GETTIN' DOWN & DIRTY

For 15 years James Woodford has dashed around the country penning stories as the environment scribe for the Sydney Morning Herald. Some of these features, including the ripping yarn of discovering the Wollemi Pine, have blossomed into books. Along the way James has also been busy handcrafting another story -the tale that is his life. Not content to simply report on issues that tether us to the fate of the natural world, he wanted to enact the kind of altered relationship with the environment that was the ultimate corollary of many of his newspaper articles.

The result is Real Dirt, a book that is part memoir and part sit-com, with a dash of self-help and a little DIY confessional thown in for good measure. As an opening fracas with a dinghy suggests, it's not all plain sailing. In fact it takes nearly a 100 pages for James to steer his life into the relatively serene waters of the family circumstance and 120 acres of south coast NSW that he now calls home. He writes with candour about his early relationships, and the multiple pressures of keeping up with work while learning about fatherhood and all the practical stuff of creating an ecological life. As James reveals, even seemingly straightforward tasks like installing a rainwater tank, can be fraught with perils.

Yet, for all the avid discussion of solar panels and worm farms, what appears to matter most is a deepening intimacy with nature. The sheer drive to make things happen, to carve out a different future based on a respectful pact with his environs is impressive. And as the story arc of the book suggests, this drive has many sources but the strongest is an elemental joy that James and partner Prue share in their surroundings: the forest, the returning vigour of the bush and the ever-changing waters of their lake.

Parts of Real Dirt reminded me of John Blay's wonderful Part of the Scenery, another wise account of hard-won connections with a natural life on the NSW south-coast. In these strange times it does no harm to be reminded by such books that what really counts are not more government bailouts or Hollowmen-style initiatives, but people getting their hands dirty to change their lives for a better world.