Nearly the end of the line.
October 18, 2009
Greg and one of the trucks taking the cattle away from Kilcowera.
If only we could get an inch of rain to clean the mulga up, but no, not for us. This is our ninth year of drought and we have only had 28 mls of rain this year, so I think this is our worst year of all.
We started here with a pretty ordinary, small herd of mixed up Brahmin cross cattle when we bought the place and by constantly buying good Hereford bulls and putting them with the cows and then culling the offspring for temperament, and type we had built up a nice herd of cattle. Mostly quiet cows who knew the country, where to get a feed and a drink in the dry times and with high fertility rates.
The cows have gone to Moree where a Drover is taking them on a stock route for a few weeks, supposedly there is plenty of feed and they will put some weight on and freshen up. The poor old girls will enjoy the grass anyway, it’s a long time since there has been any here. We’ll then advertise them for sale and they will be sold through the Moree saleyards. We have been told there are lots of paddocks down that way with either a failed crop or a paddock of stubble from a harvested crop where the farmers will put stock into to fatten them up.
All that we have left here now are a few bulls, some cows that had tiny calves or who were about to calve and the odd one we missed. And Feral, the quarters resident poddy who will spend the summer here mowing the lawn.
Mustering at Kilcowera 2009
May 12, 2009
Well the last month has been sooo busy. Our 2 girls came home for a week with their boyfriends to help with the mustering, also had 2 other men come to do the job and Greg and me.
Katherine the eldest girl and her friend Brad flew over from Perth to Brisbane and drove out with Angela and her bloke, Glen. Both really nice guys and useful!!!!! And we all got along like a river in flood.
Of course there had been much baking of biscuits and slices and muffins beforehand and these were frozen so I didn’t have to do so much during the muster. The freezer is nearly empty now but I really don’t care, I feel that I could live on cereal and 2 minute noodles for a fortnight after all the cooking I have done.
I tell the world “THE BREAKFAST FAIRY HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!!!!” Coming up with a nice brekky at 5 every morning for 3 weeks is a pain in the a#*e. One good thing is they all cut their own lunch at breakfast time, so I didn’t have to cook a lunch every day too. But keeping the cold meat up to them was a bit of a challenge as I was operating from a freezer that was seriously depleted of meat! And still is.
We also had a few tourists through and had to do a camp oven dinner one night and a BBQ another. I flew about 50 hours mustering and enjoyed that immensely. The weather was perfect. The little Skyfox Gazelle performed faultlessly. It does need an oil change badly, I thought that I had oil for it but there wasn’t enough and I could not get what I needed locally. Hopefully I will get some on the mail this week.
Peter and Jimmy, the main musterers had 18 dogs between them and the chorus that would start up when they left for the days mustering was deafening. The dogs that were left behind would howl and bark until about 10 o’clock, then all lie around in the sun and sleep until disturbed then they would just start up again. I am so happy to see the back of that pack of dishlickers.
When we finished mustering Kilcowera we trucked about 160 cattle away on 4 decks (2 trailers). Our truck driver comes from Cunnamulla and has been carting our cattle for years. Same when we finished at Zenonie, another 4 decks gone. Greg reckons if we don’t get some rain over winter we will have to sell a lot more as the country is soooo dry there will be nothing left for the cattle to live on. It will be very sad if we have to sell our cows as they know their way around here and where to get a feed usually.
All finished for the time being, so it’s time to catch up on other jobs around the place like doing my blog and office work, gardening, watering and Greg back on his dozer and fencing and fixing the bore that has mysteriously broken down. Anyone want to buy 30 old cows and their calves?
Letterbox’s fondness for green frogs.
February 22, 2009
- Hereford cattle at Cardenyabba Lagoon, Kilcowera Station.
Another interesting person we had here was Letterbox. A very capable man, a big burly bloke, very smart and a top musterer. He had a little weakness though which sometimes prevented him from turning up for the job. If he wasn’t here on time you just knew that he wasn’t coming.
When he first started coming out and doing a few days mustering for us we thought we had really struck it lucky with Letterbox as he was so good at the job and he and Greg got along really well. After he’d been here awhile he took it upon himself to look after the grass around the shearers’ quarters where he bunked down. We would often hear “I’ll just slip down and move the sprinklers around the quarters” What a diligent man! A gem! Or it was “I’ll move the sprinklers in the sheep yard or the cattle yard” Righto Letterbox!
Well it transpired that L was a fairly thirsty sort of a fellow who was mightily fond of what he called his green frogs – cans of VB and he just needed a few to get through the day – and he did move the sprinklers too.
