From Television Glamour To A Simple Life Down On The Farm

The Sunday Age

Sunday April 23, 2006

Peter Wilmoth

Author Patrice Newell is passionate about fresh food, good farming practices and the pleasures of country living, writes Peter Wilmoth.

IT'S slightly incongruous, sitting in a busy South Yarra cafe with the clang of tram bells and the gurgle of coffee machines, to hear Patrice Newell exhorting us to slow down, recognise the damage farming has done to the land and appreciate the abundant fresh food available in this country.

Incongruous, perhaps, but apt. The former model, television researcher and now primary producer of beef and olives on her farm in NSW's Hunter Valley, Newell believes busy lives shouldn't mean bad food. "I don't understand fast food," she says. "Food is something we have every day and it seems a simple idea to make every mouthful count. I don't think people have to grow all their food but it amazes me that more people don't grow even easy things like silverbeet."

Newell is in Melbourne to talk about her new book, 10,000 Acres: A Love Story, the third in a line of autobiographical works on her life on the land (the others are The Olive Grove and The River). The book charts the running of the farm she shares with husband, writer Phillip Adams and her 13-year-old daughter Aurora, and the challenges and joys faced by farmers.

Newell has long been a champion of healing the wounds from bad farming practices. "Today much of this ancient land . . . is being lost to development and ecological disasters," she writes. "Family farms have been hacked into fragments or merged into corporate enterprises. With this has come a loss of continuity and community. More importantly, it spells catastrophe for native biological diversity.

"Ever fewer people are engaged in food production, and farming is becoming an increasingly distant and old-fashioned idea. Many think of Australian agriculture as an immense mistake. They know the bitter consequences of ignorance, of disregarding the land's limitations. It's true that farmers have been blind and arrogant . . . making our soil hard, naked, saline. Turning earth into sand."

She writes that farms are being forced by the demands of the mass market to become more and more like factories. "Farmers, once proud, now feel like serfs to the czars of the shopping mall." But, she writes, "not all farmers are the land's enemies . . . To be a good farmer, you must keep the land alive."

She says she is "part of a new wave of primary producers". "There are a lot of bad news farming stories - droughts, floods, chemical contamination. Let's not forget the beauty and joy of primary production with an ecological consciousness."

Long a champion of organic food, Newell recognises that there is price resistance for people wanting to avoid pesticides in food by buying organic but says the alternative is buying imports that are not fresh. "We are a wonderful food-producing nation and fresh is the word that should be imprinted on everyone's forehead."

Organic farming is just one of Patrice Newell's four careers, the others being modelling (she was the Macleans toothpaste star in the 1970s ads), television researcher and presenter and writing. "Of those I was probably least suited to modelling," she says. "Sometimes it seems you're not sure whether it was your life."

She says she enjoyed her stint researching for Kerry O'Brien when the 7.30 Report presenter was at Channel Seven. Rather than witness O'Brien's famed fiery temper, she says she learned from him. "I didn't know I'd landed on my feet with the best mentor a girl could have."

O'Brien taught her to have the courage to confront people. "It was the confidence to believe that you had a right to ask questions. That never left me."

Neither she nor her husband - both Sydneysiders, he originally from Melbourne - ever regretted leaving the city 20 years ago. "Phillip's found his niche," Newell says. "He loves it there because there's no audience - it's a great place to be himself."

They love their rituals - every Saturday Adams drives 3 kilometres to the nearest town to get the papers, and later they'll pick a tree under which to have a picnic. "We are very happy there," she says. "Bringing a family up on a farm - it doesn't get any better than that. I don't think I could have ever brought up a child in the city. In the country there are a million things for children to do - spend three hours climbing a haystack, playing with the dogs, standing at the cattleyards, looking for lizards." She says that Aurora "didn't see a television set until she was three".

© 2006 The Sunday Age

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