Yesterday I was lying in my hammock under some pine trees, farmers hardly ever do this but I am a beginner. I noticed a wall of smoke coming up the valley. Our first drama. Went on fire alert. Filled all the buckets with water, attached the hose and put the keys in the ignition. Watched and waited. Closed all the windows and looked for falling sparks. Visibility was down to 50 metres. There was tremendous wind. Then, mercifally it started to rain, then pour, then hail. Put the car under cover. Had dinner. More instalments to come
Yesterday had an encounter of the snake kind. A green tree snake slithered across the steps. Next day the 3 guests (relatives) left. I am going to buy a rubber one.
Seen the snake again, it spends some of the day under the house. Put up a tv aerial to reexpose myself to the mediocrities of the great unwashed. Started taping ABC radio again. Today I think I wont do any of the following, fix the cattle yards, fix the fences, dig a vegie garden, kill some weeds, clean out the cattle drinking trough. I will unpack some of my old life and see if I still want it.
Plunged into the jungle that is my back paddock, and half the farm. Found 2 gum trees, lots of lantana, pine trees and rainforest regrowth. There is quite a bit of grass for the cattle, a spring, water trough and some fencing to mend. All this at the bottom of a 150m drop. Got to eat the first produce from the farm, macadamia nuts. I have 2 trees and they produce 20kg each per year. Good as packet stuff. I have got rabbits. Put out some live animal traps with carrot in them. No luck so far. Might get some rabbit pellets, I was going to eat the bunnies if I got them. Getting used to having a finite amount of water. With a few guests I managed to use a quarter of it in 10 days. Gunna run out one day. Have been musing over the luxury of having an outside spa to jump in on hot days. Finally got on the tractor, attached a chain and tried to pull out a stump. Managed to dig 2 big holes under the wheels. Still got the stump. Been using the chainsaw every day to remove pest trees and weeds. Neighbours 2 doors up have invited us over for drinks on Saturday, they have a pool so this might be a bad move on their part. What do you do with 15 lifejackets up here?
20 beef cattle arrived 7am today. They are about 6 months old, weaners, they miss their mothers, so i have to keep them in the yards for 3 days so they can cry it out. $7000. Tomorrow I have to castrate 12 bulls, drench the lot of them and inject them as well. A bloke has taken pity on me and is coming up to show me how. Why dont you come up and help hold them. Made a macadamia nut cracker to tap into the farm produce. Been chain sawing, slashing, mowing and digging. Might get my muscles back soon.
The cattle have been here a week now, and thanks to hours of fence straining and repairs they are still here. While they were still in the yards and bleating for their mothers, the stock agent came to give me a hand with some animal husbandry. It is hard to understand why anyone would agree to do such a noxious, exhausting, dirty and dangerous job for nothing. Each beast had to be injected under the skin with 5-in-one to protect them from such nasties as blackleg and pulpy kidney. Then a 25ml squirt of a creamy chemical down their throats from a container that bore a $100 price tag. This was for internal parasites, the beasts were much less keen to have a 120mm piece of brass poked in their gob and down their throats. I got to hold their large heads high. The boys had one more indignity as well. There was no head lock in our cattle crush so the beasts had to be restrained by muscular effort. Jump into the crush with 6 unpleasant animals stomping, mounting and trying to get out. Push leg into their hip to restrain them. Bend tail over their head, pull testicle down, feel for spermatic cord, clamp on emasculators, CRUNCH, wait 10 seconds while the blood vessells are ruioned, do the other side. Shut off emotions while the bovine opinions are expressed. Definately a 2 man job. There were about 12 to do. Grazing in the paddock the cattle seem not to hold any grudge against me. The sound of the emasculators doing their job will remain with me always. I am considering becoming vegetarian. Yesterday a big storm blew up with furious wind and rain. A tree next to the house was uprooted but was held against 3 others preventing its fall. It was a pine tree, 3 times taller than the house. Lots of other huge branches came down, some onto fences which needed fixing. Branches were touching the power and phone lines. We subsequently had visits from the SES, power supply people and a professional tree lopper. Our newly privatised Telstra is yet to show up. The dangerous felling was done and the sawing up and removal has become a 2002 project for me. I was already working a 14 hour day. The day before I had bought a new $1000 chainsaw with post hole borer attachment. The wood chips are gunna fly. The night was spent around a candle. Our water needs electricity to be pumped.
