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Are you prepared for this?

There are many ways to die on a farm and a tractor accident looms as the most likely. Up here in Koonorigan at least 2 people have been killed in tractor accidents. Could have been number 3 today.
I was pulling lantana in the back paddock, by wrapping a chain around a clump and yanking it out with the tractor. An hour into this arduous and scratchy job something unexpected happened. A few seconds into a pull I saw the tractor rise up in front of me, flip over and generally menace my well-being. I reached for the kill button and sat in merciful silence, amazed that I was not dead.
The front of the Massey-Ferguson 35 was 3 metres above me and the box of goodies mounted up there was showering its contents over me. I worried about bloody big bits of metal (power take-off shafts, chains, hammers etc) stoving in my head. The human body seems very fragile when being menaced by two tonnes of flailing metal.
Fortunately the tractor did not flip right over backwards. It was not the rollover protection system that contacted the ground but a jib (a type of crane) that dug in. I had selected this attachment for this very reason. I walked away. You usually get some warning when the front starts to rear up, if you happen to be looking ahead, and can push in the clutch. I was looking behind.
If I have any advice to my fellow farmers it would be to lead a moral and blameless life because you never know when you will be meeting your creator.

Passing through.

I live with my wife, and 8 cows and calves, on top of the Koonorigan Range overlooking Nimbin Rocks. We own the land in as much as there is a piece of paper in the Land Titles Office bearing both our names and describing the aforementioned 24 acres. I have heard it said, more than once, because of things that happened a couple of hundred years ago, we are living on stolen land. I can assure you that we went into virtual slavery for a few decades to earn the money to buy said piece of The Rainbow Region. We own this place to the extent that when we decide to do something else with our lives, we can sell it for what we can get for it. Someone else will move in and the farm will change a bit more under their tenure. We are the temporary caretakers of Lot 2.
We bought the place from a German couple, who, being in their 70s, found it a handful to mow and maintain. We had an exciting time quizzing them about carrying capacity, names of neighbors and species of trees that were planted about. I needed to know the location of kilometres of underground poly piping and how to start, prime and maintain the 'bulldozer' pump that sends water from the spring dam to the tanks around the house. They moved on and we moved in. I soon learnt how to drive a tractor and drag various implements about. Years of reading the library copies of "Grass Roots" and "Earth Garden" had prepared me for a crack at self-sufficiency. More than half of what we eat comes from these acres. The freezer is crammed full with hundreds of kilos of seasonal excess. When bird flu jumps the species gap to humans and we have to shut the farm gate for 3 months of isolation, it might be possible to live on what the trees, garden and animals provide. Of course, the birds live here too.
Birds are born in their little cup nests and, at the end of their time, drop to the ground dead. It is their farm too. They take their share of grapes, bananas, mangoes, mulberries, figs, paw paw and persimmons. The bats have all this and more, taking up to 90% of some crops. They are born elsewhere and are protected. Wallabies have been here for thousands of years and are entitled to whatever they need. Their worst habit is eating all the new buds and leaves of my Isabella grapes. You get the picture; those who have this as their home come and take what they need to survive. Goannas, echidnas, water dragons, pythons, venomous snakes, green tree frogs, water rats, antechinus and scrub turkey all live here happily. They give us pleasure by being around.
I managed to track down more previous owners. A Slovakian couple lived here when it was 75 acres. To remind them of home they planted lots of pine trees (something about the sound of the wind through the needles and cones). Their legacy is also a line of poplar trees, English oaks and the first house, still standing and used. She came back for a look once and had a big sob.
The oldest link with the place was a man who grew up here when it was a 300 acre dairy farm. I invited him out and he told me lots about the place. I asked him about aboriginal stone axes, I had found one. He said they were common but were thought of no value and so not kept. There were lots of axes because native beehives were everywhere. We found his 40 year old, hand made drinking troughs, and lots of fence posts that his father had split and augured. He told me how his grandfather had cleared the land, 700 acres, in 1909. In those years a settler could select land on condition that the land had to be cleared and a crop harvested within 2 years. Starting at the bottom of the hill, trees would be cut most of the way through. A big tree felled at the top of the hill would bring the whole lot down. A team of local 'Hindus' would scramble among the fallen timber and dig holes to put corn seed in. Very soon a crop could be harvested and the government satisfied. It was then the farmer's job to burn the timber and grub out the stumps and roots.
Before that, timber cutters would have been through, first cutting the cedar, and then the other valuable rainforest species, and lastly the quality hardwoods. Their snigging tracks can be seen on the slopes still. Even further back, my precious acres were part of the Big Scrub and the undisputed domain of the Wiyabal mob. I am looking after the place as best I can. The axe head is back where I found it.

