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.

 For the first 10 years of married life my little family lived in the shearers quarters here at Kilcowera.  Shearing time was a major drama for me as I had to share my home with 9 or so extra people for up to a month at a time.  My kitchen was taken over by a stranger and strangers also thumped and lounged all over everything that I had tried to make homely in the previous 12 months. 

So to take back some semblance of control I decided to do the shearers cooking myself with some child minding help from my mother in law.  A bonus was that I would get paid for doing this as I would be working for the contractor. Including the family and musterers I would be cooking for about 14. 

The cook was not allowed to spend too much on luxuries for the men, whatever luxuries there were to be, the cook made them.  After all the contractor had to make a quid out of the shearing and sheep were cheap and groceries weren’t. I think we were allowed to buy sausages, bacon and mince once a week.  The rest of the time it was mutton. 

I had been horrified at the waste of meat by the cooks in previous years.  The shanks, necks and quite often the shoulders of the sheep were just thrown in the bin, given to the dogs or chooks and the shearers just seemed to live on roast leg, boiled leg and chops. Also Greg had to kill the sheep and cut them up for the cooks, he’d do such a good job only to have half of it thrown out! Those cooks would go through 2 sheep a day! What a waste of food.  But still these were blokes who had never seen a zucchini and regarded a curry as suspect. I also learnt that the cooks weren’t looking to make their job any harder than it already was by boning out shoulders. 

A full cooked breakfast including porridge was to be available at 6.30, then the clean up of pots, pans, frypans etc. Cakes and biscuits and sandwiches had to be made for smoko at 9.30.  All in the wood stove remember!  Someone would come over to the kitchen and help me take the smoko over to the shed.  A big urn of tea, cold water, cordial and oh yes  -  the shearers did like toasted sangers for at least one smoko. 

Back to the kitchen, another clean up and the finishing touches to lunch at 12pm.   They always had to have dessert at lunch time so I would make a super big one and the leftovers would be for tea.  Desert was optional at tea time but mandatory for lunch.  Clean up and another smoko over to the shed at 3pm.  The afternoon smoko didn’t need to be quite as elaborate as the morning one. 

They would finish work at 5.30, bolt half a dozen beers down, have a quick shower and be ready for tea about 6.45.  And while they all toddled off to bed or outside for a smoke and a rum, me and the family would be cleaning up again and trying to do some tomorrow jobs just to keep up. (Cutting up chops, buttering bread, peeling vegetables, carving meat for sandwiches)  God it was a lot of work and honestly I had never seen people eat so much food.  More to come on this subject………………….

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?

This is a great organisation, they send retired teachers or helpers out to properties where help is needed during busy or stressful times.  If you are shorthanded at mustering time or shearing or the mother or father is sick the last thing you need to worry about is your childrens education.

Our lady, Beryl first came out to us in about 1992, stayed for 6 weeks and was an “Angel” not a retired teacher.  So I was able to concentrate on teaching my girls and helping with the mustering  while Beryl just took over the running of the house. 

She was about 62 at the time and was a widow from the sunshine coast (North of Brisbane), she had had 11 children, one died so that left her with 10!!! An awesome effort to bring up 10 kids and I have met most of them now and they are a really nice bunch of people.  I’m sure that Beryl was just looking for a family to care for and spoil, after all her kids had well and truly spread their wings and flown the nest.  She is a fantastic cook and housekeeper, so organised and calm, she also loved our 2 girls and would let them help her with the baking and taught them calligraphy.  She cleaned the place from top to bottom, did windows, cupboards and ceiling fans.  The washing was done every second day and the ironing basket was always empty. She would bake every other day, scones, pikelets, sponge cakes you name it and she would do it.  I think that she gets great satisfaction from cooking the old fashioned way, no short cuts and having people appreciate her efforts.  Beryl also loved meeting the neighbours, the musterers or the shearers and doing the unexpected. 

One time she and I and the girls were just sitting down to lunch when we got a call on the radio to bring all the paraphernalia out in a Toyota to kill and butcher a beast in the paddock.  And you do need a fair bit of stuff too – rifle, knives, axe, shovel, old shearers beds to put the meat on and lastly water, soap and a basin  for washing hands in at the end. And some smoko.  We piled in and went to find the men and the beast out in the paddock somewhere.  She still laughs about sitting out in the paddock watching what is commonplace to station people and then boiling up for smoko.  What I remember most was that it was pretty ordinary meat as it came off a very athletic cow who had given us the slip on previous occasions. 

Beryl has been up in the plane with me mustering, camped at a waterhole at Innaminka, seen the Thargomindah rodeo and been to the annual Ball in Thargo, attended the Brewarrina Show, and visited the Fox place where we had cattle on agistment near Bree.

All up  Beryl has been out about 8 times, she is starting to slow down and her back is not so great these days but she last visited in October 08 and vows she’ll be back again.  At first she used to come to Cunnamulla on the train and we would pick her up from there, she has also come out on the school bus with 30 or so boisterous kids but in latter years she has flown out to Thargomindah.

We have just visited her in Caloundra where she invited all her family and friends to join her at the Power Boat Club for a lunch to celebrate her 80^th Birthday.  What a diverse group of people, it was really interesting to finally meet her oldest friends that I had heard so much about mainly during our early morning walks on the dusty roads of Kilcowera.

Sometimes all this activity on the phone was a good thing.  If it rained anywhere over where the straggly little phone line went, the line would go out, if a little tree touched the line, it went out, sometimes the mulga post the line was attached to would fall over taking the line with it and it was said that if a bird flew over the line and did a poopsy the line went out.

