COWS, CAROLS AND COUNTING CARS: A Road Trip Christmas interview (& a prize to be won) ...

Stella interviews author pals Pamela Cook, Penelope Janu and Lily Malone about their Christmas anthology of books, A Country Farm Christmas *** COMPETITION QUESTION AT THE END OF THIS POST***

[Image credits Canva, all images purchased. Find the story icon on the map and you’ll know where the story was set.]

Stella Quinn asks Penelope Janu, Pamela Cook and Lily Malone to share anecdotes from their stories and their past.

A thousand kilometres, four kids on a mattress in the back of a Ford Cortina station wagon with a roll-down rear window, countless squabbles … are these your memories of the annual Christmas road trip? Doubtless I’m aging myself by admitting to seatbelt-free travel, but that was how long-haul Christmas trips were done back in the late seventies in Australia. I can remember being a kid, lying on my back and staring up at the branches of the gum trees flashing past through the window against a hot blue sky. I can remember playing the game ‘Beetle’, where we got points for spotting VW Beetles on the road (black ones were worth double). Above our heads, the roof racks would be laden with tents and eskies and fishing rods, and in the boot, my sisters and I would have been dressed in our matching safari suits (true story) and summer would have felt like a holiday that would never end …

Ah, childhood. How sweet it seems looking back, now that we’re all so adept at curating our memories so only the brilliant ones shine. Adulthood can be quite a different matter at Christmas, can it not? Expectations, dysfunctional families, cost of living, pervy uncles, aircon malfunctions, burnt turkeys, tantrumming toddlers …

Our anthology A Country Farm Christmas, out this October, covers the sweet and the sad, the happiness and the challenges of the holiday period. I hope you’ll enjoy sharing these memories from our authors, and I hope you find some comfort and laughter and heartwarming moments in our book.

First, let’s chat with Penelope Janu

STELLA: Pen, you have a big family. Any Christmas stories to share?

PEN: So many. Why don’t I tell you about The Great Christmas Disaster …

In a memorable week in the lead-up to Christmas, my family stayed in a character-filled farmhouse on a sheep station in the central west of NSW. The house had a wraparound verandah, a rusted water tank out the back and an Aga oven that roasted not only a turkey but anyone foolish enough to venture into the kitchen. We became accustomed to many things on our regular trips to the farm—an emu that chased the kids around the property, the occasional snake and an army of huntsmen spiders that clung to the ceilings at night but mysteriously disappeared in the mornings.

There were sheep with cute lambs, kelpies and cattle dogs and a fox terrier called Pup. Red sunrises, sizzling summer days and star-filled nights. On one of those nights, our six children piled into the back of a ute and the owner of the farm, Trevor, took us out to the bushland by the creek. We’d only been there for ten minutes when my daughter Gabriella, who was nine at the time, silenced us all with a piercing cry. Trevor, accustomed to the bumps, scrapes and breaks that farm life entails, was typically laconic. ‘She must’ve got her ear scratched by a branch.’ But even he suggested we get back to the farmhouse when, after finally prising Gabriella’s hand away from her ear, a thick stream of blood ran down her cheek.

An hour or so later, after a mad rush on dirt roads to the hospital, a young emergency doctor peered into Gabriella’s ear and said, ‘Whatever it is, it has wings.’ When I asked whether it was still alive, he responded, ‘It’s burst through her ear drum and drowned.’ A second trip to a bigger hospital followed and one general anaesthetic later, a surgeon pulled a large native wasp from Gabriella’s ear. It wasn’t the Christmas surprise any of us were after, but it certainly made for a memorable Christmas.

STELLA: Oh, dear. My Kid #3 had a moth fly into her ear one summer. Hysteria, emergency help line, a trip to the ER, followed by a drowning (the moth, not the hysterical teenager) and the it was ‘hoovered’ out with some sort of contraption. Now, Pen, can you tell us where you’ve set your Christmas anthology story?

