44 Finishing the mansion

Gordon had run out of time but his son-in-law arrived to complete the house that Gordon built. It might take 6 months at a leisurely pace then he would return to his job as a steeplejack in Sydney. He already knew the area well but this time he started having problems with strange feelings particularly during thunderstorms.

He became aware of being watched whenever he was working outside and noticed his tools were sometimes being moved. On one occasion he rang me to ask if I had emptied their 8000 gallon water tank; someone had turned on the tap and drained it onto the garden causing a flood. Later all their apples were stolen from the tree. His working chain saw had been exchanged for my broken one. There were too many strange happenings to readily explain. I began to wonder whether my moonlight experience really was an off-world one.

This was confirmed later when a ‘sensitive’ moved onto a property a few kilometres away. She and her partner saw lights hovering over the place at night, lights that were not natural.

That season was a particularly good one for the raspberries and we were benefitting from the extra crop in the enlarged enclosure. We had our highest yield to date and one tonne of fruit seemed a real possibility. It was also a really good season for the birds. The welcome swallows had started mating early, in August, so by March there was a large flock in the area made up in part by the dusky wood swallows and fairy martins; the fairy martins had been attracted to nesting material freely available in the cement filler of Gordon ‘s decaying wall boards scattered around the garden. Our big shed and all the power lines started to be covered by hundreds of birds as they collected in readiness for migration. The numbers swelled over maybe a week.

Clearly our place had to be special, a marker node for migrating birds on a super highway.
I couldn’t work out why the birds didn’t leave, they just sat around. I soon found out. A weather front was moving in and riding that magnificently were the kings of the air, the needle-tail swifts, zooming from out of sight above the thunder clouds to almost head height. The air was filled horizon to horizon with their speed. The swallows joined the frenzy, but slowly by contrast. By next morning the super highway sky was empty and the only action was the occasional grey thrush pecking on the ground and calling in their single but melodic autumn tone.

The problems continued with the never-seen souls that watched the area. The phone started to ring at odd hours, usually at night, before telecommunications collapsed entirely. The local telephone node had been destroyed, apparently with an axe; some blamed the damage on lightning. The node was replaced but internet connections then became difficult and very variable though Telstra could find no faults with our local systems.

All these disturbing happenings, particularly the loss of building tools, had their effects on the finishing of the mansion next door which extended well beyond the estimated six months into years. This is the price paid for drinking river water and living close to granite tors. City people don’t know how lucky they are.

43 Guru flash back

The rats reminded me of when we lived in India for a bit over a year. There the rats were not cute, were huge and popped out of open drains inside our house whenever they were hungry or needed fresh air. The spooky night also took me back to floating with the mystics during that period.

My work colleagues in New Delhi had been able to work even less than usual because their guru holy-man was visiting at the weekend. He normally existed somewhere in the Himalayas but travelled around occasionally to get up to date with his flock of souls and the world generally. He was quite old, now in his third reincarnation, and guessed to be approaching his 180th birthday. He had mentioned to my colleagues while they were astral-planing together that he would like to meet me in the flesh to check whether I was a positive or otherwise spirit for his disciples. Many others had wanted to see him so a meeting place had been arranged.

She wasn’t keen but together with Jane, then about 16 months, we entered the large tent erected so as to fill the street and block any traffic. It was pretty dull inside as it depended for lighting on electricity leaked from the nearest street pole but clearly it was full of many cross-legged sitting people; a number of them murmuring words together. We three hid at the back of the gathering trying to be invisible but standing out like traffic lights.

The chanting stopped and there was complete hush as a stretcher was carried in bearing a person in deep trance. Somebody from the middle of the crowd began to speak, like a reading of authoritative words. Garlands of flowers were brought by a train of supplicants and placed around the holy neck. Then, one of my work colleagues appeared from the gloom and said in my ear that the guru would like to meet me at the front. He had his eyes closed throughout and spoke to no one so I was sceptical. She shook her head. She didn’t want to be part of any meeting.

Jane could handle anything, only had to smile at any person and they melted. With her tightly curled very blond hair and blond and pink complexion she looked like a god anywhere, but specially so here. I thought with Jane to look after me, no problems, and so up I strolled nonchalantly, weaving through the crowd, carrying Jane like a trophy.

We stood in front of the guru. Nothing happened. Then the eyes opened for the first time. They were red like he had been overusing mushrooms or they had been scraped with fine sand for days. Instead of focussing on us, they cleared from red to black. The black became an infinitely large deep clear pool falling into outer space. He and I interacted in this space. After a while the black pool’s surface dissolved into the coarse unappetising red cover. He slowly took off three of his garlands like an old person working forceps at a distance and placed them carefully around Jane’s neck. The crowd murmured.

Jane loved all Indians and especially Indian men. She chuckled when they touched her white arms and pinched her on the cheeks. She played up to them.

She didn’t like the guru. She strained her head away over my shoulder to avoid his contact and tore off the garlands and threw them on the ground. The crowd murmured. The guru re-entered trance. Our audience was over.

Next day my work colleagues came around to tell me that the guru was very impressed with me. Indians in India do always like to say the right thing. He had told them that I would do good work spasmodically on the Indian sub-continent all my life and they should support me whenever possible. My child also would return. Nice story.

42 Spooks in the night

The round house wasn’t ready for living in. I had to make the fitted cupboards and furnishings, bring in water mains, build in the sinks, shower and toilet, estapol the walls and ceilings, stain and seal the floor and do all the outside painting. While we were erecting the yurt I had placed all the mains wires in the walls and roof in readiness for an electrician to do the final connecting. A plumber would complete the work we did on the septic tank and associated structures. This meant there were still a few weeks of living in the tin shed which I had aired after the erectors left.

I usually slept really well because I’m pretty deaf, but this night I was wakened up by something. It was a loud and repeated metallic banging sound. I lay very still and listened, working out an escape plan. It was full moon and so relatively bright in the shed but I still couldn’t see the threat. It had to be outside, maybe someone trying to get me up because of an emergency. I pulled on a jumper because it was frosty and slowly opened the door but kept a low profile in case there was a gun. Nothing; but the banging had stopped.

Outside it was amazing. The stars were brilliant and seemed to fill the sky to bursting despite the brightness of the moon. But it felt strange. There was a spooky feel in the air. The light from the trees seemed to effervesce with pale colours that weren’t quite real. It was deathly still and quiet. I started to think about the several aboriginal stone scrapers that I had found lying on the surface and buried down to 40 cm deep not 30 m from where I was standing. This curve in the river must have been well used over the centuries. Maybe there were a few lonely souls wandering around that night. I went back to bed.

Next night the banging woke me again. I had been sleeping lightly, maybe waiting. I turned on the light quickly and thought I saw a movement over on the stainless steel sink in the kitchen sector of the shed. The usual piece of dried up soap was on the sink but now bore teeth marks and other scratches. It couldn't be a Cunningham skink because they were awake only in summer and then during the day. It had to be a rat that was banging the soap on the sink as it enjoyed its feast. What a relief to know that I would die in bed from a giant rat tearing out my jugular rather than a sad soul.

The rats really had moved in. They sat around and tidily nibbled scraps even in the middle of the day, completely unconcerned by human presence. They were cute and intelligent. It was cold so why shouldn’t they be inside and warm.

Then things started disappearing. The table cloth went off the table, plastic bags that had held fruit and were stored for the next use disappeared, bits of paper, bit of polystyrene boxes, a dishcloth, all went. Till the table cloth the items could just have been misplaced or forgotten, but the table looked bald and obvious without its covering. All items took a while to find. They were all together neatly arranged on the compressor dome of the fridge. It was warm there and an ideal place for a nest for little pink baby rats. When the compressor ran it must have rocked the babies gently in their sleep and hummed to them.

They had to go. Unfortunately the babies were too small to skin and anyway wouldn’t have been impressive pinned on the wall or even stitched together as a counterpane.

Over the years the rats came back to nest and be evicted several times. The only sure way to dissuade them was to turn off all freezers and fridges. When the time came this could be the excuse for ending our fruit and jam enterprise.

41 Our own Merry-Go-Round

The original yurt plan had fallen through. But the Yurtworks could do us a good deal on an alternative if we wanted to proceed now. We decided that it was time to move up market from our tin shed and hang the consequences. We would have a yurt with windows right across the northern side and a few annexe modules for kitchen and laundry-cum-bathroom attached around the south. Local government regulations, new since we chose our house site, insisted we should be at least 100m from the river. This limited us because we were surrounded by river and put us near big manna gums and on a slope which would require us to have the dwelling on variable length props. This we argued positively would be safer in a flood. Before building could start, local council would have to approve the plans and the site. This could take some time as they didn’t get out our way often.

In two months our yurt arrived not on a yak but on a big truck. It was 7:30 am and minus 7°C. I had told the erecters that they might need long johns and definitely not to wear shorts if they wanted more kids. Jeez, it’s frigid said one climbing out of the vehicle. We unloaded the truck in about half an hour with them placing the components in a knowledgeable way around the site. The empty truck turned around to leave up our lane. The wheels spun and the truck drifted sideways into a fence. I’ve only got enough beds for three I said.

You got a tractor with a chain? That was the nicest question I had ever been asked. I trundled off to get the Red Dragon. Within 5 minutes, almost lost in tractor smoke, the empty truck was on its way stopping for nothing till it reached the road.

Somehow or other the rectangular sheets of plywood pinned down on joists on the variable height props turned into a flat round floor and we could sit on it for lunch in the chill wind and watery sunshine. They had to keep moving they were so cold. The walls modules were raised, arranged to complete the circle and fastened through the floor with hex bolts and held vertical with the odd plank temporarily nailed to the floor. They were thirsty.

Despite the cold they all wanted cold beer and absolutely nobody would join me in a sensible room temperature shiraz. He reckons we’re poofters said one. John and Jill had offered warm showers at their place. This was an opportunity for a yarn and a few beers. Jill made encouraging noises to stay for a meal and a beer which was accepted. About 10 pm they made their way back to the tin shed and its roaring fire. After a few beers they would go to bed. I escaped to the frigid caravan.

At 7 next morning they were already working on the roof. It was warmer. Jeez I had the shits last night said one. Must’ve been something I ate. I was delegated to go the 160 km round trip into Cooma to get some bits they had forgotten for sealing the roof and could I get another three cases of beer for tonight. They reckoned they could manage without me for a little while, at least till morning tea. I got five cases for if we were snowed in.

I got back with the goodies and some cake things for morning coffee. All but one of the roof triangles were balancing precariously on the wall modules and propped up with sticks at the pointy end. The last triangle wouldn’t squeeze all the way into the circle. Some fit perfectly, some are real bastards said the boss man. Sometimes we have to take the bastard down and start again. Out came an extremely large hammer called an enforcer and this was delicately applied to various roof sections that budged a little and progressively the cake became a whole. The steel rope around the structure pulled the circle in tight, the whole creaking and complaining. Hex bolts did the pinning and lunch was held in a good-humoured group under the big top. The boss lay down and went to sleep.

After lunch annex walls were erected, their large rooves pinned down and attached to the central circle and it all looked finished. It was time for a beer. They kindly invited me to tea in the shed. One of the guys had brought a huge and raging curry with him that just needed heating up and the rice preparing. This time the beer had a purpose. I told them to piss on the trees and not in the toilet which was flowing over from last night. I left them about 9 pm to complete their business. They still had a case to crack.

Day three was a small one, tidying up the structure and weatherproofing the roof. They left at 4 pm saying how much they had enjoyed themselves. Sadly, a few months later the cook died from a heart attack.

