Milking Time – Rachael Treasure
Milking Time
Connie Mulligan, daughter of a fourth-generation Tasmanian dairy farmer, feels like she doesn't belong. She's got big dreams and big ideas, but she made a mess of her university degree and has been sent home. The man who was responsible for her failure won't get out of her nightmares, her father won't listen to her ideas on how to make environmentally positive changes to the way the dairy farm is being run, her mum thinks she should go on anti-depressants, and she keeps having what her psychologist calls ‘episodes’. Connie is stifled, frustrated, out of sorts and out of step – with her family, her community and her time. It's not until an opportunity arises to travel to Ireland that a chance encounter with a wise old woman sees Connie regain her confidence. It is in Ireland that Connie realises that everything she wants back home – family, friends, community and a healthy, healing land; she's just got to reach out for what she wants and make it happen. This is the story of how Connie Mulligan uses all her wit, willpower and community to save her family farm and transform herself, her life and her small town.
About the author
Rachael Treasure lives in southern Tasmania/Lutruwita with her two children and their farm animals, including a goat called Barbara Gordon. She is the co-founder of Ripple Farm Landscape Healing Hub and uses regenerative agricultural and natural sequence farming principles to restore farming landscape. Her first novel, Jillaroo, blazed a trail in the Australian publishing industry for other rural women writers and is now considered an iconic work of contemporary Australian fiction. Milking Time is her eighth novel.