PEN: My story, A Fairytale for Christmas, is set in country NSW, in the Hunter Valley region. I love this part of the world because of the diversity of the landscape. There are some magnificent national parks, but also thousands of acres of land used for cropping and sheep and cattle grazing. My city lawyer character Juliette McAdams’s parents have a thoroughbred stud in this region, and bad-boy-turned-good Beau D’Arcy, a landscape designer, keeps a small farm that has beehives, cattle and a vineyard. I loved bringing these characters together and showing them they’d be far happier together than they’d ever be apart.

Next up, it’s Lily Malone

STELLA: Lily, I want to hear all about your aunty’s Christmas cows!

LILY: Well, they were much-loved cows and she was a very much-loved aunt! Aunty Pam was a dairy farmer, an amazing lady struggling single-handedly to raise three kids and run her farm property. Because her milkers would usually have Christmas Day off from work, my aunty had to milk the cows and so couldn’t travel. The rest of her family (my mum’s side of the family) would all travel to my aunt’s place, at Coolup in West Australia. Unlike its name, it was usually stinking hot! For my mob, that was a two-hour journey each way, timed so as to arrive at my aunt’s for midday. Everybody brought whatever they were good at cooking. I remember our nanna always brought the silverside … Our Christmas lunch was always cold cuts of meat and salad. My sister and I were the oldest of the cousins, which I like to think meant we were the ‘coolest’ … we could usually manage to lead our younger cousins astray in various ways. Invariably, my aunt’s kids had awesome presents – laser guns, water slides, video games, and as we got older, four-wheelers, a horse! – and many of my machinations would revolve around getting maximum time with their toys! I reckon we did this trip for close to fifteen or twenty years, year after year, and the day was always the same. Arrive, eat lunch, play games. There was always a traditional game of Christmas cricket. There was always my other gorgeous aunt who would usually have an extra wine or two and render herself fit for cricket, but not fit for the washing up! At some stage Aunty Pam would have to milk the cows, and I often went along ‘to help’.

After Aunty Pam finished milking, we’d have seconds of whatever was left over, plus dessert, and then my mum would start talking about the two-hour return drive and we would hit the road.

After all the cousins were older and began moving away and doing their own thing with their own families for Christmas, the Coolup Christmas tradition died, but none of us have ever forgotten.

Aunty Pam died in 2023 after a bravely fought battle with cancer.

Last Christmas, the first without her, we found different ways to honour our traditions. Most of us got together at Pam’s eldest son’s place down south near Busselton. We had a sausage roll competition, based on Aunty Pam’s tried and true, very much-loved recipe. It was tough for everybody, and Pam was very much front and centre in our hearts and minds.

STELLA: I love the idea of a memorial sausage roll competition. That sounds like as good a definition of family as ever I’ve heard. Lily, tell us about your Christmas story in A Country Farm Christmas.

LILY: Well, I don’t think there are any cows in it! The Christmas Kindness Project was inspired by various things that all mixed up in a muddle to form a story. (That’s how plotting usually works for me!). I work in property management now in my day job, and so many weird and wonderful things happen to me in a course of a week that I just had to include a few of them in a book. Yes, the scene with the wheelie bin is real. The housing crisis – lack of affordable rental accommodation especially in regional areas of West Australia – is always on my mind, both through my day job and because it’s something I truly care about. In Cowaramup, where I live, there is a retirement village run by the local Lions Club called Lions Village. I found out a while back that local legends Colin and Lorna Duggans gifted the parcel of land where the retirement village has been built. Without that type of generosity, a project such as the Lions Village may have never got off the ground. When I heard about that, I simply had to get some of that into a book. Rosie is an older heroine, a career property manager returning to her home town of Chalk Hill after a bruising marriage breakdown. She shares property management with me, and she also shares her hot flushes. I love Rosie, and I love this story and the wonderful authors that once again I’ve had a chance to collaborate with in A Country Farm Christmas. Like Stella, I fall more on the Christmas grinch side of Santa and the elves and mistletoe… but that won’t stop me wishing everybody a happy and healthy Christmas 2024!

And hello, Pamela Cook!

STELLA: Pam, did you road trip at Christmas?