40 The Queen visits

My mum was keen to know whether or not she had got her money’s worth. From long experience she knew she couldn’t trust what I told her, she had to see the farm with her own eyes. Despite advancing years, eighty or so, and a heart that had gone to sleep a few times recently, she would make the long haul from England, non-stop to Sydney, where we would pick her up. Dad had died a few years earlier so she was a free agent. She instructed my youngest brother, a manager at a large company, to accompany her at her chosen date.

No doubt she was tough, she had had to be growing up fatherless and then raising an unruly mob of her four sons, four sons who seemed to spend their entire existence just sprawled around on the floor watching the tiny television that had been cobbled together from ex-army spares by her all-purpose husband.

The draw of the farm was powerful. A farm in the family was a strange novelty. All the relatives had wanted to see it. Her lot were accountants, historian, artist, teacher, diplomatic and new lawyer, and mine were architect, arts history, computer development and me, hobby farmer; I was a strange person out on a strange limb. Luckily it was a hobby and they all thought not serious.

Mum was bemused and disorientated when the jumbo eventually disgorged her onto land so we rushed her off to a motel to recover her aching bits. The beachside motel had been caught in a Sydney storm the previous day and the carpets were all soggy underfoot and it smelt of mould but she was too lost to notice. Next morning it was different, the sun was shining, the sea was crashing on the shore, the gulls were making their noises and breakfast was good. Let’s get to the farm she said.

Despite being nothing like a farm at all, except there was a tractor, it was approved. Her money was not wasted. The birds were different and singing, the river was rushing, the chestnut trees looked promising, there were raspberries and kangaroos, wombats and sheep, platypus and tussock grass and the sun continued to shine on everything. The reality was pretty close to the imagined dream.

39 Broken gate

Two youngish women were coming to live at number 13. All the men in the valley pretended no interest but listened intently for news. Number 13 had been running down for years. The fences were broken, the gate posts had collapsed and the gate lay on the ground. The water tanks leaked since somebody with a shotgun targeted a nearby kangaroo. Rumour was they paid very little for it.

Neither of them was interested in men. Even Basil couldn’t raise interest. One was an artist, dabbled in pottery and had left a marriage way behind. The other was a teacher. Why did you come, I asked? They told me they were enraptured by the valley and just had to live in it. They loved its colours, moods, aspects, and its wildly swinging weather patterns, but it was still summer. I said it can be tough in winter. They said no problems. All the men were keen to provide assistance in every department. Everybody knows women are quite useless in the bush but surprisingly these ones seemed interested to learn. Consequently with all the willing male hands things went nicely and they were happy. Everybody liked them.

They were taught to split wood for their fire after one of the men, keen to curry favour, had delivered a truck load of quality material. They were lent a pump to move water from the river up the hill to their place and shown how to attach and start it. They were given a TV to help them while away the long evenings. Nothing was too much effort and they responded with enthusiasm and friendship. They bought a couple of sheep with coloured wool so they could spin and do artistic knitting and fixed up a fence with string to keep the sheep corralled.

Interestingly, they didn’t seem to learn the lessons they were taught and designed to help them live comfortably in the bush. They needed lots of demonstrations that gradually petered-out. In response to fading help from neighbours, they progressively down-scaled their lifestyles to avoid the physicality of bush life. Rather than keeping their house warm by building a roaring fire, they piled on more clothes and cuddled up; the wood piles had long since disappeared. They found they couldn’t start the pump down on the river, in part because it always seemed to be dark when they thought of it, so they bought plastic buckets and placed them carefully under their eaves. This became their water supply when it rained and when it didn’t they bought a bottle or two of drinking water in town. They used candles for light and ate meals in town. They had arrived with two cars, but one broke down and couldn’t be repaired. The girls took it in turn to hitch rides. The spinning wheel was still fine but now was unused because the sheep had broken down their flimsy fence and run away. All problems were deftly circumvented and they coped. Moth and rust were ignored.

As time progressed their lives became increasingly green and carbon neural, a beacon for others.

Somehow they faded away until one day they were no longer there. People had different speculations. They had been seen in Bredbo, Cooma, Jindabyne, but always in the distance. Someone else came to live in number 13. They now had their chance to fix the gate. But that’s another story.

38 Wombat-proof enclosure

To avoid similar problems in the planned new and improved enclosure wombat holes trafficable by other things had to be disallowed. I sought advice from Rural Fire Brigade colleagues.

You can borrow my exterminator said Paul. This was a loaded shot gun mounted vertically over active wombat holes with the trigger attached to a trip wire. You just move it between all the holes around your place and have 100% protection. I have no wombats now he said.

Alan had a different and quite green solution that he had used. The method was to let the wombat make its hole. Wombats aren’t interested in raspberries so you can let them in. You then frame the hole in timber and fit it with a top-mounted but heavy swinging gate. The wombat can come and go freely through this adapted hole while weak things like rabbits and birds can’t move the gate. Good in principle but wombats don’t always go out the hole they enter by. My own solution, the least innovative and least exciting, was to drop the wire-mesh side walls of the enclosure 30 cm into the ground so hampering the wombat digging process. That was the plan I followed.

Digging a slot 30 cm deep around a site 100m x 20m is hard work. I called on Ben. This was to be a father-son bonding exercise like watching Pale Rider together and listening live to touring jazz musicians at local clubs. It didn’t work out that well. I wasn’t sure why until I recalled a similar interaction with my dad. He wasn’t a great gardener, usually restricted in his activities to making borders of bricks around garden beds. These bricks were slanted upwards on their edges for classy effect but also inflicted maximum damage on falling children and tripping old people. Mum was the natural gardener. Dad liked to treat the garden as a route march with compass. You start, you do, you finish, preferably in minimum time. Repeat after a year or two.
His vegie garden hadn’t been dug over for a couple of years. It also hadn’t produced anything in the interval except chickweed, dandelions and grass. The plan was to dig it over to two spades depth thus releasing the deep bound up nutrients and allowing good root penetration. We started but it turned out he had urgent exam papers to mark and lessons to prepare for Monday so could I finish it before going off to rugby. We continued to buy vegies.

Ben and I dug half the length of the slot and because we were trapped in the bush nobody could go anywhere else to do pressing business. It was a good interaction for me. The following week I worked out a much quicker way to dig the remaining slot with less muscle, but by that time I was alone. Ben had learnt nothing except it’s cold at the farm.

The design was brilliant. The 120 cm high fence with 30 cm in the ground was chosen with a mesh that small birds could fly through easily. They were birds like superb blue wrens, bush wrens, diamond firetails, red-browed finch and European Goldfinch and pollinators like eastern spinebill, white-cheeked and white-naped honeyeaters and the chattering New Holland honeyeaters. These were mainly local residents that were joined in summer by yellow-cheeked honeyeaters. It was good to see them foraging at various times. The mesh excluded the larger crop-damaging birds like the sulphur crested cockatoos and crimson rosellas.

Above this strong fence material was hung a 2m wide metal bird mesh which was fragile but very cheap at the time and the roof would be a woven nylon bird net that wasn’t cheap. We had a local timber mill that supplied the 3.5 m treated pine poles that would support the whole structure. Total cost was around $2000 which we could cover in jam sales in a month or two.

I had previously foolishly bought 100m of nylon bird net at a very low price, primarily because I can’t go past a bargain. It was single strand nylon rather than the woven finish. I put some of it up to see if it worked. After three days it had caught and hung three rosellas. They tried to force their bodies through the mesh which stretched but not far enough to free them and in their twisting around they had become hopelessly entangled in other nylon cells. It worked well in the fashion of the shotgun on the wombats. I took it down and put it in a locked cupboard.

37 Don't go on holiday

Despite our failures to grow our wool and chestnut enterprises, we couldn’t satisfy the demand for our berry fruits and it was a nice little earner. The problem was that growing, picking and selling berries was really demanding hard work, unlike growing wool which is a doddle. We had to expand our tiny plot. This was forced on us after an overseas holiday when we spent all the jam proceeds.

We arrived back to a mess. Our canes, nicely ready to bear next season’s crop, had been felled to 15 cm high and wouldn’t be yielding anything. Whatever felled them had a very sharp pair of secateurs and always cut at a 60 degree angle. The young hazelnut trees and sprouting quince trees were pruned similarly. I didn’t know anyone who would have worked so hard.

Then it became clear, the chicken wire fence around the orchard had been broached. A wombat had excavated a large hole from outside to inside and the rabbits had used it for their evil purposes. I had been confused by the large number of pied currawongs inside the enclosure that was netted above as well as fenced, particularly as I couldn’t find any holes in the net. They too were strutting down the wombat hole and up into the enclosure.

As well as being cowardly and sneaky and therefore un-Australian, currawongs are really smart.

36 Jamram hits back

Jambo and Rambo had now been put in the same paddock solely for company; that’s the way real farmers do it with all the boys together. It wasn’t working. They didn’t make friends. I had expected that in any disagreement between them Rambo would win and maybe maim and even kill Jambo, but they just kept their distance. I assumed Rambo’s frightening horns and vigour were the reason.

It came time to move Jambo in with his ewes, but first we had to put the two rams into the yards to separate them. This forced them into close proximity, a few metres apart. Jambo instantly ran into the side of Rambo totally bowling him over. Then showing he wasn’t a gentleman, further steam-rolled Rambo while he was prostrate. Victorious, Jambo then trotted into the paddock with the ewes and made friends.

After a couple of weeks interacting with the girls Jambo leapt a series of fences and went the 20 kilometres back home. He had made his decision, our place was inadequate. We had decided in the meantime that he was gay because he always seemed to keep at least a few metres between himself and sheep.

Despite his leanings, when spring arrived it was accompanied by two cross-bred lambs, both male and therefore useless to us, but proof that Jambo had been at least a bit active and slightly hetero. The lambs grew into fine boys who looked exactly like their father. They showed no trace of merino genes. Jambo was too special to mix. The boys were however quite tasty when curried.

This last curry supper marked the close of our fat lamb enterprise. Somebody said you get what you pay for.

35 A suitable house

Goodness knows why but she thought a yurt might be OK for us. I had thought that a yurt was a round tent made of animal skins that spent half its life on a mule wandering around Kazakhstan. One week, as we were leaving Wombalano for Canberra, she suggested we take the scenic route and drop in at Goulburn Yurtworks to update my knowledge bank by checking out real yurts. These were designed in California. I was against the idea on the principle that we never agreed with each other on anything at first.

Yurts turned out to be round wooden houses, or more correctly, nearly round houses made from triangles like the slices of a cake. Each slice was a prefabricated roof section, a prefabricated wall and a bit of wooden floor. The ‘modules’ were delivered on site as flat packages and screwed together to complete the yurt cake. The bit that everybody knew about except me was that a steel hawser was tightened around the cake at the end to squeeze it into a perfect round, fairly similar to the Kazakhstan original.

We sat in one at the Yurtworks yard while we waited for a salesman to appear. The wait was intentionally long because it gave us a chance to experience circling slowly round and round while suspended under a wooden ceiling that focussed the eye on a sunlit apex; a bit like being on a merry-go-round. The pungent mountain smell of the red cedar walls completed the sensation. I should have left in anger because the cedar was fully imported from the USA, not the superior locally-grown Toona cedar that I had dreamt of.

We both liked it, no arguments. They could deliver one in a couple of weeks and erect in in 3 days maximum. The one for delivery had been prefabricated under order and the order had bounced, hence the short delivery time and very low price near cost. The plan wasn’t quite right so we would go away and think about it.

34 Idyll curtailed

Sadly Gordon had not been able to beat the cancer that riddled his abdomen and gave him intense back pains. He died without needing to use the steel bridge in an ambulance mercy dash to Bombala. His death ended one of the many love stories of the valley that had brought him, his new wife, and the younger members of his wife’s family together to Creewah. He had given up the Sydney Water Board and his grown up family to become a hobby farmer and try out his many talents in the bush. Temporary sheds had gone up quickly, the cows purchased and producing milk, chooks pecked around the sheds and made eggs, and the fruit and vegie garden thrived.