An Antechinus for Christmas.

I keep a bucket of water in the shed to put out fires. It is usually me that is on fire, a result of welding or grinding steel. Back in early November I found a ghastly sight, something furry had drowned in the bucket. I turned it over. It was an antechinus with eight babies in the pouch, a tragedy. The antechinus is a native marsupial mouse that sometimes likes to live in our buildings. They cause a bit of untidiness by dragging about what they consider nesting materials, leaves, paper and the undies you left on the floor. In return they rid your living spaces of cockroaches, moths , spiders and other insects, which they convert into scats, which are left in their place. There may be some advantage in having an antechinus living in the house. They are known to be able to pounce on a house mouse and crush its skull or neck with a bite. It will then eat the mouse, leaving its skin turned inside out. With Christmas, and some visitors expected, I did not want to give the impression that I lived in a rat-infested hovel. They might tell my mother, who would come up here and lead me back home, by the ear. The marsupials would have to live in the bush for a while.
In a former life I was a licensed animal trapper and still had my traps. With the lure of some peanut butter and oats, my little aluminium boxes were snapping shut in the wee small hours. There is something you must know about the antechinus. In mid July all the males develop impressively-sized 'wedding tackle' and become sexually active, trying to mate with as many females as possible in the few weeks they have left. Mating sessions can take as long as 12 hours. The males stop eating and die a reasonably hideous death, aged exactly 11 months and 3 weeks. This happens about mid-August, leaving pregnant females to carry on the line. So all my captives were ladies, with babies. Most mums had up to eight small pink 'peanuts' in the pouch. Each family was taken down to my scrubby back paddock, antechinus heaven, a boulder-infested forest of everything that lives.
The last domestic antechinus that I caught in late November had an empty pouch. The babies were stashed in a nest somewhere. I imagined them curled up behind a wall, comforted by a pile of torn up telecom bills and discarded underdacks. If I took their mum from them now, all the babies would die. It was a strange moment for me, I let her go in the house.
I waited a month and caught her again. Her babies, hopefully, were big enough to be independent. She joined her tribe in the back paddock. For the next few days I waited for the smell of death. It did not come. Perhaps they really were big enough to survive on their own. Four days later I discovered a little pile of furry things curled up asleep on the floor. I was really glad to see them. They had made a temporary camp, on the floor, in the space below a door and the door frame. I gathered them up, before the python found them, and put them in a plastic bucket to sleep the day off.
My only girl-child, a woman of 22 summers, was arriving later that day to spend Christmas with her doting dad. By way of a bit of mischief, I gift wrapped the bucket as a Christmas present for her, with the additional instruction that it be opened that day, before sunset. Knowing how challenging her father likes to be, she slowly and carefully peeked in the package, guessing that something live was within. In Asia you can buy a bird in a cage, to set free, here was the Aussie equivalent. We had an entertaining day watching them sleep. They would be completely immobile for 20 minutes, then start twitching and jerking about like dogs do when they are asleep. They would crawl about a bit and find a new comfortable position amongst their brothers and sisters.
Their heads seemed too big, their limbs so long, their young bodies lean. They were babies, but ready for life's challenges. The boys were already a third into their allotted life span. Our moment of quality time arrived at sundown. We picked them up and let them have a bite of our finger, just before letting them go in the back paddock. Would they recognise their mother if they saw her again?

Spiky in a jam.

