Country Wisdom and Know-How By Mrs Vera West

Country Wisdom and Know-How (2004), by the editors of Storey Books, is a large format book, with three columns of fine print. A little hard for an oldie like me to read, but I use a magnifying glass to get by. This book, while geared to North America, does have everything one needs to know to get to first base in living off the land, in Australia, too. The areas covered include, animals, cooking, crafts, gardening, health and wellbeing, and home maintenance. While that is the general type of categories used in such books, there are a multitude of things covered not mentioned in some of the competing books. As I flip through the book there are instructions on how to make baskets from natural materials, to collect the eggs, say, how to keep bees, and birds, too, keeping a dog and making a dog house, slaughtering all types of animals from rabbits to cows, and ways of preserving the meat, not using electricity, and thousands of other useful ideas, things you would just not think off.

I remember on cold winters nights siting by the wood fire in the old farmhouse that I lived in as a child, reading Donald Duck comics, pre-TV, while my father read the handy man books of his day. I think that  I might still have his copies, and if I can find these books from long ago, I will review them too, for old time’s sake. But, I believe that those books had much the same old school feel as the books I have been reviewing.