They had chosen and cleared a position overlooking the river to build their house. The sheds worked out well as temporary dwellings for the family and the bathroom shed had a lovely view over the garden. The teenage daughter boasted that her experiences in that hot bath were unrivalled anywhere. Who else could soap, watch birds and simultaneously pick and eat raspberries from canes overhanging their bath? Incidentally, she also wrote poetry while in the bath, at least that's what she said.

Their climb to the idyllic lifestyle was not dissimilar from that of others in the area. Get the basic necessities together in temporary form while you work on the better and permanent structures.
The plan was to expand the agricultural activities later. They purchased an elegant and large kit house that they would build. No components were prefabricated. The kit was essentially a plan and all the bits and pieces needed to complete the dwelling delivered on site by the manufacturer. It was sized to take the whole family and any future additions like grandchildren, so it was big.

The dream house task was too great. The sheds were there so there was no immediate urgency to complete. It progressed but weeds grew faster and components and tools, put down till tomorrow, disappeared under the grass and the debris of normal family life. Eventually the roof was complete so it was a good time to try it out and move in. The view was great without the walls.

Then Gordon’s pains started, the kids suddenly grew up and left and the lovers were marooned alone on a settee under a big roof with the wind howling through. Amazingly, they battled on and got the walls up and the ceilings, the septic tank worked, the river water was plumbed in and electricity attached. They had done it apart from sundries like shapely verandas and deckings and painting and the odd chimney. It was a remarkable achievement but time had run out. Gordon often said ‘we haven’t got a round to ot’ which was supposed to be a funny toilet joke but was also deep and meaningful.

She said, we’re not going to have a big house. Anything we have has to be complete in a week. Let’s get on with the dream without the pain. And we started looking for a cheap house that would fit the plan, but suitable for a lawyer now earning money.

33 Ram for jam

Fat lambs, if on the market prior to Christmas were bringing in good profits. Maybe we could get into this. We certainly weren’t going to try emus, ostrich, alpaca or lamas. An acceptable starter crossbred was merino x Border Leicester. Border Leicesters are those tall proud-looking sheep that featured in ‘Babe’. We had merinos, so all we now needed was a Border Leicester ram to start printing money. The grapevine soon told us of a local one that would be cheap despite his good pedigree. He was now used only for mowing grass on a property no longer interested in sheep. We rang up for an interview.

He was in a large shearing shed waiting to interview us. He looked us over but didn’t seem able to decide whether we were up to the job. He needed to look at our place to decide. We asked the farmer for the decision. He thought we should just take him. He would like the change. I backed the ute up to the shed’s ramp, opened the cage gate and he walked in, no hassle and so strange.

How much do you want for him she said? What do you reckon he’s worth was the standard reply? Now we always carried a few jars of jam with us on the off-chance that we might meet a receptive old lady, preferably past 80, and as usual there were 3 jars in the ute. How about 3 jars of jam I joked? OK he said, and the deal was sealed with the hand shake.

We started to laugh about the deal on the way back to Wombalano, but when the face peered through the ute’s rear window, quite unamused, we realised he thought he had been undervalued.

He seemed to like being at our place, getting into the green feed immediately after a brief look around. We couldn’t put him with the ewes quite yet but had him in the neighbouring paddock. Rambo was in a further paddock. After a few days we would start our new cross-bred flock.

32 A death in the family

By our fourth season we had 80 sheep and they were all beautiful. Cecil and his girls had done us proud. They had made lots more than the current 80 but the extras had been despatched to other properties. The flock included Rambo, a big strong ram not quite as good in wool quality as Cecil but close. He was one of Cecil’s sons who we had preserved to inherit the mantle should Cecil eventually get old. We had kept a second ram to keep him company but he was slightly mad and liked running at full speed into anything solid like a shed wall. Eventually he killed himself.

I found Cecil’s carcass under a small tree in the River Paddock. He showed no signs of damage more than associated with a tough life servicing ewes. Clearly he died happily of a heart attack. Rambo couldn’t wait to use his inheritance and instead of taking it gently and savouring the intimate pleasures of his sisters and mother, he had the circuit of the half flock we allowed him done in a few days.

She didn’t like it, pointing out that it was not only morally wrong, but would result in loss of vigour in the flock and possibly even homosexuality, considering also the river water. We should get a proper ram.

Recently, the bottom had dropped out of the wool market with the diminution of the Soviet armed forces; they didn’t need greatcoats any more. The Italians were making suits from brilliant new polymers that were lighter and warmer than the finest wools and selling them relatively cheaply across Europe, and Australia had just been through some over-productive wool years and the nation’s stockpile was building. Wool was now hardly saleable. Despite its good quality and doubled quantity, our wool was earning less than half the small amount we banked in our first season. It really was time to rethink the business plan again.

31 Annejam

The story as told went something like this.

Years ago, when she could get the fruit, Anne occasionally made a batch of raspberry jam exactly like her mother did. The relatives loved her jam, the neighbours were occasionally treated to a jar and everyone was happy. Then one of her lawyer friends called Charlotta suggested she should sell her jam instead of giving it all away and call it AnneJam. This caused some rethinking: How to make more than a few jars and have no failures, how to grow enough of our own fruit but not so much so that the whole thing became really hard work.

But first we had to work out why Anne’s jam batches weren’t always the same. How did Grandma do it? Anne said Grandma just followed the recipe. Grandma’s recipe headed ‘Raspberry Jam’ was in a tattered book called Cookery Book; South Australian School of Mines (and Industries).

It said concisely: Allow 1 lb. sugar to each pound of fruit. Wash fruit, place in preserving pan with the sugar, bring slowly to the boil and boil quickly until it gels.

There were crossings out and scribbled replacements in faded biro. The 1 lb became ¾ lb. Wash fruit was crossed out, with crossed out and replaced with boil then add. The word slowly was removed and ½ hour added after boil quickly.
These seemed to be fairly significant modifications and not really following the recipe. I looked at other recipes in the book and they too were rewritten.

This was a little bit wrong but near enough to the truth of the birth of AnneJam. The reality was that we had to come to grips with lots of old wives tales about jam-making so we could make reasonably consistent jams across seasons from our range of raspberries, and the boysenberries, blackberries, and blackcurrants that had joined them by the third season.

Remarkably, people did seem to want to buy our jam but she wasn’t sure. There is a big gap between giving away and selling. Giving away carries no responsibility. No fault for the dead insects in the mix, no fault for the chip in the lip of the jar, no fault for the furry growth on the jam surface. Even knowing these possibilities you can feel a warm glow when giving it away. Recipients can always dump the product and not tell you or even pass the burden on to someone else.

As a newly-fledged lawyer she worried endlessly about selling jam. It would only be worth a few dollars but if someone died from eating the product, and we were sued, we would lose everything we had and more. Was it worth the hassle? I reminded her of the business plan and that we were recognised primary producers with little produce. The Taxman might be worse than her suers.

We started with the gullible, weak and defenceless sector of the population, namely the old. It seemed our jam teleported them to long-forgotten scents and tastes of their youth.

Remembered stories wafted from the jam spooned onto freshly-baked scones; go on have some cream, you only live once. After a year of delivering to old people’s homes and selling by word of mouth someone commented that we were losing quite a few of our clients through death. No links were intended.

30 Fate

When I was at school, my occasional nickname was Rasper. This alliterated with my surname, which was enough, but had been picked from the air by a smart kid in the class who had heard of Rasputin who died 30 years earlier. Those who weren’t into history liked the name because it was associated with raspberry, a rude noise made with any part of the body, and slightly disparaging which nicknames usually have to be. There was no truth to the rumour that I had won the Form 4B ‘Long drawn-out fart competition’ leading to this name. I had actually come second, but only because the winner cheated by momentarily breaking to get her second wind at 32 seconds. This was allowed. Some mothers may have been concerned with problems in that week’s wash. ‘What have you been eating dear?’ Actually the winner wasn’t a girl; that was made up.

Maybe if I had been nicknamed Toona or tree or forestry instead of Rasper my path into the future would have been what I wanted. But unfortunately, I was doomed and at that point fate dumped me heavily and pointed me towards distant raspberries and AnneJam.

29 Failure

We worked out from our weather trends that we might get some chestnuts every 10 years, possibly enough for a bit of a party around a bonfire, participants roasting the nuts and themselves and pretending to enjoy it when they burnt their tongues. Decades into the future it would be something to tell their grandchildren accustomed only to high rise apartments and fast food.

What was it about trees and me? The Toona hadn’t even got into the ground to later wither up and die and the chestnuts promised but then retracted. Was this a progression of failure perhaps launched a long time before? When I was a mediocre and uninterested student at secondary school, the idea of trudging through a life tied to a desk from 9 to 5 was a vision of sheer pointlessness and gloom. I didn’t like inside, I only liked outside and the more apparent space that outside provided the better. I told my dad, I’m going to be a bulldozer driver. They earn heaps more than you and it’s outside work, sort of. He freaked. I guess he freaked because parents are supposed to sacrifice their lives so their children can move into higher quality air than they themselves breathed. A distinguished schoolmaster shouldn’t beget a bulldozer driver. He declared I must do one more year at school to get at least a few ‘O levels’ to my name and then I could do what I wanted. I couldn’t get a bulldozer driver’s licence anyway until I was 16.

This was serious because he normally didn’t bother me at all except once when I dated his school’s cleaner’s daughter who was very cute. I had to rethink my life. I was incredibly bored with school except for the sports things and the occasional interface with girls. So I decided to do science to fill the year; Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology. And maybe I could then be a Forestry Officer, living and working outside and occasionally driving a bulldozer. It seemed to satisfy the future mirage. Of course I would continue with advanced music because only girls did that, and maybe a bit of art and woodwork which I liked.

To fill out the new maybe dream, I worked in forests during holidays with real forestry workers. Trees were magic. My holiday work the previous year being a D8 bulldozer driver’s mate was forgotten.

A couple of years passed and I now had an acceptable school record with both ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels. My dad was happy but didn’t crow by saying I told you so; he had a few hundred other kids to worry about. Scholastically I had now exceeded the Forestry Officer requirements and could contemplate aiming for an administrative job in Forestry, a desk job 9 to 5 inside, perhaps in Rhodesia or Kenya. Foreign parts at this stage were unknown so in my brain were classified as outside, thus acceptable. I applied to do a Forestry degree in a foreign country, the University of Wales. I was closing in on working with trees, outside with things I liked.

In those days it wasn’t just scores that got you into university courses, it was interviews. I headed off into this foreign land inhabited by small strange-speaking peoples for my interview. There were 15 places and 65 students short-listed. We think you should do Agriculture or Crop Science my interview panel said. You are not suitable for Forestry. Trees turned from mirage to miasma as distant as ever.

28 Raspberries and chestnuts

Two seasons after their discovery the raspberry canes were doing well. We had put them into beds, pre-dug to half a metre and then heavily composted, and transplanted their offspring canes to make maybe 200 plants in neat rows. They liked the copious compost and water from their drippers judging from the almost 2 metre height they achieved on their wire trellis. We were picking around 200 kg of fruit. Even after visitors had eaten their fill there were plenty of berries left over for jam. Maybe we could include jam in our business plan to augment the sheep and chestnuts.

The chestnuts were hopeless they were so frost sensitive. Everybody said that since chestnuts grow in very cold places in Europe, they could obviously handle our place. This was very true while they were dormant and leafless during winter, but once leaf and fruit buds started to swell in spring, anything colder than -2°C was a disaster. The buds browned, dried and died and had to be replaced by new buds for the leafing and fruiting process to begin again. This took around 1 month thereby reducing an already short season and resulted in half-filled unsaleable nuts at the end. Expanding leaves were also sensitive to frost. The expanding bits just dried up making very untidy-looking trees.

