PHILIPPA CAMERON, ALLEN & UNWIN, $49.99

It’s always engrossing to get an insight into other people’s lives, especially when they differ vastly from your own. In this, her second book, Philippa Cameron takes us again to North Otago to the Ōtemātātā Station where the Cameron family have farmed for five generations and where, as station cook and farmer’s wife, she keeps the whole operation fuelled. This book focusses on the high country in winter giving photographer Lottie Hedley ample scope for eye-stretching landscapes and candid scenes of life on a hard-working high-country station, as well as the hearty, no-nonsense tummy-filling dishes such as shepherd’s pie, corned beef and pumpkin scones. No-waste ideas see leftover mashed potatoes put to use in a Sally Lunn cake or to make pastry for sausage rolls, extra porridge is turned into raisin-studded porridge buns and winter coleslaw becomes vegetable hash patties. Almost as important as the food are the tales of past generations – the shepherds, musterers, shearers, rabbiters, cooks and farmers of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s – whose life-long connections to the land beam through in stories of great physical hardship, camaraderie, make-do-and-mend. In Philippa’s words, “Their memory of their time on the station flows through their veins in a current much stronger than the Ōtemātātā river itself.”
TRACY WHITMEY