our story of moving to Tasmania

We moved to Tasmania in 2006 and began a whole new life in an idyllic place.

Apple Island Wife - Slow Living in Tasmania. Purchase here.

When we moved to Tasmania in 2006, I was seven months pregnant. That was a hell of a year.

We had made a trip to Tasmania in March and travelled around in a tiny campervan to see if we thought we’d like to live here. We decided yes, went back to Brisbane where we lived and spent four months completing the renovations on our weatherboard house in the suburbs.

In the space of four days, we sold that house for a sum that we knew would allow us to purchase small acreage in Tasmania. In September, we flew there again and over two weeks looked at a dozen houses, trying to find our new home. On Thursday of the second week, we found it and put in an offer. On Friday it was accepted. On Saturday, we flew back to the mainland exhausted.

After packing our belongings and the piano into a removal company’s container, we spent a week driving south, taking the inland route through New South Wales and Victoria, staying in dreary motels until we made it to the Port of Melbourne and the Spirit of Tasmania. It took us three goes to find a passer-by who could take the commemorative photo; everyone kept cutting off our heads or blocking out the ferry.

Arriving at dawn in Tasmania the following morning and driving through the awakening landscape was a magical experience and one of the most memorable of my life.

As we settled into our new rural home and slowed-down way of living, I started writing a blog and called it Apple Island Wife. The name was a mix of ‘apple isle’ the long-standing description of Tasmania, and ‘island life’. But I wanted it to be about my own experiences, so I changed ‘life’ to ‘wife’.

I publicized the blog in a women’s blogging group and it gained followers. Soon I had the material and potentially the audience for a book, similar to Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons. One of those feel-good readable books about leaving city life and settling down to a more idyllic existence elsewhere, which most of us have dreamed of from time to time.

Life takes over though. I had two young children, and supported my husband with his cabinet-making business, and had started my own micro-business building websites for local small businesses. Then we watched one too many episodes of River Cottage and decided to start a farm – keeping Wessex Saddleback pigs the same as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He has a lot to answer for, that man!

My writing and any potential books went on the back-burner.

It was a fellow member of my writers’ group who asked ‘Are you ever going to do something about turning all that material into a book? Because you’re so nearly there.’

That was a clarion call. I dragged the manuscript out of the bottom drawer and started re-shaping blog posts so that they worked as chapters for a book, a humorous memoir on moving here and living a slower life.

It was full of tales of buying alpacas when you don’t really know what you’re doing, attempting to cook one of your own cockerels for dinner because that’s what Hugh says you’re supposed to do, and reflections on what it was like raising my children in the country when I’d always lived in towns before.

When it was done, I showed it to a friend of mine, a published author. ‘The hero of the piece is Oliver,’ he wrote. Oliver is my husband and featured large in the book, as moving here was one of our biggest adventures together. ‘If he didn’t exist you’d have to invent him,’ my friend continued.

I was taken aback by that. I had intended to write a book about my own experiences. At the time there were many television programs made by men who had moved onto the land. River Cottage had a successful spin-off here in Australia, and Tasmania’s had its own Gourmet Farmer program with Matthew Evans. The women in their lives were only glimpsed in those programs and I wanted to write something that featured our side of the story and brought family life into the picture. So I reworked my material and brought in my own private thoughts and experiences. I live an internal life and that was a hard and interesting process.

Pitching to publishers and agents is an arduous business, but Apple Island Wife met with some interest. Soon I had an agent, Curtis Brown, Australia’s biggest. And I had two publishers interested. But they weren’t interested enough for a publishing contract, and like hundreds of thousands of writers I had to take rejection on the chin. The publishing industry is shaping and limiting what we read, people, and not necessarily in a good way.

Determined to see Apple Island Wife in print, I went with a British publisher called Unbound, a ground-breaking company set up by three writers which appeared to offer writers a better deal than mainstream publishers.  Once accepted by them, you have to crowdfund to offset the costs of publication. I posted a video of me talking about my book on their website and set about contacting anybody I had ever known for support. It was a humbling, galling and occasionally traumatizing experience. There were one or two horrible encounters which took a lot of recovering from. And there were astonishing and unexpected acts of generosity.

Once I achieved my target of $4,686, Unbound swung into action. Very slowly. It took over a year before the book was finally produced. By that time they had given me a top notch editor to work with and had the cover designed by an award winning designer. I had a paperback and e-book product I was intensely proud of.

Apple Island Wife – Slow Living in Tasmania came out in October 2018 and was launched at Storey’s Bookshop in Launceston by the Mayor of the West Tamar, Her Excellency Christina Holmdahl, a staunch supporter of the arts in our region. It was a joyful occasion, made more joyful by two dozen bottles of Tasmanian sparkling wine from Moores Hill Estate.

Over the next few years, the book found a niche readership amongst people interested in moving to Tasmania or some other idyllic place where they might find a slow-life alternative to the speedier way we all seem to have been sucked into living. People living in Tasmania tell me they enjoy it, and those visiting and curious to know what it’s like staying here for longer.

In 2023, I took the publication rights back from Unbound and self-published a second edition, as being with any publisher is a sucky option for a writer. Authors typically receive 10% of what their books make by the time publishers, distributors and everyone else has taken their cut. Publishing direct and selling either direct or online is a better deal and offers more autonomy. You do, however, do all the work yourself.

Apple Island Wife is understood by some people and ignored by others. I know it’s perceived as a commercial book and some in the literary circles of my island are sniffy about such books. However, I know that amongst the humorous moments and irreverence, there is also deeper reflection. Without meaning to indulge in grandiosity, there is a literary tradition of women documenting their lives that started with Jane Austen and carries on today with Maggie Mackellar and Graft. That tradition manifests in both fiction and memoir.

I look at the world, particularly the news, and see something organized by and for men. I strongly believe in the importance of seeing women’s lives, in all their humble ordinariness or extraordinariness, reflected in the pages of books.

And so, Apple Island Wife – Slow Living in Tasmania. If you have read it, thank you, especially if you have left a review somewhere.

If you’d like to read it, you can find it here on Amazon, which is a huge enabler for authors. Never feel guilty for buying books there.

If you’d like to read some reviews first, you’ll find many on Goodreads.

Thank you for reading about my story. Please leave me some chat, I love hearing from you and will get back to you – when I’m not out wrangling my husband’s goats.