TIM Saunders admits it’s a little strange seeing something he’s written being marketed and sold by leading booksellers around the country, along with the response it’s receiving from reviewers and others who have read advanced copies.
A published poet and award-winning short story writer, Saunders’ latest work, This Farming Life, has been described by one reviewer as “an unsentimental yet lyrical love letter to the land and the animals and humans who inhabit it . . . a man-on-the-land story unlike anything you will have read.”
It’s a long way for someone whose love for books and stories can be traced back to his grandmother on his father’s side, who used to read to him in his younger years.
“That was where it started. The writing came there. It was just the next step,” Saunders said.
While Saunders’ writing came easily, success came with time.
Having written all through his school years and then continued afterwards, it’s only in recent years he has turned a corner with recognition, winning the 2018 Mindfood magazine short story competition, finishing third in the 2019 National Flash Fiction Day awards, and having poetry published in The Listener and a number of NZ literary magazines.
After winning the Mindfood award Saunders was approached by one of the competition judges, who was from book publishers Allen & Unwin.
“She said ‘we love the style of your writing and we think you’ve got a book in you’,” Saunders recalled.
He was asked to write about farming, as the publishers thought there was a gap in the market for a well-written book on the subject.
Despite thinking his life was not that interesting he said he would give it a go, with it taking about a year to write.
Although it was his first long-form piece of writing, he says it wasn’t too difficult.
“Once I put my head down and got on to it, it just sort of flowed out,” he said.
The book is written in a personable style, following his farming family through a year.
“Everything in it is totally true. I’ve just, hopefully, written it in an interesting way, rather than just presenting facts,” Saunders explained.
It describes life through the seasons: summer, with shearing, slaughter, crop harvest and conservation; autumn and its floods, trading stock, drenching and dagging; winter with its maize harvest and lambing; and the docking, pet sheep and weaning of spring.
Saunders says the format allows readers not familiar with the rural world to see how life unfolds as the weather changes.
“When you’re working the land, you’re aware of how things change as the year progresses,” he said.
He writes daily from 6am to 9am, before going out to do farm work. He finds the silence and space out in the paddocks conducive to writing, carrying a notebook with him so can jot down thoughts and ideas as they come.
That allows him to later act like a magpie, going through what he has written, picking out bits and pieces, shaping them to suit what he is writing.
A self-taught writer, Saunders has never had any formal training but reads all the time and studies those words, taking stories to bits in his head to find out how they work, just like others might take an engine apart and put it back together to understand how it works.
He farms with his brother Mark and his dad Brian, who has been on the property at Glen Oroua for 80 years. The farm has been in the family since 1906.
His great-great grandfather, William Joseph (better known as W.J.) Saunders, who was farming in Alfredton, east of Eketahuna, bought the land from Isaac Greenaway, a local land baron who wanted to establish a settlement in the area.
Unfortunately for Greenaway, the property was subject to constant flooding from the Oroua River, which was on its boundary, so he couldn’t find financial backers for the town.
Instead, he sold it to W.J.
Saunders says before going into farming his great-great grandfather was a gold miner on the West Coast goldfields.
He took part in a Hokitika pub competition to lift an amount of gold, said to weigh 500 pounds, with a rope around his neck and shoulders. The idea was to lift it a foot (30cm) above the floor.
The only one to achieve the feat, he won 500 pounds in cash and decided to use the money to go farming.
To protect the property at Glen Oroua, W.J. built stop banks – hard work in those days when it was all hand and horsepower, but it made the area farmable and the local Government of the time followed his example, opening the area up to farming that still exists today, although the river still provides its challenges.
Saunders says while farming methods have changed over the years, he is well aware he still walks the same ground his great-great-grandfather did.
“Technology has changed but I’m walking in the same footsteps. The bloodline goes right through and that’s awe-inspiring,” he said.
With that comes a responsibility to the land, environment and the family name.
“Noone wants to be the one in the family who is farming when it all goes wrong,” Saunders said.
He says because of that, each generation has a heavier responsibility to bear and the aim is to leave the land in as least as good as he found it.
“There’s no point in doing anything detrimental to it. Why would we? This is how we make our living,” he said.
Adding he hopes the family connection to the property continues for many generations to come.
Saunders wrote This Farming Life to be interesting to farmers and non-farmers.
He didn’t shy away from what he describes as the nitty-gritty of sheep and beef farming, including the slaughter of animals for food.
“It’s not always going to be an easy read for some but it’s important people think about what goes into food,” he said.
“I hate the idea of food waste, especially meat. People need to remember that what they’re eating isn’t just a steak or a hamburger patty, something gave its life for that.
“It was once living and breathing.”
Saunders says he is aware not everyone is going to like that idea but it’s a reality of farming: death follows life, whether it’s for food production or natural mortality.
Although growing up on the family farm, that life wasn’t always for him.
After leaving school he did an applied science degree at Massey before doing film and television work at Avalon and then got involved in tourism, which was where he met his partner Katherin.
He followed her back to her home in Germany, where they spent a couple of years before the call of the farm and to return home was strong.
After all, he says, it’s home.
“I belong here.”