As we discovered, we could have frosts even in the middle of summer, indicating that without considerable global warming on our place, chestnuts could not be relied upon. Our 100 trees that had the potential to realise tens of thousands of dollars weren’t worth $100. On the bright side, at 800 metres above sea level, we were likely to be safe from any rise in sea level and we could climb the trees to get away from lions.

27 Skins

One frosty morning, after checking the sheep, I noticed something draped over the fence. It was a kangaroo with its leg twisted in the top wires hanging upside down. Its head had been chewed off during the night. I untangled it and put it on the ground. It had a beautiful grey skin. It seemed a pity not to skin and tan it for posterity.

Skinning a kangaroo is quite easy because there is very little fat to wade through, the meat is dry and firm and the skin itself is strong and elastic. In fact, after the first couple of incisions, the skin can be torn off like a wet suit or a sock. Having no eyes looking critically at me as I did the surgery made the job easier.

A few days later I came across a large dead wombat that had been bounced off the road by a vehicle during the previous night. Nearby was its baby. It was also dead but just looked asleep. Maybe it had been thrown out of the pouch. I had never attempted skinning a wombat, so now was the opportunity. I chose the baby. Its tiny feet were lovely and soft, totally undamaged by walking and digging. However, I soon began to wish I had walked past the corpse and let it rot because skinning was so difficult. Above the behind the skin overlaid gristle that was a centimetre thick and the two were firmly glued together. I struggled for more than half an hour before being satisfied with the cute baby, hands feet and head all nicely displayed and flattened. It tanned well, but not quite as perfectly as the kangaroo.

When Ben heard that I now had a collection of rabbits, wombat, kangaroo, sheep and Basil variously decorating chairs, walls and the floor he made a wish. He wished I wasn’t the person to find him after an accident. He reckoned it wouldn’t feel nice being skinned, stretched out and pinned to the wall for all visitors to see; an art work and long term dust catcher. I asked if I could keep his head in a small bottle.

26 Marking lambs

The average age of the lambs was six weeks and it was as late as I could leave it to do the business. They have to go through an initiation ceremony that can be painful. It builds their characters and gives them something to talk about in the long hours between meals. Marking involves an injection that protects against six unspellable things, involves putting a rubber ring around the tail and another around the scrotum, drenching, and finally, clipping an ear mark, personalised in shape for your property. Real farmers might include mulesing. They might also chop the tails off with a sharp knife and slit the scrotum to allow removal of the testicles by a suck, bite and spitting process. The dogs love the product and leap on it in frenzy. It supposedly parallels ground unicorn horn in its aphrodisiac power.

Doing these numerous steps yourself requires some organisation. With help it is supposedly easier and she volunteered to do the injections and hold the lambs. The first lamb took around ten minutes including the initial catching and the second catching after the tail band went on. It was fairly close to torture though in some countries it wouldn’t be defined as that. That little pink ear didn’t look half as pretty after I had torn a lump out of it so we dropped marking in favour of ear tagging. In this process which is just as unsavoury, the ear is sandwiched between two 10 cent-sized coloured buttons held together by a rod. The rod works a bit like a rivet. Attaching requires a hygienic applicator that doesn’t work in the hands of someone of poor resolve. The advantage of tagging is that it’s lovely to see all your lambs skipping around with coloured fashion-earrings.

Lamb two was a male which meant two rubber rings and reloading the ring applicator between. The rubber bands can fly off in all directions when you hurry. More importantly, the tiny balls disappear from the scrotum if you have cold hands, or no confidence, and you have to get them back. I had practised this operation when helping a neighbour and had had dummy runs on our own lambs. It’s interesting what some farmers get off on.

The balls came down nicely with a two finger abdominal prod and a gentle reassuring blow in the ear. The rubber rings went on and the balls were nicely captured in the scrotum. And off he ran baaing to mum saying it was nothing really, and don’t I look cute with my ear marker. Ten minutes after ringing the lambs were in agony as the appropriate parts discovered they had no blood supply. They hopped, ran, stopped, lay down, curled up and did yoga. But within half an hour it was back to mum for a drink.

We worked our way through them and gradually perfected the methodology. If I sat down comfortably on a box and cuddled the lamb on my knee on its back throughout the process, and did all the operations, it worked much better. She acted as nurse handing over scalpels, swabs and so on. We did the last ten lambs in the time it took to do the first one. Surprisingly, none of the males turned into rams possibly because they drank the river water.

25 Basil Faulty

Poddying a lamb sounded like a fun thing to do so we drove into Queanbeyan to get the appropriate feeding devices and the two types of milk substitute. One was to be given initially to replace the natural high-powered stuff lambs get as their first feed, the other was the run of the mill stuff that the lamb would get on demand. On demand, surely not, this was starting to be a bad idea.

Basil was hungry. He seemed to think the bottle was great and he especially liked being held close while he was performing. The compound went through quickly coming out the other end as a bright yellow dribble, perfect for sunshine colours on a painting. After a few days of feeding the yellow turned dark and harder and he and we were in business. The problem was we had to return to Canberra as work hadn’t gone away. Basil was totally dependent on us. We squeezed him in a cardboard box, closed the lid and put it on the back seat of the car.

This was ridiculous. He couldn’t be outside on our back lawn in Canberra because he would run away or be eaten by marauding cats or dogs, so we had to have him inside. The sun room with its tiled floor was the only place that could be easily washed free of lamb poo. However, his hooves weren’t designed for slippery tiles and he couldn’t stay upright, doing 4-legged splits acts when he tried to move. He asked for a carpet. An old Indian one seemed to do the trick. The feeding nearly on demand continued and he grew and the magic carpet changed colour. He also became more adept at balancing, clicking around on the floor at a fair rate and distributing his little raisins more widely. The room looked more and more like a paddock. After 3 months it would have been knee deep in organic grass.

He really had to go outside. He wasn’t impressed with that move and the enclosure I built setting up a big baaing din which the neighbours thought was lovely, a reminder of spring. After a couple of weeks he was nibbling grass and really growing. Children came from around the area to see this sight and have a hold and a stroke. Briefly we were famous.

The 28 lambs back on the farm were far less demanding than Basil and were growing better. They had a different shape. Basil was getting bigger but his body wasn’t getting higher off the ground, much like an obese child. He had lumps on his back that lined up with the front legs. His legs weren’t fitting into sockets at the top; the sockets hadn’t developed. Basil really was faulty and his mother was right to ignore him. We had been dealt a bummer. I took him in the shed, closed the door and shot him.

Charlotta was concerned. She warned my partner not to get ill or she too might finish up in the shed. I became widely known as the lamb killer. No neighbours reported the shot to the police despite the signs up the road declaring it a neighbourhood watch area.

It seemed a pity to waste the wool so I skinned Basil very neatly, salted the skin, bought some tannin solution, and started him on the way towards a very small pair of slippers. His body was a bit small to eat. He was the first and last poddy lamb we ever had.

24 Lambing

It is about 150 days between joining and lambing, so by back-calculating, it seemed that Cecil got to work pretty much as soon as he was allowed to mingle with the ewes. Interesting they call joining work. Judging from the rate at which the ewes dropped their lambs, Cecil was treating it as a retirement holiday. On real farms with real ‘working’ rams, all the lambs come over a few days. This makes it easy for the farmers to do what farmers have to do all at once. Like she said, I didn’t know anything about lambing so I had to find out pretty quickly exactly what farmers have to do.

The first three ewes didn’t need me. In fact I wasn’t even there when their lambs came. They were baaing instructions to their offspring who were feeding, bleating and bouncing like in the movies. It continued smoothly until a week later when I noticed one ewe wasn’t completing the birth process. It lay down, tried a push or two, stood up and walked around, laid down and tried again; a bit like when Jane was born. But in this case the lamb was stuck half way out like a fat sausage. She said ring the vet. That would cost money so I hopped across the river on the rocks to seek out an even higher authority that would probably be free.

John came straight away, leaving the dishes for later. No discussion, he just caught the sheep, sterilised his hand by wiping it on a nearby tussock, and plunged it in around the lamb. It’s dead he said, we have to get it out. I was ready to receive my instructions but the ‘we’ was apparently a royal one. He pushed the lamb back in, flicked it around and it and other stuff plopped out. The sheep got up and ran away. He resterilised his hands on the tussock and that was it. The lamb was enormous.

In the Boy’s Own book I had once read the hero fastened up the bereaved sheep, skinned the dead lamb and tied the skin on a lamb that had been dumped by its mother. The sad lamb and sad mother instantly became a joyful pair. This was a great idea, but there were no spare dumped lambs, yet.

Basil came two weeks later. He was second of twins. His mother decided he was a runt or had the wrong father or something. She just kicked him away whenever he came for his milk. The first lamb was nuzzled, licked, fed copiously and otherwise treated like a prince.

Her mothering instinct came to the fore. What can we do she said? Can we poddy it? In this case the ‘we’ wasn’t royal, it meant ‘you’.

23 A balancing act

I had been thinking about how to get the steel beams across the back creek during the week. I was able to multi-task so work didn’t suffer. The mind pictures depended on the tractor as even the whole Creewah RFB wouldn’t have been able to lift the beams manually. I would line up a beam with the centres of its two prospective supports and place the tractor on the other side of the creek again exactly in line but up a hill. Then I would pull the beam rapidly across the creek canyon. The various chains would link the leading edge of the beam and the tractor hoist, the latter giving extra height.

The picture included the beam falling into the water as well as digging into a permanent grave half way up the bank. This nightmare would be avoided by having planks leaning against the receiving pillar on the creek side. If the leading edge of the beam did fall into the creek, it might just ride up the planks as the tractor proceeded.

It was all set up. I was scared because there would be no second chance. I started with the easy beam. It didn’t need me to dodge the tractor through trees. It slid nicely on the first support and edged over the chasm, the tractor front wheels lifted as the beam crossed half way and started to drop but it then hit the planks and rode up onto the second support. I panicked and stopped to go back and investigate. Another 30 cm and I was there. I could centre it later using the crowbar.

The second beam worked well too. Everything was finished apart from a bit of welding and appropriate dancing and drinking. The latter was a D’Arenberg Shiraz with more power than the tractor. Pity she didn’t drink. Despite that we sat on a beam together with our feet dangling over the water.

22 Fern Creek

Because our lives were so flat out and everything seemed to be on deadlines we hadn’t even properly explored the farm. It was so much more than the paddocks. There were the precipitous hills that were covered in bush and remained unknown.

We set off to discover following a small creek that passed the remains of the superphosphate pile. It cut through a dead sphagnum moss bed up into the lower part of the Hanging Valley where it trickled through a gulley. There was a huge wombat hole in the gully. Outside the hole two babies were chasing each other while the parent nibbled the grass nearby. They saw us, stopped activities, stared, focused and decided it was home time.

A bit further up the creek started to climb. Tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) sat in and shaded the creek cutting. Manna gum trees fallen many years ago had to be climbed over. The atmosphere was still and prehistoric.

Large overhanging granite rocks dominated the area like they had owned it for millennia. We sat down by the creek now easing its way through the rocks and making a small pool at our feet. It was breathtaking when five white-naped honeyeaters appeared to forage busily in the ferns. They are small, brilliant-white breasted birds with dark backs and sharp red eyes, but not the menacing witch-like red eyes used by white-winged choughs. Two green birds with loud voices joined; white- cheeked honeyeaters. Not being bird watchers, we had never seen these things before. A little further up the creek stopped. It was just a spring appearing from under large rocks.

