Bye bye NSW farm

It is time to leave this wonderful farm and head up North towards Rockhampton. I spent 6 weeks in this farm and it went so fast. It feels as if I just arrived and I am already leaving! It was sad to leave as I got to meet wonderful people, passionate about their business, how they do it and how much they care about it. It was great! Some friends have told me I look happy on the photos. It must be true. I feel happy and relaxed.

We had a couple of extra adventures before leaving. On my second last day we finally “picked up” a redback in the paddocks. We went to feed the cows and found a piece of metal which we thought was a danger to animals and vehicles, so we decided to pick it up and put it on the ute and move it out of the way. We did check it before lifting it on the ute but surprise, surprise – one silly redback managed to still get on the ute too! Why-man saw it for like half a second and it was gone. Obviously, we did not find it immediately and continued on with filling the buckets with cotton seeds for cows. We found the redback underneath the last bucket. Luckily, Why-man had his camera with him and we got a couple of good shots of it. Later on I had the honour of killing it. Sad but it had to be done. It was too dangerous not to kill it.

In the past few weeks we have somehow managed to bring chooks back to the house from the stations. Seriously, it never happened before! And now all the time. It only happened when we decided to refill the water tanks. After arriving back at the house we suddenly heard something that sounded like the Troopy’s handbreak squeaking. After a couple of weird squeaks it started to sound more and more like a chicken! OH NO, IT WAS A CHICKEN! It was hiding on the water trailer. Damn. Had to catch it and take it all the way back! The adventure didn’t finish there. I got the chicken but it struggled itself loose and I ended up chasing it all over the place until one of the dogs decided to come and give me a hand. A few seconds later there were four dogs and me chasing the poor chicken and farmer’s son screaming in the background “Oh my god!” There was a reason why he shouted like that. Apparently, once the dogs catch a chook it is more than likely that they will eat it. The sight of four dogs surrounding one poor chook was priceless. Luckily, it got away with just a scare and the dogs didn’t injure or kill it.

The story did not end there. We got the chook but didn’t manage to get rid of the dogs! We had two of them running after the ranger trying to catch up with us. We ended up getting one of them on the ranger and taking it back to the house to be kept on a leash. It was just the way she (Sandy – dog) was looking at the poor bird. Sniffing around, trying to get closer to it..

That was not the only time we brought some back from the stations. Another time, we took the ute out to the stations to refill their calcium buckets. As always, we did not check underneath the car. After arriving back at the house, we heard the familiar voice again. It was a chicken sitting underneath the car on the axis. Guess what? There were two of them!

Oh, did I mention we lost a trailer? Well, we attached it but it was not attached properly by Why-man and it cut itself loose and all I could hear was the other girl saying: “Oh my god the trailer!”. Why-man immediately ran after the trailer and stopped it and properly hooked it to the ute. We were lucky it was empty and that we were not on a hill at the time. The sight of it was rather funny J

Not sure when I am going to be able to add photos since I only have 5GB of internet on my phone that I could use. Will see if I can get a better option at some stage. That would mean doubling my phone bill but internet would be unlimited!