I haven’t written in so long but Im going to start when I got to Victoria Downs Station, Morven. Basically since I last wrote, I left Perth, stayed in Melbourne for a while and then decided to get a job on a farm so I can get a second year visa. Which brought me to a town called Morven on the Waraego Highway, Queensland.
I got this job and left Melbourne fairly quickly, did a bit of shopping for work stuff and booked flights to Brisbane. I stayed there for the night and got the bus out the next morning at 0730, the stay in Brisssie was fairly uneventful, and I caught the greyhound bus for the 10 hour ride to my new home! The journey passed fairly quickly actually and we stopped in a couple of places along the way, by the time I got off the bus there were two people carrying on to Charleville...yes, Charleville (more about that later).
Narda (the mum) collected me from the bus and drove out to the house, about 3km outside town, the property starts. It is a 33,000 acre cattle and sheep station, it has a practically straight main road going diagonally through it so its a long drive through the property before you even see the house and farm buildings, its just paddocks of white grass dotted with trees as far as the eye can see, its spectacular to drive down the straight road surrounded by such vast, unspoiled land. The odd few sheep poking around, lots of road kill (kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and boars) marking the journey! The main road goes to Darwin eventually and there is a huge amount of road trains going past all day, (huge amount being, one every 10-30 mins. Thats all the traffic apart from a few white utes passing, they are always white). A road train, by the way, is an articulated truck with multiple trailers, Ive seen up to four. They are fairly cool.
The first evening I just settled into my new room and had dinner and lovely sleep, ready to rise at 0600, joy! So at the ungodly hour of six am I got up and met Will (the farmer)and Ed, (the other backpacker here). We headed out for a drive around the place, or a small part of it anyway, in the ute, it was really cool driving around at sunrise seeing all the animals across the huge paddocks, lots of kangaroos bounding across fields, emus running or grazing, little sheep grazing, lots of birds singing the morning chorus. The birdsong here is amazing, there are so many different sounds and tones, all day long, completly different from home. After this we picked up out new modes of transport, quad and motor bikes, and went for a ride to get used to them before we went mustering sheep! This was so cool, first day of work, just riding around on bikes, herding sheep from paddock to paddock. Mustering is cool actually, you start at one end of the paddock, sweep out in a line and herd them forward and then to the corner you want them in, this gets alot harder when your trying to do a paddock thats about a kilometre wide! As usual, my first day in the sun I got sunburned, on my hands and face especially, I looked like a little lobster! Ill have the worst farmers tan when I leave here. Its beautiful here though and the weather generally has been great, nice and warm through the day but not too hot. The only problem has been that most mornings in the last month have been reeeeeeeeally cold! Last weekend it was two degrees over night. So you go out in the morning with four or five layers on and by lunchtime your down to a tshirt. Back to the layers once the sun goes down. When we arrived it was getting light about six and dark about six. Now its bright before six and light to nearly seven I suppose. We work light till dark, the days fly and the last four weeks have passed so quickly.
One day we had to ear mark some lambs and cut their tails off, this shows how tolerant of blood, dirt, death and rotten smells I have become! It was our second day and I really thought it was disgusting, I think I was just worried about hurting them. So I found out the meaning of ear marking, literally, the male and female lambs get marks cut out of their ears and then you tell age and stuff from this. There are areas on the farm where the ground has been dug out to create a big pond for rainwater, these are called dams and are used to water the animals and stuff like that. At the moment it is lambing season and the ewes are heavily pregnant, sometimes when they go to water they get stuck in the mud and exhaust themselves trying to get out, or go headfirst into the water and drown. This doesn’t happen much but due to being really busy during shearing time the week before we arrived, there was a few dead sheep around a couple of the dams when we arrived. One day we had to clear these away so we tied a rope to them and towed them away on the back of the quad. The problem was that since they had been there a while they were a bit soft and as I was trying to pull a couple of them away, their heads fell off! This was my introduction to farm life. Its funny, now Im pulling sheeps legs out of mud, shearing sheep (more about that later) and carrying dead baby lambs away (this was the one time I felt so bad it made me cry the first day I found one, when I saw that the crows had pecked out its eyes and its face was covered in blood, it looks like they are crying red tears). The crows are awful, disgusting vultures. If there is any sheep that are not as strong as the others or vulnerable they peck out their eyes while they are still alive, they peck holes in their back and eat their flesh out of it. Its terrible, especially, as I said, if they are newborn lambs.