PAM: We always had Christmas at home and it was generally the same routine: present opening followed by fried ham on toast, followed by mum getting hot and frazzled in the kitchen while the rest of us played with our toys, then a huge meal where we stuffed ourselves silly and hunted for fake sixpences shoved into the pudding. But we always hit the road on Boxing Day for the two-and-a-half-hour drive south to the cottage we rented annually at beautiful Burrill Lake. Like you, Stella, I have memories (not exactly fond ones!) of being deposited into the back seat of the family Hillman and having clothes, boxes of food and mum’s sewing machine crammed in around me. Then we’d join the queues of traffic leaving the suburbs, and finally arrive at our destination. Salty lake air greeted us as we unpacked and set up to swelter in the two-bedroom fibro house for the next three weeks. It was basic and the total opposite of luxury but I have the fondest memories of paddling across the lake on the airbed, my skin smarting with sunburn, devouring boxes of Jaffas and Marella Jubes at the open air theatre where we lay back in canvas seats under blankets and star-splattered skies, and of catching prawns off the barnacled wharf while other, more daring teens jumped from the concrete pylons of the bridge into the weedy lake.

STELLA: I love that image of you on the airbed; it brings back memories! Where is your Christmas story set? Why did you set it there?

PAM: The Christmas Contract is set in a new (story) location for me, in a fictional town somewhere north-west of Canberra. My daughter and her partner are horse trainers and they moved to a farm last year, between Yass and Boorowa and I instantly fell in love with the rolling pastures and wide-open skies of the area, and especially the breathtaking sunsets that turn the sky a palette of pinks and mauves at the end of the day. Nearby properties are scattered with sheep and cows, and the dirt roads flanked by gorgeous iconic gum trees lead onto yet more scenic countryside. There’s such an amazing sense of space out there and it suited my character Bridie Grainger perfectly. She’s trying to prove she can make it in the organic farming business, much to the disgust of her well-to-do city parents, and despite the break-up of her relationship, which has left her as a single mother to her gorgeous pre-schooler Finn. When she grudgingly accepts help from her neighbour’s son, Rhys Tucker, sparks instantly fly and soon Bridie has more than a broken dishwasher and bogged tractor to wrangle. This was such a fun story to write and of course I had to do a few additional research trips to make sure I got the landscape details just right.

STELLA: I love the sound of a bogged tractor wrangling story, Pam.

Which brings us back to Stella Quinn …

These stories all sound so fab! My contribution to the anthology, A Yindi Creek Christmas, is, surprise surprise, an actual road trip story. Angela loses an opal earring that her deceased mother had bought in Yindi Creek, in outback Queensland, thirty years ago, so she jumps into her car and makes the long drive out from Toowoomba to see if she can buy one. Unfortunately, the opal shops are closed for the summer, so she finds herself knee deep in a ditch on a sheep station with an opal mine on it, much to the surprise of the station’s resident grieving widow sheep farmer and his ancient kelpie, Bruce. I was glad of the chance to return to Yindi Creek, where I set my 2024 novel, Down the Track.

A Country Farm Christmas is out in stores across the country now, and is also available in ebook and audiobook with four of your favourite narrators.

Here’s the Harper Collins link which has links to all sorts of vendors.

Check out this book review from book blogger Bookish Bron:

Books to look out for… A Country Farm Christmas - Bookish Bron

*** COMPETITION***

I have three print copies of A Country Farm Christmas wrapped up in Chrissie paper and ready to be stuffed into a stocking. To win yourself a copy, leave a comment on this post, or on my facebook or instagram post with the same Aussie map image, with the answer to THIS QUESTION:

Q: Which animal on the map is the odd one out? Bonus points for an interesting reason why.

I will draw 3 winners at random (because of course you’ll be able to see each other’s comments lol) on 30 November and then I’ll be in contact with the 3 winners to ask for a mailing address. I’m happy to post anywhere and everywhere, and it should arrive by Chrissie if I post at the beginning of December. Santa tells me he’s hot to trot.

Until next time,

Stella xx

(This article originally appeared on www.romance.com.au on 2 October 2024)