Fern Creek was now named, so it came into reality. No longer was it a prehistoric nothing, but a walk, a destination. Relatives and visitors had something to do when they visited. They could go on the Fern Creek walk. The property suddenly had a new perspective.

21 The Bridge

Pick up and delivery of the now two metal beams went perfectly in the very cheap truck we hired. We left them by the creek above high water mark and were back in Canberra in time for me to go back to work for an evening session to catch up. The problem now was that I would have to build the footings for the bridge which would have to be big enough and strong enough to carry these massive metal beams as well as a vehicle.

Our back creek crossing had once been trafficable. When the land agents had created our approximately 100 acre blocks back in the 1970s, they had been required to provide access on to each block. For our place they had put 1m diameter concrete pipes into the creek to carry flood waters and placed the gravel road over the pipes. They had done a similar job on another creek further into the property using slightly smaller pipes. All had been washed out in a flood a decade later.

I found three of the big pipes tumbled down stream but still intact. The fourth was broken into pieces. I also found 2 of the smaller pipes with their tops protruding from a soil wash 20m from their original site. One was intact. I decided to sink the 4 intact pipes vertically into the creek banks, well back from the sides. I would fill them with rocks then place the beams on top and weld them in place against steel posts that would be concreted into the pipes. Ideas are so easy. The mental moving pictures can be so vivid and detailed. At this stage though the concrete pipes were still scattered and they were too big for me to handle alone.

It was time to call out the red dragon. I had a big $100 drag chain, a couple of heavy wire hawsers bought via the Canberra Times adverts section for $10 and the bits of bullock chain from Johnny the shearer. All fastened together they were long enough and strong enough to pull the required concrete pipes out of the creek and burial sites. The tractor provided the shaking power. Phase 1 was complete almost exactly as pictured.

Digging the round holes to take the pipes was easy, just needing a pick, shovel and muscle power. The soil was soft. A copperhead snake wandered over and watched me. Probably thought I was wasting my time that should have been spent in planting Toona. Too much digging affects the thought processes.

There had to be quite a bit of thinking to work out how to get the heavy pipes into their custom-made holes. The tractor hoist couldn’t take the weight without bending so there had to be a flash back to the pyramids to solve the problem. Of course I could have called on muscles in the shape of the RFB but I already owed them heaps of Brownie points. Better to use my brain. As I shovelled the soil out of the holes I arranged it in a spiral ramp around each hole. Theoretically I could balance each heavy pipe on its edge and wind it up the ramp till it exactly overhung its hole. Winding it just a bit more over the edge and jumping sideways should see it dropping vertically straight down the hole. Precision balancing was required. I could finish up in the hole with concrete on top of me.

Amazingly the first pipe followed the mental video exactly. I stopped then to make sure this was reality and not brain pictures. The snake was still there, the tractor was watching as before. I decided to celebrate with a coffee break. So it was Nescafe Instant, two spoons, delicately lifted with a little myrtle honey.

The next two pipes fell in as ordered; now it was the small one. That was so easy to manoeuvre. But I rushed it. It fell into the hole at an angle so the lip caught half way down. I couldn’t budge it by muscle power. The tractor and chain completed the job. The snake had got bored and left. I filled the pipes with rocks and sealed them with concrete. Next weekend was the big one, putting the heavy beams across the creek, somehow.

20 Bureaucracy

Despite being in the middle of nowhere with no town facilities like sealed roads, piped water, sewerage and rubbish collection, the bureaucracy caught up with us. The double garage we were living in most comfortably wasn’t classed as a dwelling, only as a shed. If we set in play the building of an actual house by sending the council the plans and paying the appropriate dues, we could continue to live in the shed till the house was built. It was also noted that the access to the property was inadequate, not being trafficable in all weathers, and not being wide enough for the passage of two vehicles simultaneously. This should be attended to as a priority.

We hadn’t factored in these costs and time consuming activities. By now she had almost finished her Law Degree with exams looming and I had additional responsibilities at work, but no more pay as happens. Luckily for us these council demands were followed by personnel changes in council and so the pressure was off for a while on the shed. Unfortunately, Gordon next door got really sick with cancer and there was an increasing likelihood that he would need to use the ambulance to Bombala Hospital occasionally. This may not seem relevant, but when the river was in flood, our neighbours’ only way to get to Bombala was through our place as that avoided crossing the river. But our place had a back creek which also rose to more than a metre deep.

I talked to Garry. He came up with a plan. Build a bridge over your creek he said. I had images of using a shipping container placed on the high banks to span the creek. It would work and containers were only $100 plus delivery. Garry liked to do things very cheaply and always read the adverts in the Canberra Times for bargains. I was sure he memorised many of them for revisiting on a rainy day. A metal H-shape beam from a decommissioned overhead crane was advertised a couple of weeks ago, he said, and it was only $20 though it must have cost $100s. I didn’t get his drift. If it’s long enough to span the creek when cut in half, I could weld in some spacers between the halves and you have a roadway. He got on the phone. The beam was big enough. The selling firm in Fyshwick would do the cutting for nothing and an adjacent company had a truck with a hoist big enough to load the metal onto our truck. The hoist driver would do it for a case of VB.

Garry said we can do it tomorrow. I need a day off work. Of course he had to get permission, so I gave it to him.

19 Rural Fire Brigade

I was so embarrassed next day when I called the Captain of the Rural Fire Brigade. Had he any suggestions for getting my tractor out of a deep bog? He told me many stories quite similar to mine that were later added to when the whole valley learnt I was an idiot. He knew I was a weekender and had to be back at work in Canberra ASAP so suggested I leave it with him.

The following weekend I found my tractor sitting quietly under a big Manna gum near the bog, covered in dried mud but otherwise OK. The bog, disengaged from its prize, had closed again with only a sandy creek bubbling from the grave as evidence of the adventure. Clearly I had destroyed some spring system or aquifer probably thousands of years old. The only water that could be feeding the boggy lens was 300m uphill where a small creek disappeared into the ground. I apologised to all the watching spirits and declared never to be bad again. I was ignored and the trees turned their backs.

The tractor started first time after a copious injection of ‘Aerostart’ into the engine air intake. Driving away I passed two deep boggy ruts I hadn’t seen before. The RFB report indicated two people had attended the emergency in the 4WD fire truck. They had become bogged whilst manoeuvring into position and had had to winch their vehicle out by attaching the cable to a large tree. The winch was then used to extricate the tractor, anchoring their vehicle to said tree. The gurgling sucks and sighs as the tractor emerged must have been huge.

I became a member of the Creewah RFB and she after a few years became the brigade secretary as well as editor of the newsletter.

18 Superphosphate spreading

Attaching the 6-bag super spreader onto the 3-point linkage and PTO of the tractor wasn’t easy for someone who didn’t understand the devices. The two main lifting arms had to match the width and height of the brackets on the spreader, the angle adjusting arm had to be right so the PTO meshed with the drive to spin the thrower, and the spreader should lift up straight and not bounce around when operating. There were telescopic arms with pins and big screws for distance adjustment and I didn’t know whether I had all the required bits.

By the time I had the spreader in position on the tractor I could have spread the pile by hand and it would have taken less physical effort. I knew I had to do it though otherwise someone would say “why did you waste money on that tractor”. I pulled the lever to raise the spreader. There was just a loud humming noise but no action. I tried to raise the massive blade on the front of the tractor. Same result. Clearly the hydraulics had expired. I shouldn’t have bought the tractor. It turned out the hydraulic oil tank was empty and after a refill everything worked, though hesitantly at first.

I bounced the tractor the 1.5 km or so up to the blue-tarpaulin pile and started loading. There are a lot of shovels-full in 6 bags and the spreader lip was high. I bounced the loaded tractor back to the River Paddock and we were away. The spreader was fantastic covering an acre in no time. By mid-afternoon I had the whole Paddock done and the pile had enough left for a couple more runs.

I was so cocky. I decided to take a short cut back through the Middle and Top Paddocks to the diminished pile and leave the tractor there overnight and finish off tomorrow. The route by the Long Paddock road was too far. That season was wet, the creeks were flowing strongly and the river had been in flood twice. It was really quite a good season to apply fertilisers. No problems through the Paddocks, the tractor pulled beautifully, until we had to slow down approaching the pile from a new angle, down a steep slope. The brakes didn’t do anything but still no problems as I was in control. At the bottom, the ground wobbled and bounced as we started to cross it, the surface broke, and quite quickly the whole tractor sank right down to the engine. The big blade at the front was fully immersed in wet soil. A spout of water a metre high burst out of the ground at the side. We were going nowhere. It was time for a cup of tea anyway.

17 More gems from the list

It appeared that large amounts of different types of clover had been spread around the farm along with the essential superphosphate during Torsten’s reign. Clover needs phosphorus to enable it to fix nitrogen from the air and thus fertilise the soil. Creewah soils are very nitrogen deficient even though the Acacias/wattles and the many types of native peas try hard to address that problem. Torsten had used contractors to supply and spread the superphosphate but the amounts supplied and spread didn’t match. Either Torsten had been ripped off or there was a large pile of superphosphate lying idle on the property somewhere.

While wandering I had been interested in a blue tarpaulin attached tightly over a small hillock in the Mountain Paddock but hadn’t been interested enough to poke under it till now. It was the un-spread superphosphate, several $100 worth. I was overjoyed. This gave me an excuse to learn to use the super-spreader on the tractor.

16 Torsten's list

During the hour or so that Torsten and I had spent together prior to our purchase of Wombalano he had told me many things, like how to start and run the fire pump that lifted water from the river to the 8000 gallon concrete tank sitting on a small hill 200 metres away. Like where the 2 inch water pipe ran and how he had dug it in and his plans for linking in to Gordon’s similar line as a fire emergency measure. Like about the kit 4000 gallon tank that had been delivered but never unwrapped and where I would find the thousands of nuts and bolts needed to fasten it together. He told me where the rolls of spare irrigation pipe were, the wire and netting for fencing and explained the tools I was inheriting. They had many expansion plans and had bought in sufficient materials to do them. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel he said.

Over the following months and years I got to know Torsten intimately despite never communicating ever again. He was methodical, so once you learned the method, you knew he would always use it. He spaced things equally, kept his old nuts and bolts separate from his screws and nails and had categorised them in sizes. He overbought everything so there were spares. He made lists. The lists were in neat folders and arranged alphabetically. He obviously went to a different school from me, or perhaps he listened instead of looking at girls.

While browsing through one folder I found an envelope containing the labels from all the plants they had tried to grow. The labels were numbered and there was a diagram of where the numbers were placed on the farm. Very many things had died or soon would. Grapes, many fruit trees that would thrive in Sydney, nut trees like almonds and hazels and a couple of walnuts. They had spent a fortune. Included were 5 varieties of raspberry, 5 plants of each.

We grew a few raspberries in the cold of Canberra so I thought they might be alive somewhere. I followed Torsten’s diagram to the Middle Paddock where there was just long grass. No signs of the bushes. They should have towered above the grass. I started up the enormous trimmer that was part of the walk-in-walk-out deal using the nylon cutter rather than the blade that was big enough to fell a small tree. Sadly, Torsten hadn’t bought the plough attachment. I started cutting the grass and within a few minutes had located a very small raspberry plant. The others were equidistant and due east and west of the first. All 25 had survived the 6 years since they had been planted, but hadn’t grown or spread. They weren’t on a dripper line like the dead and miserable fruit trees and the seriously bored-out blackcurrant bushes. They had got this far so they might as well be rescued and treated nicely with at least a dripper line and a bit of a weed and fertilise.