One Melbourne Cup day we were bringing a mob of cattle in to the yard and still had 5 or 6 kms to go before the race, I had resigned myself to not seeing it and was a bit glum. I love the champions of the turf and horse racing. Looking around at the mob of cattle I saw that Letterbox was nowhere to be seen. “Huh, b*st*rds gone off to move the sprinklers, I’ll bet!” flashed through my brain. About a half hour later he returned with a couple of green frogs for everyone and a radio so we could hear the race that stops a nation out in the middle of the paddock. What a good man!
Catalogues were very big in the 80’s & 90’s and still are!
February 22, 2009
When we first married and I came to live here we made our own electricity, had a third world phone, not much money, no credit cards (nobody trusted them), no internet, a once weekly mail service and I was also the new kid on the block with a pair of in laws to try and win over.
We had to live quite a frugal lifestyle as the family had to go into debt to buy Kilcowera and understandably wanted to pay it off asap.
So there just wasn’t the money to spend on luxuries, holidays or even former pursuits of Greg’s like playing polo. His horses were now just used for mustering.
The other women on nearby stations were considerably older than me but offered me friendship and advice and an avenue for plant, vegetable, egg and magazine swapping which saved money and gave me a sense of belonging to this very cliquey new world I found myself in.
We would often receive catalogues in our mail. Oh, how I used to drool over the Myer Direct one! It used to have everthing in it – clothes through to homewares and furniture. Well about 10 years ago Ezibuy took it over and Myer had nothing to do with it any more, I was pretty disgusted about that. (Sshh, Ezibuy is a NZ company). I still buy the odd thing out of Ez when I just need to buy something! All the woolen things are made from NZ wool which sticks in my craw as the Australian wool industry needs all the help it can get!
That used to be my all time favorite, but there were others, the bulb catalogues were big in my life. I only had to look at the special deal on Daffodils or Jonquils and in my minds eye could see drifts of flowers under the trees in my lawn. Digger’s seeds come to mind too. Fair dinkum, us gardeners must be the most optimistic people on the planet. Over the years I have spent thousands on plants and bulbs, fertilizers, water crystals, pots and seeds. And I’m still not happy with either of my gardens. Still, 15 years of drought out of the 28 that I have been here might have something to do with the gardens’ lack of lushness. Selective thinning when I have to ask Greg to come in to the garden with his chain saw to cut down dead trees. More on this topic soon…………
Royal Flying Doctor Service visits Thargomindah weekly.
February 7, 2009
- Foxtrot Delta Papa on the Thargomindah Airstrip
The Royal Flying Doctor does a weekly visit to Thargomindah to provide medical care for the 300 or so locals and also the station people. Our Doctor comes from the Charleville base, these days it’s a lady doctor one week and a bloke the next week.
I think we are very fortunate to have the RFDS as our medical service as, even on the stations, a doctor is only ever 2 or 3 hours away since we all have airstrips. We also have a large medical chest supplied by the RFDS to administer first aid from while waiting for the doctor to fly in.
So off to town yesterday for Greg to see the Doc ( he prefers the lady one), I went in for the ride and to take my library books back. Had to also get diesel, about 600 litres at 149.9 cents a litre! Petrol might have come back in the cities but it’s still pretty dear out here! We also booked one of our cars in for a service with the Toyota dealer. The shop had reasonably fresh fruit and veg in so I bought some and a funny little ice block that had come all the way from Poland! Unreal.
Had a hamburger with an organic beef patty on it for lunch at the roadhouse. OBE beef was formed by a group of graziers in Thargomindah 15 or so years ago and is still going strong, supplying organic beef to Japan and America and some in Australia too. We were a part of this for the first 10 years but had to relinquish our organic status in order to supplement our cattle during the drought to keep them alive.
On our way home we did a water run on our other place, Zenonie. Old eagle eyes (himself) spotted a Hereford head under a tree, off the side of the road on our northern neighbour’s place, so off we go to investigate. Sure enough it’s 2 new bulls who have taken themselves off for what they thought were, greener pastures. Well they aren’t doing our cows any good there, so we got them moving ever so reluctantly and put them through a nearby gate back onto Zenonie.
Then we travelled the length of Z doing a water run, no great dramas today – one dead roo to be pulled out of a tank, lick blocks to be put out for the cattle, lots of gates to open and we found some of the southern neighbors’ cattle in our Bottom paddock. They have to stay there until we muster and then we’ll try once more to get them out, but they are very wild animals and a bit hard to keep up with.
We left home at 7.30 and got back at 3, travelling about 300 kms for the day.
