“By now I’d learned that country life is not a pastoral painting. Sure, at various times during the year you might see fluffy white lambs prancing in the tall grass, but those moments are rare. Real country life, it turns out, involves blood, shit and worms.”

Dirty Chick: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer is the first memoir by magazine journalist, Antonia Murphy. When the cost of health insurance in San Francisco sent Antonia Murphy looking for somewhere to migrate to, New Zealand looked promising for several reasons, and before long, Antonia and husband Peter were sailing the Pacific in a south-westerly direction. Eventually, they found themselves renting a house in the North Island town of Purua for a year while the owners were in Germany. And somehow acquiring animals: three alpacas, two cats, two dogs, a goat, two calves, a lamb, a rooster with insatiable libido, a flock of chickens, three turkeys and a pair of ducks.

By this time they had a developmentally delayed son and a feisty daughter. Luckily, they also had the help of a capable niece, and the support of a bunch of wonderful neighbours: “John scowled when I spoke, and I realised there was a time when I would have thought he was angry at me. But this was a man who’d offered to shave a sheep’s arse for free. What’s a better indication of friendship than that?” and “’We’re all a bit nutty to be out here,’ Abi agreed. ‘You’d have to be really. It’s not like any of us knows what we’re doing, with the animals and this country life…’” describe a few of the friends they made in Purua.

As she learns about chicken anatomy, goat care, milking, alpaca shearing, cheese making and wine fermentation, Murphy includes plenty of humour: descriptions of rapist ducks, alpaca noses, vampire worms, an ovine Brazilian, chicken physiotherapy, the perils of calf transport and an addiction to lambs: “That’s how that lamb seduced me. It was cute like a baby, but unlike my own children, it didn’t whine or annoy me….I felt sorry for people who didn’t have lambs, because their lives seemed so grey and predictable. Unlike me, they didn’t live in hyper-elevated lamb reality, full of cute things and sparkles.”

This memoir is delightfully funny as well being interesting and moving. Further adventures of the Unlikely Farmer will be eagerly anticipated. An excellent debut.