One thing I found about the farm is that you can work 14 hours a day, or do nothing. Work will eventually catch up. It is something like bringing up children - you encourage good behaviour (growing grass) and you try to discourage bad behaviour (growing weeds). As you can see I am qualified to be a farmer. When it rains the grass grows, the cattle eat it and turn it into meat. On this block I produce 15 kg of beef each day. Estuarine fishing, wildflowers and self-indulgent bushwalks seem a long way away. My aerobic fitness will evaporate and be replaced with short twitch muscles. Socially I see people once a week when I go shopping. The rest of the time I live with the birds and animals on my 9ha. Will soon have to do something about this, or become stranger still. At the moment there are 2 trees of mangos. There are about 100 ripening in the kitchen. Gunna be swamped soon. Also have bags of macadamia nuts, too many to eat.
The tree snake turned up again. He was lying on a piece of timber that I was about to grab. It was bad luck for both of us. Earlier on I would have made a pact with the snake that if he promised not to bite me I would promise not to kill him. But can you trust a snake? Turns out you can't trust me either. I grabbed a spade and turned him into 3 snakelets. It was a bad business. There is a huge brown snake in the garden. Very deadly. One of us may die if he does not find a home further from the house. I am taking measures to keep down the rodents and to open up the vegetation. One of the Herefords developed a disease called pink eye. Quite discusting to look at. I hearded the lot into the yards by myself and a few at a time put them in the crush for a check over and an insecticide spray to knock off the Bufflow Flies from them. Bruce, with the pink eye, got a blast in the face with antibiotic spray. All are doing well. It is all fun and games here. Lately I have had to repair the electronic part of the electric fence, grade a level spot for a water tank, freeze a surplus of mangoes, service the tractor and ride on mower, fix a flat tyre and eat as many figs as I can. Might have to get a food dryer to take care of the surplus.
The previous occupier of this house, a German lady of good vintage, left behind an arrangement of pots that are used for extractong juice from grapes by using steam. She also left the instructions in German. I can at least read the diagrams. We now have a million grapes to deal with. Had a try last night. Got 2.5 litres into sterilized bottles. The stuff is supposed to last for years, it comes out boiling. There will be many more sessions to come, this is the only time in my life when I dont have enough empty wine bottles. It aint all work. So what are the joys of rural life? Firstly there is the joy of finally achieving this lifestyle after a lifetime of reading and imagining the process. I started with a head full of Vacola bottlinging jars, skinning knives, peach trees, tall timbers, gumboots and a vegie patch. Time to reconcile. Then there is the pleasure of walking and walking and all of it is yours. I live in a house with no curtains. The doors of all of the buildings are never locked. Keys are left in the car. There is much to do and much to learn. The farm is an entity with boundaries, a community of animals and plants all with their own timetable and aspirations. We are all mates together.
When you take over a farm you find evidence of past endeavours. This is usually old machienery and buildings no longer needed. I managed to score an old dairy, now used to store fence posts, firewood and no doubt snakes. Also there some old timber gates lying about. They have been rounded up and combined. The old gates are now disassembled and the timber is being used to make a wood box for firewood. The alge, moss and paint has been left on for effect. Many generations of persons have worked this farm. Their personalities can be read from the remains of their handywork and repairs. My touch also will soon be in evidence. Friday evening will see me in the Koonorigan Hall with the other locals for the monthly BBQ. Hope they dont laugh out loud.

