Ten Dry Years
What a dry year teaches you, if you’re paying attention
Most years give you something to complain about. That one gave everyone the same thing to complain about, all at once, which somehow made it worse and slightly funnier.
Ten Dry Years is Tom Ashcroft’s account of the year the rain didn’t come, told without much dressing up: the decisions that turned out wrong, the neighbours who turned out right, and the slow business of getting used to less.
It isn’t a book about resilience. Nobody who has actually been through a dry year wants to hear that word again.
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“The paddock didn’t care how I felt about it. That was, it turns out, the whole lesson.”
Chapter one
“Grief, like drought, mostly just waits you out.”
Chapter four
“Nobody warns you the recovery is duller than the disaster.”
Chapter nine
One · The paddock, in June
Chapter one, complete. A few minutes, if you don’t stop to make tea.
You get used to a paddock the way you get used to a person — the shape of it, the moods of it, the bit near the gate that always floods first in a wet year. By June that year there was nothing left to get used to. It had gone quiet in a way that paddocks don’t usually go, and I found myself talking to it, which I have never admitted to anyone before now.
People kept asking how bad it was, and I never had a good answer, because the honest one — that it was mostly just boring, in the way that watching something die slowly is boring — didn’t seem like the kind of thing you said out loud at the pub.
This book is my attempt at the honest answer. It took ten years to write down properly, which tells you something about how long the boring part actually lasts.
Excerpt fictional