I got a phone call from a neighbour the other day. She lives alone and asked for some help to remove a lizard from a pipe. A light stand had been knocked over on the verandah and an unfortunate water dragon had wandered in and become very stuck. She stood the stand up to keep the cat from worrying the trussed reptile. Nevertheless he (lets call him Spiky) had a mouth full of cat fur. Spiky looked so vulnerable with his arms pinned firmly to his side by a steel ring. There was no apparent panic, he just resorted to his main form of defence, that of not moving at all, hoping to be invisible. I gave Spiky a sponge bath with extra virgin olive oil to help with his transition. Ever-so-gentle pushing down from the top and pulling from below eventually did the trick. Throughout all this Spiky was gracious, not biting me, not struggling, even seeming to drift off into a slumber at times. Once free he shot off to join his bush mates.
On the farm

History of a photograph

Back in the mid-1970's I was at a photography exhibition and saw for the first time a sequence of photographs showing the birth of a human being. I was shocked and moved. Here is a similar photograph, and its story.
When my first child was being born I was shown a waiting room where I was expected to wait for an expected 6-18 hours. This was how it was done in 1977. The maternity ward was ruled by huge, gruff women. At best you would be allowed a quick visit every few hours. The rest of the time was to be spent on a vinyl chair next to a pile of 'Womans Weeklies' in the waiting room. I am not a patient man. My wife took pity and said I could go home. To her great disappointment I did. Six hours later I was summoned back to the hospital to view Adam, not the red reptilian thing I had been expecting but a handsome boy. That first sight of him was one of the great moments of my life.
More baby-making followed and by 1979 it had become an accepted thing for the 'significant other' to be present for the whole duration of labour and birth. Not so accepted was the intrusion of a camera. I was not allowed to take any photographs until the cord was cut. Thus Brett came into the world. He was to grow to become, in the words of Men at Work, 'six foot four and full of muscle'.
I had one last chance, in 1982, to photograph the whole labour and birth. So that I would not be prevented, I had letters of approval from the hospital directors, the matron and the obstetrician. I took two 35mm cameras loaded with black and white 'tri-X' high speed film, no flash. At times you have to decide whether to enjoy the moment, or get the photograph. The picture shows my wife assisting Kate into the world.

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Are you prepared for this? There are many ways to die on a farm and a tractor accident looms as the most likely. Up here in Koonorigan at least 2 people have been killed in tractor accidents. Could have been number 3 today. I was pulling lantana in the back paddock, by wrapping a chain around a clump and yanking it out with the tractor. An hour into this arduous and scratchy job something unexpected happened. A few seconds into a pull I saw the tractor rise up in front of me, flip over and generally menace my well-being. I reached for the kill button and sat in merciful silence, amazed that I was not dead. The front of the Massey-Ferguson 35 was 3 metres above me and the box of goodies mounted up there was showering its contents over me. I worried about bloody big bits of metal (power take-off shafts, chains, hammers etc) stoving in my head. The human body seems very fragile when being menaced by two tonnes of flailing metal. Fortunately the tractor did not flip right over backwards. It was not the rollover protection system that contacted the ground but a jib (a type of crane) that dug in. I had selected this attachment for this very reason. I walked away. You usually get some warning when the front starts to rear up, if you happen to be looking ahead, and can push in the clutch. I was looking behind. If I have any advice to my fellow farmers it would be to lead a moral and blameless life because you never know when you will be meeting your creator.
Passing through. I live with my wife, and 8 cows and calves, on top of the Koonorigan Range overlooking Nimbin Rocks. We own the land in as much as there is a piece of paper in the Land Titles Office bearing both our names and describing the aforementioned 24 acres. I have heard it said, more than once, because of things that happened a couple of hundred years ago, we are living on stolen land. I can assure you that we went into virtual slavery for a few decades to earn the money to buy said piece of The Rainbow Region. We own this place to the extent that when we decide to do something else with our lives, we can sell it for what we can get for it. Someone else will move in and the farm will change a bit more under their tenure. We are the temporary caretakers of Lot 2. We bought the place from a German couple, who, being in their 70s, found it a handful to mow and maintain. We had an exciting time quizzing them about carrying capacity, names of neighbors and species of trees that were planted about. I needed to know the location of kilometres of underground poly piping and how to start, prime and maintain the 'bulldozer' pump that sends water from the spring dam to the tanks around the house. They moved on and we moved in. I soon learnt how to drive a tractor and drag various implements about. Years of reading the library copies of "Grass Roots" and "Earth Garden" had prepared me for a crack at self-sufficiency. More than half of what we eat comes from these acres. The freezer is crammed full with hundreds of kilos of seasonal excess. When bird flu jumps the species gap to humans and we have to shut the farm gate for 3 months of isolation, it might be possible to live on what the trees, garden and animals provide. Of course, the birds live here too. Birds are born in their little cup nests and, at the end of their time, drop to the ground dead. It is their farm too. They take their share of grapes, bananas, mangoes, mulberries, figs, paw paw and persimmons. The bats have all this and more, taking up to 90% of some crops. They are born elsewhere and are protected. Wallabies have been here for thousands of years and are entitled to whatever they need. Their worst habit is eating all the new buds and leaves of my Isabella grapes. You get the picture; those who have this as their home come and take what they need to survive. Goannas, echidnas, water dragons, pythons, venomous snakes, green tree frogs, water rats, antechinus and scrub turkey all live here happily. They give us pleasure by being around. I managed to track down more previous owners. A Slovakian couple lived here when it was 75 acres. To remind them of home they planted lots of pine trees (something about the sound of the wind through the needles and cones). Their legacy is also a line of poplar trees, English oaks and the first house, still standing and used. She came back for a look once and had a big sob. The oldest link with the place was a man who grew up here when it was a 300 acre dairy farm. I invited him out and he told me lots about the place. I asked him about aboriginal stone axes, I had found one. He said they were common but were thought of no value and so not kept. There were lots of axes because native beehives were everywhere. We found his 40 year old, hand made drinking troughs, and lots of fence posts that his father had split and augured. He told me how his grandfather had cleared the land, 700 acres, in 1909. In those years a settler could select land on condition that the land had to be cleared and a crop harvested within 2 years. Starting at the bottom of the hill, trees would be cut most of the way through. A big tree felled at the top of the hill would bring the whole lot down. A team of local 'Hindus' would scramble among the fallen timber and dig holes to put corn seed in. Very soon a crop could be harvested and the government satisfied. It was then the farmer's job to burn the timber and grub out the stumps and roots. Before that, timber cutters would have been through, first cutting the cedar, and then the other valuable rainforest species, and lastly the quality hardwoods. Their snigging tracks can be seen on the slopes still. Even further back, my precious acres were part of the Big Scrub and the undisputed domain of the Wiyabal mob. I am looking after the place as best I can. The axe head is back where I found it.