Sitting shirtless at the computer because my person got sprayed with fresh cow pats when I was slashing this morning. A 9000 litre plastic rainwater tank arrived yesterday and I spent a fascinating day connecting it up to the guttering. It is still empty. Have to master the mysteries of the new pressure pump next. Could not recognise some interesting scats found around the farm, in the garden and in the verandah. They contained beetle shells and grasshopper legs. Spotted the culprit last night. A bloody enormous green tree frog, the size of a cane toad.
There is much gut-busting work to do on a farm. The other day I broke a hardwood 4X2" plank through sheer effort. Every day I lift to my capacity. I know from my past athletic endeavours that it takes 3 months for permanent changes to occur in your muscles. Time will be up soon. At the moment if I rest there is much bodily pain when I get up. You feel like an old man. My muscles from the 1970's are popping out all over, draped this time on a cranky frame and padded a little with fat. On the weekend all my cattle disappeared. I had let them into the dredded Back Paddock. They were supposed to keep this side of the electric fence. I tested the fence and it was dead. Probably because the solar panel did not like the previous 3 overcast days. I dropped the fence and hearded 10 of the least-adventurous back to safety. There were still 10 down there somewhere. The trouble was that the fence at the bottom of the drop was barely cattle-proof. To save my investment We scrambled down with fence posts, wire, strainer and lots of fencing junk for a couple of hours of coarse repairs. Got about 10% of what was needed done. Returned to the top for some more posts and made the difficult and slippery 100m drop again with more supplies. Spent the rest of that day checking to see if any cattle had come up for a drink. Eventually the lot came close enough for me to heard them back on the motorbike. Yes, I bought a near-new Honda 250 Degree dual purpose trail bike. Looked a regular cocky moving the beasts that way. Every day now I disappear down the hill with a snake-bite bandage, bottle of water and fencing supplies for 3 hours of barbed wire doings. That is usually followed by an hour of pulling burrs, grass seeds and spiky things from body and clothes.
I am back in harness. One of the things I bought from the previous owner was a backpack sprayer. It holds 15 litres of herbicide and by pumping a lever it is kept pressurised. A spray wand leaves a trail of death. So that I dont also succumb I wear a respirator which covers the mouth and nose and does a good job simulating asthma in the wearer. Well this backpack had been repaired. One of the shoulder straps had been replaced with a leather belt. The leather was rather nice so I took it off, shortened it, sewed the buckle back on and after trying to clean it I ended up with a blackened, chafed belt that looks like it had spent the last decade between 15 litres of poison and a sweaty shoulder. 30 years ago I bought a paddymade H-frame rucksack and all that is left of it now are the shoulder straps. One of them now has a second career on the sprayer. Imagine, when I am out venting my chemical spleen on the lantana and Crofton weed, refurbished leather belt holding up my jeans, chrome tanned shoulder strap straining, again, against the 15kg load, what stories, what journeys they could talk about.
Half of my farm is really good land, the best in Koonorigan. The other half is as bad as it gets, very steep and 75% covered in weeds. The cattle are now allowed to wander at will in this hell. I thought it would be a good idea to try and walk the boundary to make sure there were no holes in the fence. Twas quite an adventure, rucksac with star-picket-pounder-inner on back, some wire, and just one star picket to right any wrongs. I trespassed on my neighbours land to get access to the fence, he, a 70yo surveyor, had not let his patch go nearly as much to rack and ruion. I still had to plunge down steep slopes and crawl through thick bush. I was visiting places that almost no one had ever visited. I am thinking about snake bite, broken leg and other mischief. Should I have a whistle, radio, EPIRB, rescue dog? Probably only find my belt and a shoulder strap.
The tree that could have flattened the house lives on as an uprooted tree stump, leaning over 45 degrees. There were still plenty of roots attached to allow removal. There was much digging and axe chopping. Hidden roots everywhere. I had to sadly abuse the chain saw by plunging it in full depth and circumnavigating the stump. It still felt solid. Using a 2 tonne winch and chains I tried to drag it over. I used the ripping hook and the jib on the tractor to try and budge it. It took 2 days of winching, first to this tree then to that and then to another. Bloody great tap roots were finally exposed which I cut through. The bugger was finally on its side next to a waist-deep hole. It was cut in two and slowly dragged away to be burnt in August. 150 years ago all the paddocks were cleared in this way.
The cattle are starting to run the show around here. When they are sick of being in one paddock they bunch up at the gate, expecting to be let out. They know best. When I let them out into the steep back paddock, half of them stayed out of sight for 5 days. I went down expecting to find them jammed in rock crevices, broken limbs and died of thirst. No way. They were on holidays munching the knee deep grass and tree leaves. It had rained enough to leave a boggy patch for them to turn into a quagmire and get a drink of sludge. Then had to spend a day connecting piping from the spring to a nearby drinking trough. Water now trickles in to a cement recepticle. Saw my first cane toad on the farm.
A big truck came and delivered a $2200 contraption for immobilising cattle, called a crush, with head bale and chin bar. This forced the issue and it was now time to dismantle the decayed half of my cattle yards and rebuild them. Cuit the twisted wires that hold the lot together, use the tractor to yank the posts out of the ground, dig new holes and wire the boards to the new posts. My wire twisting has become more expert with practice, it is evident which ones I did first. There is a lot of hard work in all this. Some of the posts are so heavy that they have to be moved around inch at a time with a crow bar and lifted into the hole with the jib. Holes have to be dug through the rock and dirt with a post hole digger, spade and crow bar.
Apparently there is a big cedar tree in the back paddock. Went down on Sunday to look for it armed only with a picture from a book. Best I wait till late winter when it will have lost its leaves for a positive identification. Discovered also strangler figs, guavas and rain forest pockets.