There are lambs around at the moment and they are so cute, long spindly legs and skinny bodies, they run so fast too, one day I had to catch one actually, it was funny. I got him as we were only in a pen, but thats kind of a cliché I think, an idiot running around in circles after a baby lamb! Another thing about the sheep thats funny, Ive noticed, when your driving around, (the paths are down along the fences, on both sides) the sheep will be lying there, a group at either side, having a little gossip session! They don’t make a noise, but obviously there is some communication going on among friends. When you come on the scene, they all flee in every direction.
They have about twelve dogs here, they are really beautiful dogs, called Kelpies. They are sheep and cattle dogs and come out mustering, they are really good, fit and lovely tempered dogs. They are so well trained and they sit up on the back of the motorbikes and quad when were driving along! I thought it was amazing the first time I saw it. In the evenings we take them for a run, they run after the bikes up the paddock, then when they come back they (all twelve of them) go back to their own kennels to be tied up! Theres always one or two I suppose who are trying to be rebels but they are no trouble! We should have had Louie out here! speaking of Louie, there is a puppy here called Jelly and shes so cute. She comes out with us working to get to know everything and shes so full of energy. Shes the image of Louie, the dog we used to have at home, when he was a puppy. Kangaroos here are a pest on the land and are in huge numbers. In Australia there are professional ‘Roo shooters’. People who come onto the farms and shoot roos. There are also dog trackers. This is cool. There are some wild dogs, maybe Dingoes, that kill the animals so there are professionals who track these and catch them and kill them. This is very difficult to do as you can imagine, it is said these people think like dogs!
The first weekend I was here, Will and Narda wend on holidays for a week and left us to look after the farm! It was fine actually, we just had general stuff to do and watch the animals and that. There are four daughters in the family, including two identical twins who come home most weekends. So one day we went with the girls to a neighbours property (10 km away). We had a nice day actually. They were bringing a mare of theirs over to meet a stallion on the property next door, so maybe they could have a lovely baby! The first place we went to was lovely, there were guinea fowl roaming around the garden, and Malcolm showed us his collection of farming memorabilia, including a side saddle! One used by the ladies in the old days, that was cool. Its lovely here with the sun shining generally and just a relaxed atmosphere, we just did a few things, put the mare in the horse box and we all headed off next door. This place was cool too, they had lots of lovely horses, but the funniest thing was that they had a few sheep, and two al paka! These are the funniest looking animals. So I discovered that day that al paka (a relative of the lama) protect the sheep from dogs, they can be vicious and keep the dogs away from the sheep, the funny thing was that they had pet dogs so the al paka were chasing the pet dogs away whenever they came near the house!
We went mustering cattle one day, that was cool. Interesting more so than the sheep I suppose as they are bigger and a bit more exciting. They are fairly good though and not too many tried to run away or anything. There are some huge animals though, or ‘beasts’ as they are called. The girls took their horses out and we had the bikes. That was cool, mustering cattle through big paddocks with some trees. Sometimes they just run into the trees, they are fairly smart at working out what you don’t want them to do at times I think!
The tv here is funny, the ads are hilarious at times. Since Ive been here I seen ads for bulls with ‘exceptional semen packages’, ‘pyjamajeans’ jeans that feel like pyjamas!, endorsements for shops/produce by local farmers wearing atrocious clothing, all monotone lifeless statements. There are ads for cool things too though, the ads for the big cattle sales look so great, hundreds of pens of cattle, thousands of cattle on sale on a day. Ads for rodeo competitions, I really want to see one of these. Its similar here to what we would know of Texas or something,(from tv!) huge cattle stations, people wear cowboy hats, you need something out in the sun, jeans and shirts. One of the girls here was working on a station up north that was over two million acres. Imagine that!
