The guilt of an easy good life

When my father was 6 years old, my grandfather Percy – a farm manager in Huntly – bought each of his boys a thistle grubber. They were actually short-handled trench-diggers from the local army surplus store, and they were quickly put to use in the war against the Scotch thistles proliferating in Granddad’s peaty paddocks.

A few days later, Dad nearly lost a foot when he swung wildly at a thistle but missed and shanked his ankle. (Almost seven decades on, he hasn’t learned much: last week he shredded his Redbands and almost took off his toes in an ill-advised tango with a rideon lawn mower).

I can’t imagine sending my boys out to tackle our thistles, let alone yield a grubber myself. Instead, when the thistles rise to waist-high in our paddocks, I just phone up Dad and ask him to cull them with a knapsack of Conquest.

Despite having been raised on a farm, I’m not much of a farmer. Neither is my husband, who was raised a Westie before buying 22 hectares in the Hunua Ranges 20 years ago to satisfy his then-partner’s obsession with all things equine.

Five years ago, when I moved back to the land, our stock head count consisted of seven long-toothed ewes and three cows. Then we adopted my mother-in-law’s ram and now we shepherd a small and largely feral (liberated pet lambs excluded) flock of almost 30 sheep. Every year, every ewe produces twins and, every year, despite my vows to fill our freezer with ethically farmed, grass-fed, free-range spring lamb, when I look them in the eyes I haven’t the heart to choose who deserves to live and who should be butchered and barbecued. Naturally, I’m less sympathetic to the rabbits, possums and rats brought here by our feckless forebears. In Gordon McLauchlan’s new book Great Tales from Rural New Zealand ($29.99, Bateman), an entire chapter is dedicated to ‘‘rabbits and other riffraff’’. There was, writes McLauchlan, nothing surreptitious about the rabbit’s arrival: ‘‘In 1843, in Waimea, a