Made a big contribution to the greenhouse effect today. I set fire to a huge pile of trees and branches, 20 truck loads worth. Can still see the glow in the mulburry paddock. Not content with the current state of affairs, I have spent the last 6 months moving vegetation from one part of the fanm to another. That was a lot of gate openings. Like a bum on the dole I have also been shifting a big pile of dirt from one spot to another. The miracle of life has happened. My vege garden has lots of infants in it to nurture.

The north coast is in drought. Yesterday the tank
on the house was empty. I started laying pipes to
be able to fill it from the spring 300 metres down
the hill. This tank only waters the vege garden,
our drinking water tank was still half full. That
job is now on hold, it finally rained. Within half
a day both tanks were overflowing. Picture me in farmer clobber about to ride off to
find 4 missing cattle that have not been sighted
for 2 days. It is 10 degrees and raining.
Lit the Bega No 2 fuel stove in the flat for the
first time. It seemed the safest time to send the
probable resident vermin living in it scurrying.
For half an hour the kitchen filled with smoke.
When the cast iron contrivence was hot the smoke
slowed to a whiff. To celebrate I boiled some
water on it and made coffee. Old time stuff

A few days ago I got a phone call from a farmer 3
properties up alerting me that he had 2 new beasts
in his heard, perhaps they were mine. Bugger. I
went up, and there were my two biggest and best
steers munching away in his paddock. Actually he
was low on grass and his cattle were on a
neighbours property, behind a temporary electric
fence, they had no cattle but liked their 5 acres
to be mowed and fertilised for free now and then.
My prize beasties had joined them. We tried to
separate them from the heard but they kept going
back to their new mates, it is the natural
instinct of cattle. As it turned out he was
sending 10 of his calves to be sold at Lismore
saleyards that afternoon. Decided to send the
errant pair along with his. Went home and got my
tail tags and paperwork, phoned my stock agent and
helped him and his 2 dogs yard the lot. What
followed was a few hours of yelling, barking, head
bailing, mother seperating and being excreted
upon. Normally this 70+ farmer, (ex surveyor),
manages his heard alone. I hope it did not take
him much longer to do it with me there.
My best steer, I was hoping to put him in my
freezer, fetched $360, the other one sold for
$284. This was about the same maount that they had
cost me. Might see him in the Woollies meat
section soon. The market was down due to lots of
cattle coming from the west due to lack of water
and feed.
Their zest for adventure cost them a shortened
life. I still dont know how they got out. Spent
the next 2 days straining fence wire and sinking
extra posts. Two down, 18 to go.

Up here they have declared war on Camphor Laurel trees. Planted in the old days for shade trees, they now reproduce like rabbits. Each tree has thousands of berries that the birds scatter all over the place. On my farm they can be seen every few metres on the ground. If even a minute proportion of them germinate the farm would soon be a forest. I have a huge Camphor Laurel tree on top of a hill and decided to lop the monster. A metre across at the ground, it has four trunks each reaching 18 metres skywards. I didn't want to be under the tree when it fell so I cut out wedges around the trunk and walked away hoping the wind would drop the lot in time. Despite the weakend state and several wind storms in the following weeks nothing happened. I had to stand under and chain saw some more. One by one the 4 treelets toppled in a deadly crunching, snapping finale. Some was sawn up for firewood for which it is not very good. The big logs were left on the ground to chainsaw into planks at a later date. The wood is prized for indoor furniture. It needs to be seasoned for 2 years.

