, Graft, Maggie MacKellar describes a year on a Merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, and all of life – and death – that surrounds her through the cycle of lambing seasons. She gives us the land she knows and loves, the lambs she cares for, the ewes she tries to save, the birds around her, and the dogs and horses she adores.
She has published two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada and two memoirs, When It Rains and How To Get There.
She now lives on the east coast of Tasmania with her partner and two children.
About the Book
A gorgeously written reflection, set in Tasmania, on motherhood, farming, nature and home.
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.
Combining pages of her diary, kept through lambing seasons on a wool Merino farm on the east coast of Tasmania, with observations on the world around her, MacKellar writes a stunning thanksgiving on place, mothers, and the ways we cannot escape the elemental laws of nature. Her love for and knowledge of the land on which she lives, the lambs she cares for, and the birds she adores – illustrated in stunning line drawings through the book – are writ large. You will want to leap into the pages and walk beside Maggie as she saves ewes, lambs, tends to her beloved horses and dogs, and considers the challenges and joys of motherhood and farming.
Judges Report
A dispatch from the sharp edge of the climate crisis.
The stunning poetics of MacKellar’s prose, spare yet deeply evocative, belie the urgency of a warning borne of harrowing experience. It is hard to think of a finer example of writing the cataclysm of drought particular to Australia than this. And yet Graft is so much more than its environmental context. With great compassion and humility, MacKellar brilliantly interrogates notions of motherhood, animal husbandry and our relationship with the land we live on and those with whom we share it. She does not shy from the viscera of birth and death yet approaches them with the tempered decency of someone who not only knows how to pay attention to the world around her but also cares for it on a deeply personal level. Graft might well be the new benchmark for Australian nature writing.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Land, belonging and motherhood are closely interwoven in the memoir.” Emily Riches, Aniko Press
“Motherhood in all its guises, both human and animal, is depicted with the clear-eyed perspective of one who understands the paradoxical nature of bonds that simultaneously entangle and estrange.” Anne Green, Good Reading
“MacKellar’s reflections on her mother’s life, and on the phases of motherhood, are especially moving. Graft is a deeply affecting and vital literary offering.” Elke Power, Readings
Links
Listen to MacKellar talk about Graft and her creative process for the book in Book Chat.
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