Barrie currently works mostly for a guy named Simon. Simon owns a huge farm just outside of a little town called Coolatai. Simon didn't grow up on the farm, or any farm. He married into it. His wife's family had the farm and he more or less inherited it. Or maybe her family had a lot of money and he bought the farm. In any case, Simon didn't grow up in farming. And so, despite being what Barrie assures me is quite smart, he makes some startlingly bad decisions, at least as far as the farm is concerned. It seems to be a nice enough farm, much like farms that I would see in the Canadian prairies. It is at the end of a road called Ottley Road. And as might be expected for being such a large farm (Barrie mentioned something like 15000 acres), and as it is at the end of the road, the farm is knows as Ottley Station. It is a dirt road that winds between a bunch of other small parcels of land that are mostly undeveloped. There are a couple of larger neighbours who have farms of their own. Then just as you arrive at the farm, you proceed down a hill and onto the property. A couple of years ago, Simon thought it would be a good idea to strengthen the road and make it more durable. The area is mostly sandy earth. So Simon put down clay on the road into the farm. Now I know pretty close to nothing about dirt, but one thing I do know is that you don't put clay down on a road with a hill.
As the road winds along it passes through a number of gullies and ravines. Australia is quite flat. And along the east coast, it rains quite a bit, particularly close to and into Queensland. And since it's quite flat, the waters come up fairly quickly when the ground is saturated and run off in these little gullies to spots where there are actual rivers and proceed to other areas. It had been raining for a few days in the area and so the gullies were running with water and the road was getting quite rough as a result. And because the area was so wet, so was the clay road leading into the farm. One of the things that happens with clay when it gets wet is that it gets very slippery. So the “toughened up” road that Simon had created was now just a big mud slide, only instead of happy squealing children slipping down the slide, it was half-ton and one-ton vehicles, with buildings and fences and other vehicles sitting at the bottom of the slope.
Another of Simon's decisions was to build a million dollar house at the other end of the property. This is not such a big deal. Everyone needs a place to live and, if you have the money, there is no reason not to build a nice house. On the other hand it is a large farm. Barrie had been planting lots and lots of grain in the few weeks prior to this. And in March they had harvested a huge crop. Of course there are only two fairly small grain silos on the entire property, and those are full of some kind of wheat from a previous harvest. So the sorghum that was harvested in March had to put on the ground with a covering tarp. And it was put on a rather inaccessible area of the farm. And now with the rain, it was getting wet. Instead of putting in more grain storage, or roads to access the more remote areas of the farm so vehicles could get in to take the grain out, Simon is building a million dollar house.
The vehicles he does have are decrepit. There is a house, where Barrie lives free of charge, but it is falling down. The other buildings on the property are also in a state of extreme disrepair. And instead of putting any work or money into these things, Simon is building a nice house. His decisions are not very smart (at least from my point of view).
At any rate, we arrived at the farm in the rain after stopping at the Coolatai Pub. The farmhouse where Barrie lives used to be quite nice from the looks of it. But time and neglect have taken their toll and have left it leaky and rotting in spots. Spiders have left their webs all over, and there are mice. Of course, I've slept in worse spots and so this wasn't so bad for a free room for a couple of days.
The next day dawned rainy and wet. This meant there was no possibility of Barrie being able to work. So he decided to head out to a nearby town and post another flyer. This town was called Yetman. We headed there, signed a petition saying that the local post office/little shop/little restaurant should be allowed to operate a gas pump and had a hamburger. Gotta buy things in the little places if you want to leave the flyers unmolested, you know. They also had a table of books at a dollar apiece. This was remarkable to me as I have found Australia to be a very expensive country in which to be literate. In a bookshop a regular paperback book is over twenty dollars, sometimes more than thirty. In second-hand bookshops they are eight, ten, and twelve dollars. So to find books for a dollar was a nice surprise. I bought one. And then it was back to the farm.
On the Wednesday, it was still raining in the morning and Barrie decided to get a few chores done in a couple of nearby towns. We headed to the first town, Warialda, and Barrie tried to get some poison to bait crops with to get the mice. The place didn't have what he was looking for, but they did have some other poison to put in the silos to protect the grain they already had. Then we headed to the agriculture office to get some advice on some other mouse controls. They also didn't have what was needed at the moment and so that stop turned out to be pretty much a waste of time, except for the meat pie at the bakery.
Then it was on down the road to another town, Inverell, the same town where Simon makes his home. (He doesn't actually live on the farm at present. Barrie is unsure whether he will live on the farm permanently once the million dollar farmhouse is built.) At some point in the past the floodlights on Barrie's vehicle stopped working. He needed new housings for them and had gone to a shop with the lights to have them get the housings and fit them. Barrie wanted to get them. Unfortunately, when we got to that shop, the lights weren't yet ready, although the housings had arrived. They offered to fit them if we wanted to wait, but Barrie seemed to be somewhat impatient and we moved on. I'm not sure what he was impatient about, but it resulted in that stop also being a waste of time.
We went on the back road to return to the farm and stopped on the way at the farm of another of Simon's contract employees, Warren. Warren is a cattleman and looks after Simon's cattle. At Warren's place we had a cup of tea and Warren and Barrie chatted for a while. They both think that Simon is rather foolish and that a number of the other people who work for Simon are rats, oafs, and fools. Over the time I spent at the farm, I began to wonder why Barrie, and now Warren worked for Simon as they think him a bit of an idiot. (Actually it seems to be a lot of an idiot.)
While we had been jaunting about, the rain had pretty much stopped and the sky had begun to clear into cloudiness that didn't suggest any more rain. But Warren had a forecast from someone that suggested there would be a bucketload of rain that evening. When we left his place, neither Barrie nor I could see how that would be the case. The system that had brought the rain had come in from the northeast along the coast and was proceeding down the east coast towards Sydney. The sky we were seeing was clearing from the north. This supported the idea that the system was all but done. But Barrie was not hopeful of either convincing Warren of that, or of being told he was right when it eventually turned out that he was.
When we got back to the farm it was quite sunny and some of the wildlife was out. Yellow-crested cockatoos abound in the area, as well as lots of parrots. They flock in the trees and eat grain that is sitting on the ground in the farmyard when they are unmolested. However, I never got close enough to see them clearly when they were doing that. They flew off as soon as I appeared out the door to try to take a photo. So I had to content myself with these rather long shots.
These parrots sat at the top of a tree close by and I got better shots of them. The little yellow and green parrots never were close enough or out in the open. I was a bit sad about that.
The third day of my stay dawned free and clear. In such light, the farm is really quite beautiful.
As the sun rose higher, I headed out to one of the fields to have a look around. The dew and lingering raindrops lit up on spider webs with nice little patterns.
Later, Barrie and I drove around the farm to check out some of the fields. Barrie had sprayed some areas a couple of weeks earlier to ready them for planting and he wanted to see their progress. During this look around, we came across a young, and rather curious, emu. It was approaching the ute, but I didn't get to find out if it would come right up to the window. Barrie started the engine and it ran off. I suppose it may have been dangerous. It still would have been interesting to have it poke its nose in the window. Right up until it bit my nose off, I suppose.
In the afternoon, I went for a longer walk and found some interesting fields and trees to look at and just enjoy my surroundings without having to contend with rain and lots and lots of muck. I'm glad I got to see the farm in nicer weather before I had to head back to Moree the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment