Well I got my wish!  It started raining early on Christmas morning and rained all day till about 4 o’clock!!!!  It was the bestest Christmas for a long time.  We ended up with 97 mls.  Kilcowera creek ran all over the place and the Box creek did too, so we had water every where, even a big flood through the campground at the quarters.  The lagoon is full and every other swamp that we have been able to get to is also full, some of them have not had water in them this decade. 

We have not been able to get out to our Lake paddock much yet so we don’t know if all those creeks ran ( 2 did  and took a couple of hundred metres of boundary fence with them ).  At this stage we don’t know how much water went into Lake Wyara.  It was bone dry so it will take a lot of water to fill it.  

The birds are back and it looks like a lot of them are going to nest here, you can see some flying around with sticks and bits of wool in their beaks and parrots and budgerigars in and out of hollows in the trees.

Then we had another 16 mls at the house on the 31^st with storms to the north and west, much more rain than the 16 we measured.  The creeks are up again and we can’t go far at all unless it’s on foot or motorbike on the road.  I might be able to get across Box creek tomorrow on the 4 wheeler to see if the campground was flooded again and check out the lagoon.

The country has responded so quickly to the rain and the grass and herbage is looking fantastic.  We haven’t had good summer rain since about 1996.  A person forgets how beautiful the place can be. I just hope that it keeps up and we get some more rain soon, being wet is a good problem to have.  Oh and I haven’t put a sprinkler on since December 24.  What a break from watering!

I guess city people never give  a thought as to how we get rid of our rubbish ?  The ways are many and varied.  And you know what really annoys me?  Some mail days I empty the mail bag and go through the mail only to find that 75 % of it goes straight in the bin.  And packaging of some products produces more rubbish than useable product and we have to get rid of it somehow.  

Our rubbish get sorted up 2 ways – what we can burn and what we can’t.  Of the household rubbish the only stuff that doesn’t get burnt is soft drink cans, beer cans and bottles and wine bottles.  All other tins like baked beans and food tins and plastics need to be burnt to take the foody smell out of them so the stock don’t sniff them out and get them stuck on their jaws.  A very sad sight to see a beast or sheep with a tin stuck to it’s lower jaw as they can’t eat or drink and usually die because we would probably not see the animal unless it’s happens to hang around a stock water.  Even if we do see the poor thing it may be too far from a yard to get it to.  So please don’t throw your rubbish out when you are camping in the outback.  I have seen a brown snake slithering along blindly with a VB can stuck over its head. 

We have 5 dumps on Kilcowera – just as well we’ve got plenty of room!  Greg digs a big pit with the dozer for the afore mentioned beer cans and harmless rubbish to be put into.  The only problem with this is birds pick up some of the cans and fly around with them and drop them all over the place or whirly winds come along and scatter the cans too!

This is a picture of Greg’s wire dump where all reusable wire and steel posts are lined up.  Depending on how financial we are there is always a supply of new plain and barbed wire, posts, weldmesh, droppers and steel cable here too and it all has to be kept off the ground as steel rusts fairly quickly when it is in contact with our soil.

The most interesting dump is the one where anything that might be handy for something gets put.  There is a line up of old washing machines, dog kennels, batteries, tyres, interesting pieces of steel, old bottles, chains, fish tanks, old rain water tanks and wooden fence posts.  About every 10 years or so someone comes along and wants to buy stuff out of the dump………….batteries, copper wire, bits and pieces off old cars, aluminium cans. 

The previous owners had a dump like this too, some of the stuff there is pretty old but not so old as to be valuable.  There are tractor seats, horse floats, beds, engines, woolpresses, wheel barrows, old toys, horseshoes and a dazzling array of little bits of steel like chains, nuts and bolts, locks etc.  They also had another dump right near the shearers quarters where they lived.  Unfortunately though they did not dig a pit but simply and with gay abandon threw everything onto this ever expanding pile.  The pile is basically in the creek so whenever the creek runs so does the rubbish, pilsener stubbies and longnecks mainly – straight down toward our lagoon.

The next door place sold to a new owner 10 or so years ago and we went to the  clearing sale and the very last thing to be auctioned was the contents of the dump!  It really brings new meaning to “One mans rubbish is another’s treasure”. 

Driving to town one day I was sailing past Yakara Station when out of the corner of my eye I noticed something big and new on their dump.  A great big white Toyota trayback on it’s roof!  It had been rolled and the owners had dragged it there and just left it, along with quite a few other old cars.  The dump is very close to the road and a bit of an eyesore. 

Another neighbour to the south has his main dump right along side the road that you drive on to get to the house.  The dump goes on and on and on.  I would love to have a scrounge around there ( I suspect Greg would too! ).  Bad form to go sticky beaking around though if there’s any chance you’ll get sprung!

 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…………

In the first half of 2008 there were approximately 10,000 pelicans breeding on the western shore of Lake Wyara.  It was a magic sight and sound and smell to stand out there seeing all those pelicans that had come all this way from the coast to breed.  In the 28 years that I have been here it is only the second time that I have seen them breeding on Lake Wyara.  They could have been there at other times though. 

They kinda snuck up on me this time as I did not think there was enough water in the lake for anything much to be happening there.  Then out of the blue a journalist rings me up and asked “ How’s your pelicans going?”

 Says I “No pelicans here mate”. 

Journo “Well the National park ranger reckons there’s about ten thousand on Lake Wyara.”  “Hmm, I’ll ring you back tomorrow when I check it out.”  So a quick fly out over the lake confirmed this amazing news.  Here’s some pictures.

 Greg and National Parks are currently working on a new boundary fence that will keep stock out of the park and enable us to use our 70,000 acre Lake paddock again. We have had no stock in it for 5 years as a part of the old boundary fence was pushed down for a road to the lake from the Currawinya side.  This little guy just came right up to us to check us out and then waddled off to his mates. 

 In 1991 National Parks and Wildlife took over the grazing property Currawinya, our eastern neighbour.   They also took Lake Wyara a 6000 ha salt lake classified as Vacant Crown Land which was our eastern boundary and physically on Kilcowera.

When Lake Wyara is full it’s a beautiful blue saline expanse of wetland that supports enormous numbers of birds, fish, turtles, crustaceans and sea grasses.  It is filled by 5 big creeks, 3 of which start and end on Kilcowera, Benanga, Youlaingee and Kihi creeks.  The lake has been listed by RAMSAR as a wetland of international significance.

Lake Wyara had some water in it in 2008, this picture taken from the north and at 1500 feet.

We have an interesting scenic drive which is a 60 km round trip out through our Lake paddock.  It goes over the highest country on Kilcowera and offers great views of Lake Wyara and the creeks.  The lake has been pretty much dry for about 4 years now but surely it will fill again soon.

Kilcowera has many different types of vegetation and land types, ranging from dunes to gibber plains, out around the lake is sort of like channel country with small dunes.

The image above shows Pink Eared Ducks on one of the creeks that flow into Lake Wyara.  We see some interesting birds out there not seen around the Homestead, like the gibber bird  and orange chat.  Of course when the lake is full it is teeming with water birds. These beautiful birds below are Red Necked Avocets.  To be continued………….