Don't Fence Me In: Grassroots Wisdom From a Country Gal

By Rachael Treasure

Inspiring, playful, witty and uplifting thoughts and stories to brighten your day from Australia's favourite rural writer.
take your life by the horns with this gorgeous collection of feel-good stories, sayings and life lessons. Bestselling author Rachael treasure serves up a dose of pure positivity with a side of down-to-earth cowgirl wisdom. Accompanied by charming illustrations, these bite-sized morsels of home-grown advice will brighten the most monotonous day and leave you feeling inspired and at peace with the world. Get in touch with nature, appreciate the little things, be mindful of your surroundings and learn to love your life with this witty anthology of optimistic thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781460702703

Rachael Treasure

Rachael Treasure lives in Southern Tasmania/Lutruwita with her two children and their farm animals, including a goat called Barbara Gordon. She is the co-founder of Ripple Farm Landscape Healing Hub and uses regenerative agricultural and natural sequence farming principles to restore farming landscape. Her first novel, Jillaroo, blazed a trail in the Australian publishing industry for other rural women writers and is now considered an iconic work of contemporary Australian fiction. Rachael is a rural business administration graduate of Sydney University's Orange Agricultural College and has a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing and journalism from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst. She has worked as a journalist for Rural Press and ABC Rural Radio. Rachael currently supplies holistic farm product to the online farmer's market, Tasmanian Produce Collective. Milking Time is her eighth novel.

Book preview

Rachael’s Welcome

YEE HAH! Thank you so much for deciding to saddle up and take my book for a ride! The fact you are right here with me makes my heart sing and I hope reading Don’t Fence Me In will spark a happy tune in yours too. My aim is to inspire you to make the most of each moment of every day, even in the rugged, boggy bits of life and even when you feel fenced in by circumstances.

As a novelist I am a sponge to the world. I observe life both closely and also with a distant detachment. But even more so, I study myself and my own unique brand of crazy. I attempt to watch my behaviour and belief systems from outside myself so I can see where I limit my life and impact both negatively and positively on my loved ones. Then I weave my inner discoveries into my fictional characters so as to help others.

Over many years I have learned to watch how my ‘blocked’ thinking impacts on everything around me. Through that study of self-awareness, my life and my world have expanded to become so much funner. I know that’s not a word but that’s what this book is about — not fencing in our creativity, and changing our belief patterns so we are free of restrictions that don’t matter. If I want to make up a word like funner I ain’t going to let some old-school rule stop me. Life needs to be funner and freer. And that’s what this book is about … It’s about not fencing your soul in! It’s about leaping the mind fences you don’t need any more, opening new gates into better pastures in life and finding ways to more quickly regain your centre — your equilibrium or balance — and peace when you do happen to get tangled in life’s wire.

Recently I had what I call my ‘buckskin breakdown’. I’ve been a little more than rocky ever since and the writing of this book is helping me patch together some kind of balance in my sense of self and some kind of comfort.

In January 2013 I lost my beautiful beloved quarter horse, Dreams, in a road accident during the time when Tasmania was ablaze with bushfires. Then our family Jack Russell, Indi, died, when tied up to her kennel after being bitten by a tiger snake. Since then I’d philosophically and gently carried on with life, coaching the children through the losses and taking comfort from the fact that I had had the gift of those beautiful animals in my life and would continue to always feel their energies even if they weren’t physically here with us any longer.

But then I went to the horse show Cavalia in Melbourne and the sight of a galloping buckskin quarter horse just like Dreams released a torrent of grief, rage and despair. Layer upon layer of hurt and disappointment from the loss of my farm, from the divorce, from my childhood seemed to rush like a flooding river up from my core. I couldn’t stop the tears, the fear and the hysteria. You see, I’d not allowed the grief for the death of my four-legged ‘babies’ to fully show itself. Or the fact I missed my land, my cattle, lambing time, the shearing shed. I’d tried to ‘coach’ myself through the experience lovingly and with grace, but had I inadvertently suppressed grief I had to feel to process?

I’ve heard that grief takes a full four seasons to really work through your body. Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Are you grieving someone right now? Or something? If you are, give yourself time. Lots of time. Cherish the memories but don’t wallow. And if a tidal wave of emotion hits you at some point months and months later, let it take you. Eventually you will find a rock to cling to. Someone, perhaps with four legs and fur or a two-legged being who has love for you, or something, like a sunrise or a rainbow, will make you feel a glimmer of hope. For me, the grief is still a work in progress, but this book is making me feel better and I thank you for sharing yourself with me while you read.

As a country gal, this book is also a celebration of ‘the can-do Jillaroos’! In American culture, cowgirls are revered and celebrated, but we rural women in Australia don’t have as much cultural kudos. Most city folk associate us with the Country Women’s Association and baking scones. It’s about time the world knew that grassroots, born-to-be-outside girls exist Down Under and we have our own version of ‘cowgirl wisdom’! Sprinkled throughout the book are little messages from my real-life cowgirl friend, Luella, who lives down the road and trains racehorses with a bunch of hilarious and gutsy girls.