An Antechinus for Christmas. I keep a bucket of water in the shed to put out fires. It is usually me that is on fire, a result of welding or grinding steel. Back in early November I found a ghastly sight, something furry had drowned in the bucket. I turned it over. It was an antechinus with eight babies in the pouch, a tragedy. The antechinus is a native marsupial mouse that sometimes likes to live in our buildings. They cause a bit of untidiness by dragging about what they consider nesting materials, leaves, paper and the undies you left on the floor. In return they rid your living spaces of cockroaches, moths , spiders and other insects, which they convert into scats, which are left in their place. There may be some advantage in having an antechinus living in the house. They are known to be able to pounce on a house mouse and crush its skull or neck with a bite. It will then eat the mouse, leaving its skin turned inside out. With Christmas, and some visitors expected, I did not want to give the impression that I lived in a rat-infested hovel. They might tell my mother, who would come up here and lead me back home, by the ear. The marsupials would have to live in the bush for a while. In a former life I was a licensed animal trapper and still had my traps. With the lure of some peanut butter and oats, my little aluminium boxes were snapping shut in the wee small hours. There is something you must know about the antechinus. In mid July all the males develop impressively-sized 'wedding tackle' and become sexually active, trying to mate with as many females as possible in the few weeks they have left. Mating sessions can take as long as 12 hours. The males stop eating and die a reasonably hideous death, aged exactly 11 months and 3 weeks. This happens about mid-August, leaving pregnant females to carry on the line. So all my captives were ladies, with babies. Most mums had up to eight small pink 'peanuts' in the pouch. Each family was taken down to my scrubby back paddock, antechinus heaven, a boulder-infested forest of everything that lives. The last domestic antechinus that I caught in late November had an empty pouch. The babies were stashed in a nest somewhere. I imagined them curled up behind a wall, comforted by a pile of torn up telecom bills and discarded underdacks. If I took their mum from them now, all the babies would die. It was a strange moment for me, I let her go in the house. I waited a month and caught her again. Her babies, hopefully, were big enough to be independent. She joined her tribe in the back paddock. For the next few days I waited for the smell of death. It did not come. Perhaps they really were big enough to survive on their own. Four days later I discovered a little pile of furry things curled up asleep on the floor. I was really glad to see them. They had made a temporary camp, on the floor, in the space below a door and the door frame. I gathered them up, before the python found them, and put them in a plastic bucket to sleep the day off. My only girl-child, a woman of 22 summers, was arriving later that day to spend Christmas with her doting dad. By way of a bit of mischief, I gift wrapped the bucket as a Christmas present for her, with the additional instruction that it be opened that day, before sunset. Knowing how challenging her father likes to be, she slowly and carefully peeked in the package, guessing that something live was within. In Asia you can buy a bird in a cage, to set free, here was the Aussie equivalent. We had an entertaining day watching them sleep. They would be completely immobile for 20 minutes, then start twitching and jerking about like dogs do when they are asleep. They would crawl about a bit and find a new comfortable position amongst their brothers and sisters. Their heads seemed too big, their limbs so long, their young bodies lean. They were babies, but ready for life's challenges. The boys were already a third into their allotted life span. Our moment of quality time arrived at sundown. We picked them up and let them have a bite of our finger, just before letting them go in the back paddock. Would they recognise their mother if they saw her again?
Spiky in a jam. I got a phone call from a neighbour the other day. She lives alone and asked for some help to remove a lizard from a pipe. A light stand had been knocked over on the verandah and an unfortunate water dragon had wandered in and become very stuck. She stood the stand up to keep the cat from worrying the trussed reptile. Nevertheless he (lets call him Spiky) had a mouth full of cat fur. Spiky looked so vulnerable with his arms pinned firmly to his side by a steel ring. There was no apparent panic, he just resorted to his main form of defence, that of not moving at all, hoping to be invisible. I gave Spiky a sponge bath with extra virgin olive oil to help with his transition. Ever-so-gentle pushing down from the top and pulling from below eventually did the trick. Throughout all this Spiky was gracious, not biting me, not struggling, even seeming to drift off into a slumber at times. Once free he shot off to join his bush mates. On the farm
History of a photograph Back in the mid-1970's I was at a photography exhibition and saw for the first time a sequence of photographs showing the birth of a human being. I was shocked and moved. Here is a similar photograph, and its story. When my first child was being born I was shown a waiting room where I was expected to wait for an expected 6-18 hours. This was how it was done in 1977. The maternity ward was ruled by huge, gruff women. At best you would be allowed a quick visit every few hours. The rest of the time was to be spent on a vinyl chair next to a pile of 'Womans Weeklies' in the waiting room. I am not a patient man. My wife took pity and said I could go home. To her great disappointment I did. Six hours later I was summoned back to the hospital to view Adam, not the red reptilian thing I had been expecting but a handsome boy. That first sight of him was one of the great moments of my life. More baby-making followed and by 1979 it had become an accepted thing for the 'significant other' to be present for the whole duration of labour and birth. Not so accepted was the intrusion of a camera. I was not allowed to take any photographs until the cord was cut. Thus Brett came into the world. He was to grow to become, in the words of Men at Work, 'six foot four and full of muscle'. I had one last chance, in 1982, to photograph the whole labour and birth. So that I would not be prevented, I had letters of approval from the hospital directors, the matron and the obstetrician. I took two 35mm cameras loaded with black and white 'tri-X' high speed film, no flash. At times you have to decide whether to enjoy the moment, or get the photograph. The picture shows my wife assisting Kate into the world.