Cover of Living the Good Life – Revamped!
Can you imagine living 6 months without spending a dollar? This family grew their food and loo paper, walked or biked, and went without chocolate for 180 days.
— Paulette Whitney – Broccoli & other Love Stories
HOBART, TAS, AUSTRALIA, December 8, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — Can you imagine living 6 months without spending a dollar living off a suburban property? The Cockburn/Wittmer family grew their food, shampoo and toilet paper, transported themselves by foot or bicycle, harvested water and solar power and went without chocolate for 180 days.
Soon after they launched into a Tasmanian adventure, hand building a straw bale house with the motto: If there’s a hard way to do it, we’ll find it!
Diary style, the book is full of recipes and fun facts about sustainability. Originally published by Hardie Grant, the family featured twice on Channel 7’s Today Tonight and were the subject of hundreds of interviews. It was the highest selling new release, and helped launch the sustainable lifestyles of thousands of families.
Motto 1: The family that plays together, stays together. Living the Good Life covers the antics of a backyard goat called Possum; Linda dropping the bag just as Trev dropped a venomous snake into it; weight loss and losing your skirt in public; Trev eating garden snails, and the trials of an infestation of parrots who stripped their grain crops during the worst drought in 100 years.
All of this is eclipsed by the thwarted attempts to coax their 6 year-old son, Caleb, to partake of wheelbarrows of pumpkin. (He invented a Lego face mask to prevent pumpkin consumption.)
After 20 years they’ve re-released the book with a major update on their subsequent adventures moving to Tasmania, the naturally air-conditioned state, where together they built a mud-rendered straw bale house, made their own bathroom tiles, saved 400 year-old celery top pine from becoming firewood, eschewed PVC and concrete and survived a close encounter with death (Trev). A list of 20 year old facts from the first edition is compared against the current version – with surprising results.
Linda Cockburn was born in New Zealand in 1968. Of her 5 siblings she was considered the least likely to garden due to a horror of accumulating dirt under her fingernails; she’s now accrued a few kilos. In 2002 she made the mistake of wondering if her family could live off a suburban block and spent years dragging Trev and Caleb with her to find out and continues to drag them through sometimes bizarre quests for a sustainable way of life. Linda writes for ABC Organic Gardener, is the author of Kaos Court, Eat My Shadow and The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives.
Linda is a sought after public speaker on refreshing ideas and ways to survive into the future.
Trev Wittmer moved to Queensland from Melbourne, attracted by the endless summers and cheap land. For 20 of those years he lived the hippie dream, mudbrick house, solar power, wood stove, the bush. Through a mix of tragedy and serendipity, he was fortunate enough to meet Linda. Trev has a background in forestry and market gardening.
https://www.togetherpress.com.au/media/
To download a media kit – photos, headshots, book covers etc
RRP $29.95 available on Amazon and Together Press
Linda and Trev, seasoned public speakers, are available for interviews
Linda Cockburn
Together Press
+61 437 185 912
lintrezza@bigpond.com
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