The book alludes, through its intriguing title, to the magic pudding of Norman Lindsay, the Paterson Valley offering seemingly-endless succour to successive occupants over the millennia.

This book is a wonderful pageant of the inhabitants of the Paterson River from the aboriginals, through the settler/invaders, to the gentrificationists of the modern day.

Fascinating in itself is the chronicling of the rise and fall of sequential industries based on cedar, wool, tobacco, wind, olives, wheat, corn, vegetables, oranges and beef, pigs, dairy cows and poultry.

After the first cedar logs were shipped to India in 1795, red cedar was soon recognised as one of the world's finest timbers for making furniture.

The tree was seen as red gold and the stands in the Hunter and Paterson soon attracted much interest, but within 100 years the cedar forests of the region were no more.

I understand that a cubic metre of red cedar is now worth more than $6000! Now is the time to plant a red for your grandchildren.

One of the many highlights of Cameron's book for me was the chapter on the Lostock Dam water wars when dairy farmers up river near the dam had to now pay for water, but those on the lower Paterson did not.

We see history repeating the story but at a bigger scale with the states fighting over the waters of the Murray Darling, and at a nation scale with Ethiopia and Egypt fighting over the waters of the Nile.

The final chapter addresses the climate emergency, which is the biggest challenge we all now face. We know that the weather is changing, but in this chapter, we see some real data.

The daily temperatures have been recorded at Tocal for the past 45 years and the calculations of the mean annual maximum temperature reveal that over that time there has been a warming of 1.31 degrees Celcius.

There is much for us all to learn from this book.

After almost six years it is time for me to take a break from this column. Thanks for your interest and goodbye.