How to get there
Mackellar's second memoir traces, with characteristic candor and perception, her move to Tasmania, for love, and the struggles and joys of settling there.
Her story takes as its epigraph, a quote from Roger McDonald: "Through every small opening in life, through the tiniest most restricted nerve ends, through rips and tears and tatters, life pours." In the book, she explores learning to love again after living through grief, and the complexities of doing this in a community with which she is unfamiliar, with two young children.
She reflects on love after grief, juggling being a mother and negotiating a burgeoning relationship, the rhythms of country life, displacement, and the writing life. This is a book for anyone who has imagined taking a risk, for anyone who has moved to a new place and struggled with feelings of homesickness and displacement. It is a story about making a life in a remarkable setting--the east coast of Tasmania, on a sheep farm in a stone house built by convicts in 1828.