Book review: Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail: the Diary of a Country Vet

Danielle Hawkins. Photo / Stephanie Creagh

Danielle Hawkins doesn't have time for your nonsense. By page two of her diary, she's massaging lubricant into a prolapsed uterus and folding it back into a cow.

On page five, she's inducing the farm dog to vomit possum bait and, two pages later, is setting out her views on literature. "Literary experts … seem to believe that the best writing is dense and elliptical, leaving the reader dazed, exhausted and, preferably, slightly inadequate," she writes, ending with a spike: "I resent the assumption that anyone who writes light-hearted romantic fiction can't be a great writer." Then she's off to plant poplars.

The multi-hyphenate Hawkins needs no introduction to devoted readers of her comic rural novels; the bestselling Catherine Robertson, herself no slouch, insists Hawkins is the funniest fiction writer in the country. But have you read her?

You bloody well should - and why not start here? Hawkins' country diary – a lightly fictionalised year of her life – might be the closest you'll ever come to farming cattle in the rolling, grassy uplands of the Waikato. It's muddy. It's sweaty. It's hot in the woolshed. Dogs can infuriate, lambs won't co-operate. It hurts all over.

There's no glamour: "After lunch we dagged a mob of hoggets." There's blood and pus, birth and death, drought and growth. It starts at five and the day runs long.

Whenever Hawkins isn't helping husband James on the family farm, she's driving for hours responding to calls as a large-animal vet. She wrestles with breech calves, arm-deep inside pregnant cows. She cauterises scrota. She lances boils, palpates rams. At the clinic, she euthanises a dying bird: "It was limp and gasping, so I took it out the back, put it down on the floor and stepped firmly on its skull."

We get it: this is no year in Provence. But to her eternal credit and the reader's relief, Hawkins is reliably kind, drily funny, and observant of the tics of her family and neighbours, like Jane Austen in Red Band gumboots.

Come for the calving, stay for the comedy. After lovingly upholstering a chair: "It would look amazing if Bean the cat hadn't immediately decided I'd done it just for her to use as a scratching post. The chair is now covered with a blanket, which we'll be able to remove when Bean dies. This may be quite soon."

On a friend's panic at getting kids to a dance show on time: "We arrived at her house to find her frantically applying sparkly eyeshadow to her two little girls. 'We'll be late!' she cried despairingly. 'I forgot I had to make them look like prostitutes!'"

Hawkins is skilled at writing about children, and hers give her plenty of material. Eleven-year-old Ellie sleeps with a rescue pigeon, while Blake – cheerful, job-dodging and too fond by half of farting – emerges as the stand-out character in a diary lively with people.

Blake is as optimistic as an 8-year-old should be, swinging from worrying about death ('Is Sir David Attenborough very old? Will he probably die soon?') to the triumph of a good lunch: 'This sandwich is a masterpiece of life.' Townie parents will be glad to know country kids are often as mad for Minecraft and unwilling to do their chores as city kids – but give any child a river of friendly eels and a sausage by the fire, and they're in heaven.

If distinguishing fact from fiction is important to you, Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail may chafe. Hawkins tells us it's based on truth but admits wandering off into the bush at times: "It is as accurate a record as I could write without hurting anyone's feelings or being accused of defamation".

This might explain why she doesn't use real names, and how she can write so boldly about annoying people, like a nightmare sister-in-law. Is Diane real? I wanted to know, more than once. And: Did your brother-in-law really say that to you, at the wedding?

But in the end, a little embroidery simply finishes the quilt and Hawkins has stitched something beautiful here. She wouldn't be so sentimental as to say so, but this diary's a love letter – to her hardworking, gruff, and dependable husband; to the native bush she fights to save from pests; to her garden, children, and to health itself. For we discover she came close to losing it all – yes, very close – but that's in the past, thanks very much, and there's nothing to dwell on, now.

Let's have none of your nonsense; there's so much to do. Have some mutton hash or a fresh-baked scone, and let's make the most of the day.

- Reviewed by Leah McFall

Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail: the Diary of a Country Vet
by Danielle Hawkins
(HarperCollins, $38)