"The local Indigenous people were interested and sceptical," Griffiths says. What passes from father to son on this unruly patch of earth is more than a livelihood it is a legacy.Griffiths' Deep Time Dreaming, Uncovering Ancient Australia charts that archaeological journey through pioneering scholars, excavations and discoveries, winning this year's NSW Premier's Literary Award Book of the Year and sharing the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction with Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner.Ī research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Griffiths set out to learn the craft of "deep time" by joining an archaeological excavation in Arnhem Land, working on site during the day - "slowly trowling our way through time, coming across these little residues of former worlds and piecing them together, what stories they had to tell" - and earning his keep as camp cook. It’s about belonging, humility and regeneration – of land, family and culture. Slowly, Sam finds himself thinking differently about the farm, about his father and about his relationship with both.īy turns affecting, hilarious and utterly surprising, this memoir melds humour and fierce honesty in an unsentimental love letter.
But there are victories, too: nurturing a fig orchard to bloom learning to read the land joining forces with Indigenous elders to protect a special site.
Whether castrating a calf or buying a bull – or knocking in a hundred fence posts by hand when his dad hides the post-driver – Sam’s farming apprenticeship is an education in grit and shit. When Sam returns to the family farm to help out, his life takes a new and unexpected direction. Sam Vincent is a twenty-something writer in the inner suburbs, scrabbling to make ends meet, when he gets a call from his mother: his father has stuck his hand in a woodchipper, but ‘not to worry – it wasn’t like that scene in Fargo or anything’. A moving and hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir of a millennial leaving his inner-city life to take over the family farm.
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