Well our cattle sold at the Moree Saleyards on the 10^th ( all but 4,  that nobody wanted ), we did not get good money for them nor did we expect to.  That’s Beetle in the shorts in the photo, he was the agent commissioned to sell them.  I also met Frog and Puss!   At the time Moree was very dry and the graziers and farmers had mostly run out of water.  We did pick out 50 or so cows and sent them to a friends place on agistment so we still own a few.

Came home to a dust storm and 1 broken down water.  But the caretaker had done a great job, the garden was better than when I left and all dogs in fine form too.  Lucy was pleased to see us.  We had 11 very surprising mls of rain a week ago and that has greened the place up a bit and put some water in a few swamps.

The weather bureau has been predicting rain for a large part of western NSW and QLD for the last week and our local radio station is really ramping things up today.  Not a drop of rain has fallen anywhere ,yet they are putting out flood warnings for all the rivers in the district!  May be they are getting in early cause we have Xmas, Boxing day and the weekend coming up?  Oh and probably a public holiday on Monday and maybe even Tuesday?  Not sure about that.  Well it is cloudy and the wind is right, but the unbeliever here still has all sprinklers going, not sitting around waiting for rain to water my garden.

Well a Happy, safe and peaceful Christmas to all and please God may it be a wet one for us too.  Cheers me

Cattle in the yard at Kilcowera Station.

We have had some rain in the last 2 months but all after we sent our cattle away and it wasn’t enough to promote sufficient pasture growth to bring them back here.  So next week they will be auctioned off at the Moree Saleyards.  I hope someone is willing to pay reasonable money for them.  The Drover has been asked to have them all back at the Moree yards on the evening of the 7 th so we can sort them out on the 8 th.  They should look a bit different than when they left here anyway. 

We have a local man coming to mind the place for a week so we can go and see the demise of our herd…….hmm maybe I won’t go to the auction, Greg can just tell me about it.  Then I am going to see my Mom in Brisbane, then we go to Toowoomba for some shopping then home.  We are going to have to leave Lucy behind as we will have to stay in Motels.  I do like to get away but I worry about the dog and the gardens and whether the caretaker is keeping the doors shut to keep the snakes out, so we won’t be away long.  Will let you all know how the cattle sell after we get back.  Cheers, Toni

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.

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?

 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…………

One month to go!  Hopefully it starts to cool down a little by the time March rolls around.  It’s been tops of around 45 degrees so far and 30 – 35 at night. I used to love summer now I just endure it – even though there are a couple of good things about it – air conditioning and watching a DVD in the afternoon.

So far we haven’t had any major dramas with stock or watering thereof.  We did have one stock tank bust and let all the water go a couple of days ago, luckily we have electricity at that well and it was simply a matter of putting another tank there and hooking it up to the water supply and trough and then cleaning up the god awful mess that the cattle had made of the place.  Cardenyabba lagoon is nearly dry and we have to keep a good look out that cattle don’t get bogged in the rapidly drying up, last waterhole there.

I have been running around watering everything in sight both here at the house and at the shearers’ quarters.  I think that I am on top of things and have a look around the next day and it’s time to just start it all again.  It’s like house work, you sort of wonder why you do it when you only have to do the same thing again and again.  I walk down to our shearers’ quarters first thing in the morning and move the sprinklers.  From then on I try to ride my bike down to save on fuel costs.  Up and down, up and down and then watering at the house and watering the trees in the chook yard, putting sprinklers on for the chooks and watering sheep yard trees etc.

Here’s Greg using the old Fordson Major to lift some  concrete pipe.  He is going to use it for a dog kennel under a mulga tree for Boofhead.

Greg hired a bobcat and truck to come out from town to push dirt back up around all the troughs, dig some holes and to shift the water tank.  The operator who is Greg’s nephew also climbed up most of the windmills to oil and service them.

Another trough had a hole in the bottom and was letting a lot of water out, G fixed it with a tank bolt and a leather washer and then a shovel full of dirt to seal it.

It’s a never ending job through out summer checking the stock and their watering points, one of us checks each and every water at least every second day.

There is a cute little building at the quarters – it’s the meat house, one third of the walls are made of fly wire and it has a high sloping roof to help with air circulation.  It had a bench inside, a chopping block, a long bar going from one side to the other where the meat was hung and a kerosene fridge. We lived mainly on sheep back then as the only refrigeration we had was the kero fridge, one smallish gas fridge and a gas freezer.  The sheep would be shorn, usually by Greg, he would then take it to the killing block, cut its throat, hang it up and butcher it.  The sheep would then be hung in the meat house overnight to “set”.  Right at the beginning we didn’t have a bandsaw so he would cut the whole thing up with a meat hatchet and knife which was pretty ordinary as you got bone splinters all through the meat.  We also used an old hand mincer attached to a table.  After a couple of years we purchased a bandsaw that made the job a whole lot easier.

Once, maybe twice a year, we would kill a medium size beast – always in winter as we did not have enough freezer space to store it and we’d share it with his Mum and Dad.  Some of the meat was salted and wrapped up in hessian bags and hung in the meat house for a month or so until we had enough room in the freezer for it.

We always had to vigilant about keeping dust and fluff away from the naked flames of the fridges and freezer so they wouldn’t set fire to the place and also had to check constantly that the little flames had not blown out.  And heaven forbid don’t run out of gas or kero! Our roads were pretty ordinary back then so we always had extras in case we got rained in.

It took a long time for the multi cultural experience in the food department to make its presence felt out here.  Capsicums, avocados and zucchinis were pretty much unheard of and treated with great suspicion if found.  One was extremely lucky if one could get cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce at the local shop as they did not stock many cause most people ate a hot meal 3 times a day.  And don’t dare give a bloke a salad at night time.  You would be accused of dishing up rabbit food and shirking your duties.  A quote often heard when dishing up a musterers’ meal “No veg mate”.

This beautiful Major Mitchell Cockatoo was photographed by Peter Strutt at Kilcowera’s, Cardenyabba Lagoon. 

We raised a clutch of chickens under that old stove too, about a dozen eggs sat underneath in the warmth and we turned them every couple of hours, 24 hours a day.  I was so pleased that we had managed to make more chooks without having to buy them!  Except it turned out that 80% were roosters.  One thing led to another and I then learned how to chop roosters heads off and pluck them.  I found it wasn’t too gruesome if you didn’t think too hard about what you were doing and did the job quickly.  And they did taste good!

I had a gas iron that just got hotter and hotter.  After burning several shirts it seemed to me that the work clothes did not need ironing, the good trousers got folded just so and put between the mattress and the base of the bed until one needed them and shirts – if you hung them up straight off the line they looked good enough to wear for me. So that was one hated job off my list.

To be continued………