She said it would be nice to grow raspberries. Then we can make raspberry jam like your mother makes. She didn’t mean my mother who never made jam though she was great on other stuff, but rather her mother. Her family had a strange tradition of referring to their parents by “Yer mother/father”. They were all pretty keen on their parents so it wasn’t an attempt to distance themselves from that relationship. They still do it which is pretty weird. Maybe an Adelaide thing to do with expurgating any convict links which of course they didn’t have.

15 Selling the wool

I asked Johnny how to sell the wool. Take it into TWG on Polo Flat in Cooma, ask for an estimate and if you don’t like it take across the road to the other agent. What should I get? Should be a fair amount, he said, because it’s beaut wool, about 19 micron. I borrowed John’s trailer and with some difficulty rolled the bale and bits up some planks onto it. It looked strange perched up behind the Alfa.

I recalled Garry’s story about when he sold his first wool clip, just 3 bales, and driving into the Agent’s car park and queuing behind semi trailers stacked high with wool. How much you got they asked. Three he replied which they mistook for 300.

The agents weighed it, opened it and pulled out a few hands full. Nice wool! Who’s your shearer? I told them. How did you get him they asked, he retired? Did he class it? I said he and John did that. They approved. It seemed both were well known and considered good enough to delve no further. I had been in good hands. Paper work was filled in with unit, price per unit, amount and total. There were 3 categories and it all came to $1210.

Inputs were $850 for the sheep which included the agent’s fees and delivery plus $45 for insecticide and $100 for shearing so I was $215 ahead in just 3 months of farming. Plus I still had 34 sheep, mainly carrying lambs. I would have maybe $1600 income next year. Farming was money for jam.

14 Deals with a shearer

Johnny and Rosie had been really wonderful to us so when dropped in next morning I wanted to pay them back generously without being excessive. I had decided to give them twice what they asked me for. How much do I owe you I asked? Whatever you think it’s worth said Johnny. I jumped back mentally to our year in India. Then you never knew the going rate and the hope was you would offer a very large amount based on costs in your own country. The other party would then look very hurt and claim the going rate was twice that. The final agreed amount would be somewhere between your original offer and their claim. You were ripped off.

I had found out that the going rate was $1.60 per sheep. Doubling would make it $3.20 and the full sum for the day would be about $100. I asked if that was OK or should it be more or less. He looked hurt but said it was OK. I’ll drop you off a case of VB next time I’m passing, I said, and a bottle of scotch for Rosie. He looked slightly brighter. Total sum $120 and the cheque was written.

I thought we had finished but he said he had a few things for sale and was I interested? There was a fold-up wire spinner, just what I needed for the fence mending around the Mountain Paddock, a couple of heavy duty chains one of which was clearly from an old bullock cart and the shearing gear. I took the spinner and chains for $40. I later discovered that the spinner was from my property, given to Johnny by Torsten as part of a job lot during his clear out. It really was back to India, but I was pleased.

13 Shearing

It was three months after we had bought the sheep and it seemed time to make some money instead of just spending. I had no idea how to go about shearing. Davo had introduced me to my other near neighbour John who Davo declared was uncrowned Creewah Mayor; certainly royalty. I asked him for advice. John was a man of many parts who together with Jill had lived several previous lives. Among these were policeman, postman, shearer and gardener and landscaper. They ran sheep and cattle on their place. John’s favourite greeting wasn’t ‘Good morning’, but ‘Do you want a hand?’ These few words kept the royalty very busy.

He reckoned we should ask Johnny about shearing. He lived with his partner Rosie in the small stone house by the river where it was crossed by New Line Road. The corrugated iron sheds opposite his place were shearing sheds that had been built by his father and grandfather. They had owned much of the land around the area. Johnny had been a shearer but had retired to concentrate more closely on more serious things in life. Davo’s comment was ‘He’s a wreck’.

Johnny didn’t look a wreck. He had sharp eyes, black hair with no trace of grey and a slender body that looked about 40. I had seen him and Rosie several times as we drove past their place. I had thought Rosie might be his mother. They liked to sit outside in the sunshine and take in the view while they enjoyed liquid refreshment. They waved at everyone who passed. Johnny agreed to come out of retirement and shear the sheep. It would likely take him two days as his back was stuffed. He would start on Saturday about 8.30. Put them in the sheds late Friday so they’ll be dry to shear, he said.

When John said ‘Do you want a hand’ it often meant he would take charge and you would give him a hand. He came around with his dark brown Kelpie-style dog called Tuffy on Friday afternoon and it was on. The dog without much help had the sheep in a tight controlled group in no time and we set off to walk them through Gordon’s then Johnnie’s place to the sheds. The sheep were coaxed into the pens in the sheds to spend the night.

I like to be early for anything, so she and I arrived at the sheds at 8.15 am to check out the poor sheep. They were standing quietly, stirring a little as we came in. They knew more about what was going to happen than we did. Johnny appeared a little after 8.30. We had to move the big diesel generator from his house to the sheds. It would drive the shearing gear. That completed he turned on the radio to country music, set to sharpening blades, oiling and assembling his handpiece and attaching it to the driving arm.

What do I do I asked? Sweep the floor, he said, and make sure it really is clean and then clean the table and move it onto the floor. The wooden slatted table was where each fleece would be thrown so the oily edges could be removed as second class wool. She and I followed the instructions. Rosie appeared and told us about classing and pretty much everything else about the process including that some of our sheep would soon be lambing. You have beaut sheep she said. Nicest around here.

Johnny went into the pen, grabbed a sheep by its front legs and dragged it on its back to lie quietly between his knees under the shearing gear. The starting string was pulled, the handpiece started rattling and humming and within seconds the sheep had had a haircut and its rear end was scalped. The bits were on the floor. They had to go in separate empty fertiliser bags hanging on the wall. Meanwhile the fleece came off. It was beautiful to watch the long gentle strokes that peeled the wool away in one big piece. The sheep was mesmerised by Johnny’s touch. It seems I was now supposed to pick up the fleece and throw it onto the table like a sheet onto a bed, outside up. I needed a lesson. It hit the roof, landed upside down in a crumpled heap. Rosie reckoned it wasn’t too bad for a first try. I didn’t get any better though.

Luckily John and Jill arrived at that point. Do you need a hand? Silly question. He took over throwing, string pulling, bagging, fleece pressing in a wool pack suspended in a green machine in the corner and probably lots of other things I didn’t notice. It all went really well until Johnny stopped the gear at about 10.30. It was morning tea time. Rosie brought out the thermos and Johnny went for a leak and for his own private tea over in the house. We only found out much later that food was our responsibility. We didn’t have a clue. Rosie knocked up some thick sandwiches.

It all started again about 20 minutes later. The sheep were even more relaxed in Johnnie’s hands than previously. It seemed he only had to breathe on them to make them almost comatose. We were supposed to spend two days on the exercise but it was finished before lunch. The retired shearer had done a brilliant job and the sheep were now shining white without a trace of blood anywhere. The dog could take them back home. One wool pack was bursting full of fleeces and there were a few bags containing the dags and other extras. Johnny said come over tomorrow with the cheque.

12 Weather

My dad had been a weather measurer. As kids we had been stood outside and told to observe the smoke coming out of the neighbour’s chimney. If it goes straight up there’s no wind and if the chimney pot blows off that’s a 60 miles per hour wind he said. This was the Beaufort scale.

He explained how to measure temperature with a thermometer and to calculate humidity from another thermometer that wore a wet sock on its bulb. These instruments lived in the garden in a slatted white box that he made. Rain was measured in a calibrated tube. There was a wind direction indicator with NSEW letters that he cut out of a copper sheet, but no cock like some people had. The indicator turned round on top of a very high post in the garden that held one end of the wire aerial for his home-made short-wave radio system, the other end was the house chimney.

All jobs were allocated at our house and so the kids had a week about routine for doing the weather at 8 am before going to school. The numbers were carefully written in columns in a note book with the date at the left and the barometer reading at the right. My dad was a school teacher.

I couldn’t see much point in this routine as the notebooks just accumulated in a cupboard. It was something you did though like getting up and going to bed. Much later I summarised and graphed the daily patterns for a few years. Dad was thrilled and made a frame to hold and display this work on the wall, initially at his school and then at home when he had retired. We established the hottest of summer days over those years was 25°C and the coldest night was -4°C. The Gulf Stream worked then. Those wet chilly mornings clutching a pencil in a Yorkshire garden seemed to have some point at last because we had a result.

That background suddenly had a future because I needed to know about Creewah weather. How well would the chestnuts grow, could I grow other things, how often were the sheep likely to get fly strike? Jon Fox had told me that the only important weather things for growing vegetables were frost and rain. Frost defined the start and end of the season and rain how much you could grow in that time. He had intermittent records of both going back 15 years. It turned out that other neighbours had more detailed rainfall records for a similar period and the families at South Bukalong property had been measuring and recording rainfall since 1860. Our other neighbours would ask for those numbers when next they visited.

The graph is what the rainfall numbers showed. It was all over the place with Gordon’s generous 40 inches happening in the 1870s, 1890, 1930s and1950s. But there were many very dry times of less than 20 inches. Everybody talked in inches and points even though everybody had a rain gauge that measured mm. This required considerable dexterity at mental arithmetic that was beyond me. Just divide points by 4 and that’s mm I was told. So I guess points are mm multiplied by 4. The imperial measurement system was alive and well in our area even though it officially went 30 years before.

The second graph is in our more familiar millimetres and has my other near neighbour’s Creewah rainfall data added. Even though Creewah is only 30 or so kilometres away from South Bukalong the rainfall here is much higher.

Nobody seemed to collect temperatures, except for the occasional Jon Fox frosts so here was my chance to emulate my late father with my own weather station. I made a Stephenson Screen, copying the picture in my hazy memory, and filled it with a clockwork 1960s, 7-day recording thermo-hydrograph that was government surplus as well as a max-min thermometer so I could check the thermo-hydrograph calibrations. It also got a temperature data logger for if I forgot to read the charts. My dad smiled down.

Doing a fast forward, 5 years later the records showed there was no week in the year when a frost couldn’t happen at Creewah. So you might be enjoying a Christmas pudding in the boiling heat and it might suddenly freeze on your plate as an inversion layer swept down from the Snowy Mountains.

11 A job for the tractor

It kept being wet, bits of rain and mists and dews. One morning in the mist I went out to check the sheep. One didn’t run away, it just lay on the ground looking miserable. It struggled up only when I got very close. It didn’t smell that clinical lanolin fragrance of clean damp wool that gets to the back of the nose, or of sheep droppings, but of rotting meat. I caught it easily and laid it down. The smell was coming from a dark wet patch of wool along its breach. I poked in with my fingers and out wriggled white maggots, some tumbling onto the grass.

I went over the river jumping between rocks to the neighbour’s place. He had had 100 or so sheep for around 20 years. He said it was fly strike. With hand shears and a shaker of white powder he came back to check. After cutting away all the wet wool he powdered the exposed flesh. It was raw and bleeding. Maggots wriggled out of the meat escaping the powder. They were eating the sheep alive. Davo didn’t give this sheep much hope. It was too far gone. He said he jetted his sheep in such damp weather to prevent the flies laying their eggs and to kill any maggots that hatched. It is worse when the sheep had a lot of wool on like mine. Thick damp warm wool is perfect for hatching the eggs.

Jetting was hosing the sheep to dripping point with a high pressure spray of insecticide. He would lend me his Ferroni pump to do the job. You need Vetrazin insecticide, he said. This was exciting because it meant that I could put the sheep in the yards again, drive the tractor down, attach the pump to the PTO, and do my first real sheep thing. It had to be tomorrow because sourcing the insecticide was difficult as all farmers in the area were having flystrike problems. They had some in Dalgety that I could buy today.

