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.
A long hot, dry summer in outback Queensland.
February 3, 2009
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.
Changes Part 3
January 9, 2009
- The Meat House at Kilcowera Station shearers quarters Outback Queensland
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.
Changes through the years – Part 2
January 6, 2009
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………
