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.