Late afternoon we moved the sheep down to the yards where they would spend the night. It was easy now we knew what to do and the sheep were familiar with the paddock. Early next morning the red monster was started up, belched its dense blue smoke and we manoeuvred noisily down to the yards. The sheep huddled into a corner furthest from the tractor making a bunch so small they were hardly there.

The Ferroni and PTO converted the frothing Vetrazin solution in a 44 gallon drum into a high pressure jet that the sheep had to face, five at a time, in the race. Their wool became a straggly dripping dish cloth. They were miserably but I was happy. Life was good.

10 Local magic

Most of the properties in the area are around 100 acres. That is a nice size to attract a wide range of buyers. Real farmers with properties measured in square miles are totally disinterested. We had no idea initially how diverse the owners were and why they had moved there.

Shortly after buying our place we were invited by Jon Fox to come over for morning tea. He wanted to welcome us to the valley on behalf of the 80 or so local land-holders. He had been an original member of the Creewah Bushfire Brigade so was high on the civics pecking order. We were met by a 70 year old who acted a bit like a professor, though he had floppy gaping shorts and a comfortable stomach. He apologised for not having raised the Union Jack up his flag pole to recognise my English origins. Morning tea matched the image with freshly-baked pikelets and scones and a choice of home-made jam. That over, Jon read his poetry to us in the sun-filled lounge while we absorbed the expansive views over the river. A photo of us at that time would have been sepia with a slightly out of focus oval border. It was slightly unreal.

Neighbours explained that Jon’s life was more complicated than ours. Though he did have a repetitive ordinary side like us, growing and selling vegetables and his jams and pickles at local markets, he had recently lost his partner. This had changed him from a happy to a sad person. As in the poem, his partner was a man who had had a sex change and then taken up with another person and moved away. It seems they had been attracted to the valley by its beauty that had held them in a golden haze for many years. Love drove their property. This was a bizarre story for us.

A second same-sex couple down-stream from us had a similar story. They had fallen in love and moved from the city to the valley because they were wrapt by its beauty. One of the partners had a family from a previous marriage. The story was repeated again by two more same sex, but female couples. As it turned out, only a few of the owners were gay.

John and Jill warned us about drinking the river water. It turns people strange they said jokingly.

As we got to know more of the owners, it seemed that only a few had decided to try to be farmers or use the land in some way to make a living. Most had an alternative income or were bringing some wealth with them from ‘outside’ or were on war or disability pensions. One grew a large crop of marijuana under the tree canopy on his block but was caught before making lots of money. Many were weekenders or lifestyle owners. All were attracted to the area by its magical beauty, its native forests, its river and its granite tors.

9 How do you grow chestnuts?

Leo knew lots about preparing and eating chestnuts but very little about growing them. By contrast our library man had planted, grafted and harvested chestnuts as a young man in Italy. His main advice was get good grafted stock at the outset. Individual nuts bought at the supermarket when planted may grow into strong trees, but they will likely produce a very small crop and that may be impossible to peel. You will have lost several years just to save a few dollars.

I trawled the web for suppliers of grafted stock. I went to garden centres to be horrified at the price of stock. Then, at a Fire Brigade meeting in Creewah, Tom, who had recently done some contract Chestnut planting, suggested I should try Ian Widdowson in Cooma. He’s cheap and reliable.

Ian was an interesting character hailing from New Zealand who had a garden centre that was a potting shed in his own garden. But he was a wealth of advice and knew everybody that had anything to do with anything. He told me to prepare my holes a few months in advance of planting and replace the mixed soil to settle. Holes should be half a metre deep by wide incorporating a few handfuls of peat moss (she was horrified), dynamic lifter, gypsum and a potash and phosphorus source in the lower layers. He would order in the 2-year old grafted stock from Victoria, 25 of a short season variety and 25 of a mid season line. Next year I would get 50 more after seeing how the first batch went. They would be $17 to $18 each.
Marking out and digging the holes was easy in the light sandy soil especially as it kept raining. Gordon told me that the year’s rainfall was normal because normal was a generous 40 inches. He had lived there for close on 20 years. I was surprised as work colleagues had suggested that my place was in the Bombala rain shadow.

When the trees arrived I planted the lot in a day in the prepared soil holes, watered them in well, and protected each one inside a UV-stable clear plastic sock about half a metre high by 40 cm diameter called “Grotube”. That was supposed to keep the inside warm and humid and prevent rabbits and wombats from chewing the saplings. Three tomato stakes home-made from silver wattle (Acacia dealbata) collected in the local bush kept each sock vertical and rigid. Now I could sit back for a few years and wait for the profits to start rolling in. The business plan was right on schedule.

8 Cecil

Garry argued that the 34 ewes were a godsend. If I had a decent ram I could at least double my flock annually for no cost and sell any surplus lambs to the meat or wool industry. Murray reckoned lambs were more trouble, particularly for an amateur like me, and the wool clip each year would be closer to half what wethers would provide. At that time wool was good money. Good authority estimated the flock average at 19 microns, so it was going to be good money.

I had known Garry for around 20 years and he’d always been enthusiastic and proactive. He was in an especially good and proactive mood that day because, as he put it, his very pretty wife had let him do it. Nothing could hold him down. By morning tea time he had secured a 15 micron ram for $50. Sure it was old and had only one eye, but at least that eye was still randy. Cecil was on the scrap heap at a nearby farm where there was a large flock of much younger rams. The owner was my tractor delivery man. I could pick him up tomorrow.

Garry said, I’ll collect him in my trailer and you take the trailer on to your place. I had the feeling that things were a bit out of control, that my future was being painted into a corner. Sounds good I replied and gave him the $50 to pass on. That night she reminded me that I didn’t know anything about sheep and even less about lambs. How do you look after lambs, she said? It’s going to cost a fortune in Vet fees.

Cecil was beautiful, fairly small but his fleece was so white and like silk, and his face was beaten up like he’d been through the wars. He stood commandingly in the trailer and looked at me as I hitched up to the car. It’s only 200 km I reassured him.

It rained heavily all the way so he was a very cold and miserable ram when we arrived but rapidly perked up when he saw 34 young ewes, some with superb bodies. At least, that’s what the sparking eye said. He hadn’t allowed for the fence between him and them but maybe he just enjoyed looking.

7 Herding the sheep

I was actually more experienced in handling sheep than I pretended. Once, at thirteen, when I was working on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales during school holidays, I had been told to move a flock of about 100 scraggy Yorkshire sheep from one field, down a lane, across a road and into another field. Just find the leader, grab hold of his ear and the others will follow. I was nonplussed thinking I would be helped by a dog, but that was it. I decided in retrospect this was an initiation ceremony and that the farmer and all the hands were killing themselves laughing behind the hedge.

I started by walking the route and opening the gates in readiness. Which was the lead sheep, they were just a bunch? I grabbed hold of the ear of a big one. It just shook me off and took off in the wrong direction. Meanwhile behind me the others were streaming out of the gate and down the lane. The cars stopped when they crossed the road and that was it. They didn’t need me at all.

A week after ordering my new flock, we drove down our farm lane arriving from Canberra, and parked the car. There was a flock of sheep in the River Paddock grazing peacefully just like sheep are meant to do. We leaned on the gate, took in the scene and the sunshine, and felt a relaxed achievement. The note from the agent accompanying the all-up bill of $850 said the 34 animals had been drenched and crutched and were ready to roll. I actually counted 35 so we had a freebie, but was later told by a neighbour that farmers count sheep by summing the legs and dividing by four, so I could have my maths wrong.

The reason for putting them in the River Paddock was because there were small yards and a race in one corner where they could be handled. The next day we decided to yard them so we could have a better look. My long experience told me they would go in there without trouble.
Just in case of having minor difficulties I asked the neighbours, father, mother and two kids if they could help. The plan was to make a line across the 300 metre-wide paddock and slowly walk the sheep towards the yards. Joke. Almost 50 m between people was a steal for the sheep that poured through the gaps time after time. They were much fitter than any of us and much better at bisecting angles. After 2 hours we gave up. The sheep won. The yards were in the wrong place.

Everyone knows sheep are dumb. She and I discussed the plan for tomorrow. We would win. First part was to erect a long fence that funnelled the sheep towards the yards; a right-angled corner was useless. Second part was a movable fence that would close off the head of the funnel once they were in. Third part was to have two herders, she and I, and take it quietly. We went to bed confident; after all I had been master of 100 sheep in my youth.
My fencing was architecturally unattractive but the plan worked perfectly.

In the yards came a revelation. All the sheep were ewes and the freebie was a large lamb to one of them. Time to try Plan B.

6 Ordering 30 merino wethers

I had to get serious about sheep to fulfil the Tax requirements. My work colleague Murray, a farmer himself by upbringing over near Ardlethan, told me I couldn’t go past Merino wethers, boys that would never grow into rams. Get a certain-number-of-teeth wethers. I wrote that number down. They will give you a good wool clip for about 5 years and you’ll be way ahead. Ewes can be a pain.

Following the advice I fronted up at the Stock and Station Agents in Bombala. I asked for what Murray had told me, about 30 fine-wool merino wethers. I had memorised it beforehand from the piece of paper. Where’s your property, what’s it called, how long you had merinos, how many microns, who’s your shearer? I admitted to not being a farmer but that I was very excited about getting my first flock of sheep and I was totally in their hands. No worries the agent said, I’ll drop them off in the next couple of weeks. I gave the instructions to leave them in the River Paddock. No price was discussed, he would look after me. She looked worried.

5 Every farm must have a tractor

I asked around at work if anybody knew anybody who had a tractor for sale very cheap. Almost everybody at work knew that a farm must have a tractor otherwise it’s an imposter farm or worse still, a hobby farm. I was quite scared that my farm would be labelled a hobby farm, implying I was playing rather than working. Mary-Anne asked why I needed a tractor; a typical woman question. She told me her father had a tractor on his place and all he did was drive it around the boggy paddocks never seeming to actually use it for anything productive. I ignored her question and gave her a difficult database to work on.

The first vehicle I ever drove was a tractor officially called a Fordson, but it did have other names. It lived in a field at the top of a slope so it could be started by running down the hill. If that didn’t work the tiny petrol tank was part filled and switched in and the handle at the front cranked. The handle had a vicious wrist-breaking kick-back. As soon as the engine fired, a kerosene tank became the fuel source and the precious petrol was tipped back into its container for next time. It was a joy to drive for a fourteen year old having only one foot pedal (brake and clutch combined) and a throttle controlled by pulling a piece of wire. It was so tempting to try to use the brake down the steep hill into the village when being pushed by a huge load of hay on a trailer. That released the clutch and off you sped, totally out of control for the stop sign and right angle bend at the bottom. The farm where I worked had three tractors and it was less than 100 acres. On that count My Farm should have four.

Garry found a suitable tractor. It was similar to his but newer and bigger: a 1955 International with 3-point linkage, PTO, a huge blade at the front and a cab so you could keep working in the rain. He was enthusiastic particularly about the PTO. I had to do some quiet reading to find out what that was. He reckoned the owner might throw in some extra agricultural implements at the price. These included a chisel plough, harrow, super spreader and hoist. It’s a bargain he said. We drove over to near Goulburn to see this bargain. Danny wasn’t expecting us. The tractor had a flat tyre, no battery and looked very lonely sitting in the middle of a big unproductive paddock. Garry was smart. He had brought a battery, some nostril-tingling Aerostart spray and never went anywhere without a small air compressor. In about 20 minutes the red dragon was blowing dense blue smoke out of its chimney. Danny was visibly impressed probably thinking it would never go again.

Take it for a drive said Danny. Can you show me first because I’m a Fordson man I replied? I clung on while we bounced wildly across this seemingly smooth field. He demonstrated its prodigious power in top gear by rolling two cars over and into a dam. They disappeared in a gurgle of brown and green bubbles. My go included kangaroo hopping the first 10 metres, and being scared.