So sometimes I would find myself swinging off the handle of the phone ringing, ringing trying to get the attention of the exchange ladies and they couldn’t hear me as the line was down somewhere. Usually someone along the line would eventually pick up and act as a relay between me and town and I would get my message across via a neighbour.  Then we would have to drive along the phone line to fix the problem and try not to get bogged if it had rained.  Sometimes a cow might have decided to have a scratch up against the mulga post and knocked it over.

There were times when we had no communication with the outside world because it was too wet to try and fix the line.  Also when it was wet the phone line didn’t work so well and the exchange ladies had to act as a relay between you and whoever you were trying to talk to.  I had to interview a job applicant with the assistance of the exchange lady and a neighbour once.  It was a novel experience.

If you ever wanted to know any goss these were  the  girls to ask, but they were mostly very discreet.  Mostly.  It paid to be discreet and mindful of what you said on the phone at all times. The phone exchange was manned by about 6 ladies rostered on one at a time and was a 24 hour service. If you were on a long distance call they would come on periodically and say “3 minutes are you extending?”  This might be after you had been on for 10 minutes, so that was nice. But you never knew how much they were listening.  To contact the exchange you would grab the handle of the phone wind it around as hard and fast as you could for about 10 seconds. If that didn’t work you’d go harder and faster and longer.

Old telephone from the party line days at Kilcowera Station.

About 1983 we escaped Kilcowera for a brief trip to Brisbane – first time away since marrying in 1980.  Yeehah!!! I remember being in some business house and the salesperson asked for my phone number, unthinkingly I replied “ Thargomindah 22R”  I got a very blank look and then the question “ How do you dial that”  Good question.  Seeing as I hadn’t been to a city since marrying I didn’t know.  When we were in a local town we used a telecard to make a call.  Seems you had to ring an operator and they would put the caller through to the Thargomindah phone exchange operator who would then ring the station with their own distinctive call.  Our number was 22R – the r was a short, long, short ring, based on Morse code.

It had taken me a long time to differentiate between the calls on our party line as there were 8 stations on our line.  Our other place Zenonie was 22U, two shorts and a long and our immediate neighbour was 3 shorts, so everyone on the line knew who was getting a phone call.  Some of the ladies were a bit sticky beakish and would pick up when you were on a call just to see if they could work out who you were talking to in 10 seconds or so.  They could always pretend they had been outside and not heard the phone ring and wanted to make a call themselves but the one on the phone could hear when the other person picked up and if the intruder didn’t put the phone down fairly quickly you would loudly say WORKING!

  All having to share one line was a bit frustrating at times especially if you needed to make a call urgently or before close of business, so if you were a bit desperate you would just keep picking up the phone so the other person got the hint to get off, of course if it was an emergency you would just say so and they would get off but probably not before you told them what the nature of the emergency was.  You can imagine that this system didn’t encourage long gossipy calls often.  Except in what were deemed to be the quiet times of the day.  More on this in my next post!

Wedge Tailed Eagle - Photo by Peter Strutt

A bit more on catalogues…….  Then there were the electrical and white goods catalogues.   Very drool worthy too.  Specialist lingerie ones and those for all things babyish, then along came wine and alcohol catalogues, office supplies, jewelry, Avon, shoes and RM Williams ones (too expensive!!!!!)

My silliest purchase was an expensive ring from Magnamail.  I ordered this diamond ring from a picture, paid up front and waited about 5 months before I received it.  Really thought that I had done my dough. When I did get the ring I was very happy with it though.   Thinking back, all I can say in my defense was that I hadn’t had a shopping splurge for a very long time. And I do love jewelry! 

But that’s not all, then there were the blokes catalogues.  Have you ever seen a bull catalogue?  The pages are strewn with cows and bulls backsides and bulls testicles.  Impressive stuff!!  Then there’s the machinery trader full of dozers, graders, trucks and bits and pieces that lift or push, dig or plough, water or cut something.

 Greg especially likes the camping, fishing, 4WD type of catalogues, poor bugger he doesn’t get away much to use our camping gear.  Our last big trip was maybe 5 years ago when we had a good look around WA.  He also likes tool and power tool catalogues, I try to make note of what especially interests him in these for future present giving.  Blokes are so hard to buy a pressie for – I mean you can’t give him a shirt or belt or socks – too boring.  But it’s gotta be something he lusts after.  I draw the line at a $7000 welder though .  I did buy him a Lindsell hoist one birthday cause his back isn’t as good as it used to be.  The doctor told him he should   reassess his capabilities after G strained some back muscles while lifting batteries out of his dozer.

Other super interesting ones he gets are water tank catalogues.  I tell you the makers of poly ethylene tanks have really branched out.  Did you know that you can have a dog kennel made out of poly ethylene?  Or a water dish? A calfateria?  Yes –  they make tanks and troughs and poly pipe and poly pegs and things for chook food and water, bins, garden edging, pools, tool boxes and wheel chocks? AMAZING!!!!!

We also get a newspaper free each month and it’s basically a catalogue for aeroplanes and all things pertaining to.  Lincott Linen have a catalogue full of work clothes, boots, coats, blankets, sheets, mattress covers, socks and singlets.  I buy our mattress covers there still and Greg’s special woolen socks. We’ve got an old windmill catalogue too.  They are all there to tempt us and then there’s the internet – the window to the world.