The extras were thrown in for free with the full sum coming out at $2,500. And it seemed a pity to leave without a couple of gates and a sheep crush, also free. $2,500 for a shed full of rubbish seemed good at the time. I was ecstatic. Garry and I drove back to Canberra full of the future.

Garry continued to provide amazing service. He had a real-sheep- farmer neighbour who was prepared to move the tractor from Goulburn to Creewah, a mere 300 km, for $500. I had to guide him to both ends and load and unload the beast onto his truck. He would do the rest. A high bank was found, the tractor positioned at the top and the truck backed into a receiving position; easy after Danny’s fence had been rearranged. The reverse process at my place completed the deal.

Mary-Anne still wanted to know what I was going to use the dragon for. She got another database to complete. I avoided the question to myself by vigorous activity, raising the dull red of the dragon to a glorious deep sheen with a can of Repco Heavy-Cut Duco Polish. I pumped grease into hidden nipples and topped up oils and hydraulic fluid. Gordon next door, sensing my lack of purpose with the new machine, generously asked if I would like to level his drive and the area for his unbuilt garage. I enthusiastically spent half a day on it finally bouncing and rattling away with the whole place looking like a ploughed field.

4 The business plan: mixed farming

She kept asking how my business plan was progressing. I said I was working on it mentally. It was pretty obvious that if I could be considered a Primary Producer by the tax department we would save heaps of money because our loan would be tax deductible. This was well before GST during the time of cheap diesel and the superphosphate bounty for farmers. Farmers also got huge tax reductions on purchases of recognised farm machinery. Some four wheel drive cars fell into this category, though the pansy 4WD vehicles that rich people parked on their front lawns to test out their off-road capabilities were excluded. The list of potential benefits was long.
I did a bit of reading. We would need a largish flock of sheep, or cattle, or we could plant lots of pines or grow lucerne for stock feed. These were all recognised tax-deductible activities for our area. None fitted; the part of the property that could be used for these activities was too small. Most of it was native trees and bush and even if cleared it would be too steep for arable farming.
Leo, Spanish by birth and always lateral, reckoned I should grow chestnuts. Australia imported the vast proportion of its chestnuts so there was lots of space in the market. A decent chestnut tree at 10 to 80 years will produce far more than 100 kg nuts each year. Nuts sell at $4 per kg, towards $10 for best quality material, so each tree would yield at least $400. 100 trees would bring in $40,000 annually for almost no work. The investment required was only $15 to 20 per grafted tree.
Because the lead-in time for profit from chestnuts would be 10 years, I would need a small flock of sheep to provide cash flow in the meantime. A small flock meant at least 30.
The Tax department liked this plan and approved my detailed 5-year schedule as being suitable for the area and the size of the property. Suddenly I was a Primary Producer with the world and a real farm at my feet. She reminded me a few times I didn’t know anything about chestnuts or sheep. She was right. I looked pretty stupid later when her brother asked me the DSE for my property. What’s DSE? He looked concerned too in a ‘my sister married a black sheep’ way.

3 Deciding to buy our farm

I like it she said, it’s beautiful. I liked it too though wasn’t saying. The place brings back memories of camping with the redbacks in Bombala, she said, when we went to watch that full eclipse of the sun. We had stood there with the kids and a million other people wearing T-shirts that proclaimed hopefully “I watched the eclipse at Bombala” and eventually we did. Remarkably, right on cue around lunchtime, the shadow appeared on the horizon and rippled silently forwards over the woods, the paddocks and eventually enveloped us in eerie green and orange semi darkness. Everything was still. Not a sound, not a movement. But the shadow crept away and it was light and noise returned. The birds, cows and sheep were all suddenly talking again. And little Ben said, “Mum can we have breakfast now”. It was early afternoon.
We don’t often reminisce in the car, she usually sleeps, but soon we were back to reality. We can’t afford it. Do we really need it? You can’t grow Toona so what’s the point? What about the kids? I’ve decided to buy I said irrationally. We just have to cut out luxuries like overseas holidays to be able to afford it. What a turn around, back flip and reversal. And after considerable further negotiations we did buy it. The house was taken as security on a loan spanning 10 years, joining the loan we already had on the house. We’ll be right I said. Life’s more exciting with a few adventures and challenges. She was nervous. It was going to cut heavily into our stable and easy-going lives. My mum threw in $2,000 to reduce stress. The idea of a farm brought back happy memories of her childhood when her father had a few chooks and a vegie patch and of rides on his shoulders. He left her for the Great War when she was 5 and was buried in Palestine in 1917. The small medallion he sent her from the war was always kept close until she died well into her 90s. Most other things had been given away or discarded by that time.

2 Finding a Hobby Farm

Where this place would be exactly was anybody’s guess. The country changes so much from the cold wind-swept 1000m high Nimmitabel to the almost coastal Bega with its rolling hills and dairy farms. Still, we followed the directions. After Nimmitabel head for Bombala and turn left onto New Line Road. The road is gravel for 22 km. Cross the Bombala River, go down a goat track 1 km further and we will be there to greet you, show you around and provide lunch.

New Line Road was scenic, no doubt, with big Manna gums, Snow gums and Peppermints and the occasional wallaby raced across the pot-holed gravel in front of the Alfa to complete the postcard. But we weren’t anywhere near Bega. Dropping down towards the river the trees became huge, a stately stand of Messmate stringy barks, so it was clear this place really could grow trees, even though they weren’t Toona. She thought it was beautiful.
Sadly, the goat track into the property was fringed not by awesome towering E. viminalis gums, holding up the sky, but by sad and scrappy Snow gums, called E. pauciflora because of their supposed pathetic flowers. The signs were bad. Then we were out into tussock grass Poa sieberiana paddocks and a gate that said “Wombalano”. She mused it might be owned by English people, homesick for the ‘wombals of wimbledon’. Anyhow, there were the beaming owners, a German couple who had emigrated to Australia to escape the cold war and bought Wombalano to be well above the waves when the ice caps melted. They had decided to sell after 6 years ownership because they wanted to join their grown up children now living in Queensland.

Strange why people buy bush places and feel they have to rationalise their actions to others. I mean who would ever believe that anyone would want to move to live near their children. So we sat in this tin garage furnished as a kitchen and bedroom and lit with an elegant glass chandelier and talked about the property. The river gurgled past just outside and the birds argued in the bushes. After Nescafe, beansprout sandwiches and yogurt and a superficial summary of the lives, accomplishments, failures and future plans of the four of us it was time to explore. I was negative but it was new country for us and we might as well make the day into a nice outing. He couldn’t walk with us because he was recovering from a recently broken ankle, snapped in a rabbit hole, and she was a naive painter, whatever that is, not a walker. Go up to the Hanging Valley, he said, and if you are energetic you could climb the hill to the Hidden Valley. He pointed the way following the Long Paddock. We were comforted to know that if we got lost, we could shelter in a gingerbread house that would rise magically out of the descending mist.

Despite its name, the Hanging Valley wasn’t, but it was magical. Tall white-stemmed E. viminalis gums stood silently like giant celery as though at a non-violent protest meeting, side by side. No foliage except a sparse green fringe right at the top of those stalks. No undergrowth to struggle through, just these white sticks. A small creek wended its way through a depression. Being keen to burn up some energy emanating from the bean sprouts, I dragged her up the steep hill above the Hanging Valley. The occasional rocks grew in number and size as we climbed, finally capping the escarpment like giant black molars known to normal people as Granite Tors. We were both having difficulty breathing so after sitting on a small tor to take in the view across the Creewah Valley we headed back. The Hidden Valley could stay that way.Torsten and Victoria told us not to hurry with a decision, but they did have other interested purchasers and so an answer within a few days would help. They would throw in the caravan at the price and everything we had seen in the dwelling and on the property. It was a walk in walk out deal, a funny term completely new to me. The idea of owning a chandelier was very inviting. And the place did have a new and enormous shed dwarfing her father’s shed 20 times over, though no tennis court views or meter maids. And the shed had housed their 150 Tukiedale sheep over a previous winter when the property was cut off by deep snow for several weeks. The imagined Toona saplings were wilting behind the first white flurry.

1 Midlife Crisis

They thought it was mid-life crisis. I was 45, irritable, couldn’t settle, knew I needed something but didn’t know what it was and sniped at her whenever the smallest opportunity arose. I started a peculiar behaviour of patting trees as I passed them on the way to work. Nobody saw this because it was in the Black Mountain Nature Reserve frequented only by crazy fast runners like Rob Decastella, and then at speed.

Maybe I needed a lifestyle change, maybe my own big space, like a property in the country, instead of a restrictive small suburban house. It had never been restrictive before. It had a nice little shed where I could do my wood carving, mend my bike and be surrounded by big-breasted centrefolds from Playboy on the walls. And with the large bench, vice, and lots of hand tools, was perfect for doing just about any maintenance oddies around the house and for inventions. She said I should be content. Her dad had been happy with almost exactly this set-up for 40 years so what was wrong with me. I pointed out in weak defence that he had meter maids from Surfer’s Paradise pinned on his wall and a partial view of a tennis court out the back.

So I had to rationalise this strange and sudden need. The gist was that Toona australis, the beautiful Australian cedar that takes a couple of centuries to mature and is perfect for transforming into superb furniture, was pretty well logged out. I could be one of the few far-sighted people to begin to replenish the stocks by growing my own forest. It would be a nice earner for the multi-greats grandchildren too. Only problem was that Toona likes warm places and I hate them. Canberra was my ideal climate and I was already there.

But the irrational urge ignored the comfort issue and anyway, when I was old, I might like a warm place. She agreed to go with me one weekend to see a perfect property in northern New South Wales, not far from the coast. She agreed because she actually liked travelling and it didn’t matter where to as long as we could stay overnight in a nice motel.

The property was 250 acres, had natural springs and was just $45,000 including the 3-bedroom house. What a bargain. Except it had no access apart from a track through a neighbour’s property that was not trafficable in winter, no electricity, no phone, and the house was dilapidated. But worst of all it was covered in unmanageable perennial weeds. Sadly, my dream place was a disaster quite unlike the adverts. “It’s only $45K I argued stubbornly and it’s the right climate and it’s big”. She wasn’t impressed and discussions about separation began in the car on the way back home, between long silences.

I gave in temporarily, making no further mention of the dream. Was pretty busy at work anyway and I loved my job, sort of discovering things and inventing stories about them. The job resembled a mental big shed but with more tools than at home.

It wouldn’t stay down though and off we went again to look at a place in the gold country near Bathurst. It was more money, approaching $100K, was only 100 acres and had no facilities. In short it was a total rip-off but once again I enjoyed patting the trees and imagining the spirit of the land that had been interminably raped by the miners. You’d be stupid to buy this she said. I disagreed on principle.

She kept telling me that I should buy something more local. There were nice properties in the high country at low prices, plenty of water, isolated to suit my hermit leanings, and I could go there every weekend and grow my things while still working in Canberra. But I had spent many hours convincing myself and others that Toona was the key. No way would Toona grow in the high country. It was freezing there. Grow something else she said, or just be like others and enjoy it as a weekender.

I was pretty fed up. One day though, she came home from Uni where she was doing a Law degree with an ad from the property section of the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a tiny and scrappy ad torn out of the paper by her student friend Charlotta who might secretly have been taking pity on me. The key message was that a 65 ha place was ready for immediate occupancy. It was between Nimmitabel, Bombala and Bega, 2 hours drive from Canberra, had 1 km of river flowing through it and had large sheds, fenced paddocks and a temporary dwelling. Permanent water is a must for growing anything and maybe it was near enough to Bega so I could grow exotic trees. The price was right at about $75K, negotiable. Let’s have a look she said.