Something is pinching my dung beetles. The cattle serve as biological compost tumblers. I spend hours shovelling up cow pats for the garden and lately they present with lots of holes poked in them. Presumably ibis, kookaburra or magpies are mining them for dung beetles. I have not seen the culprits in the act. My precious beetles do a magnificent job burying the recycled vegetation back into the ground. Something better watch out. Went to the Koonorigan big morning tea and finally met one of my next door neighbours. She owns 250 acres across the road but her house is 10 km by road from me. Older than me she lives alone except for 50 cattle. There are other women in their 70's living alone on their farms which they run with a little help. Tough but happy.

Cattle duffers. Today I noticed a man on a horse hearding cattle into my neighbours yards.
I had not seen this cove before, he had a cattle truck at the loading yard. I have not met my
neighbour on this side yet but I have spotted him pottering around on occasions. He does
not live on the farm so I looked him up in the phone book. He is a barrister. I described to
him what was happening. He was mortified, said things like 'this is terrible'. He was
coming right away. I jumped into my truck, cruised past and wrote down the rego
number. All good exciting stuff. Twenty minutes later I watched the confrontation from
the safety of my verandah 500m away with the help of binoculars, the ones I used on the
yacht for identifying navigation beacons in the good old days. No one died. I got a phone
call later saying that the mystery man was known to him and he vaguely remembered
something about him coming to spray some of his cattle some time. FarmWatch at its best.
One of my cattle got into my other neighbours paddock and I had to use all my mustering
tricks to get him back, dogless. Spent the rest of the day stringing up hundreds of metres
of barbed wire, hammering in dozens of star pickets, straining wire and fitting spreader
bars. All are safe in Koonorigan

And then there were nine.
For weeks now I have been eyening off my 4 big Murray Greys, assessing them for
eating. When I look I see steaks, mince and roasts. But which one? The carrier was
coming to earn his $15 for taking one only beast to the Casino Abattoirs. A beast was
going to die today. I hearded them all into the yards, they are a herd, and instinct tells them
not to get separated from their mates. Much pondering with my butchers eye led me to
choose at last the fattest, juciest one. I put him into the crush to have a look at him, yes it
was a steer, I only have 3 girls and they will probably the last to go. I ran my hands over
his body on the pretence of looking for steaks. We are in drought, there is not much grass,
this one thrived the best. Really I was making an interspecies connection. Unused to this
confinement his body twitched wherever I laid my hands. I needed to induce some pain
and cost in myself for the sacrifice that this fattest and best was about to make for me. I let
all the rest go into the paddock. The chosen one, my beamish boy, got his tail tag and
waited for the truck. The whole time his mates stayed next to the fence, with him on the other side. The carrier, a handsome, young country bloke, backed the cattle truck up to the
loading ramp. My beast took some time to load as he was unwilling. As a last act of
unkindness I put a cattle prod to his rump, he joined half a dozen fellow travellers for a
last ride. Will God ever forgive me.

Bloody fireweed. There are what looks like wildflowers all over the paddocks at the
moment. Nothing that nice, but a poisonous plant called fireweed. It is toxic to cattle but
they have the good sense to graze around it. The only effective method of removal is to
pull it up. I have spent hours pulling the stuff up and new plants grew in their place. At the
moment the lot are going to seed and around the base of each plant are hundreds of
feathery seeds for the next generation. Fireweed likes drought conditions as there is little
competition. If you spray it you kill also all the grass around it which will not grow back
for 3 months. Grass means meat. Water means grass but there has not been a drop for
about 7 weeks. The weather man said it would rain this afternoon, so far it is cloudy. I
shall go on to the verandah and play my didj to help things along. There are deep cracks in
the ground, the dirt is as hard as iron. It being that time of year I went down the hill to
have a look at my Cedar tree. It is bare of leaves, three stories high and hanging on.

There are plenty of rocks in some of my paddocks which prevent me from slashing down the weeds. I was in the paddock digging up same, a gut-busting and endless job, when Joy called from the house that I should come there now. I had a few hundred metres of paddock and a barbed wire fence to traverse, and time to wonder what catastrophie had occurred. There it was, 2.1 metres of diamond python slowly moving across the ground beside the house. It was thicker than your arm, harmless they say (by those that have not worn one as a necklace). Took lots of pictures as it roamed the garden, went under the house, climed a tree next to the house and reached across space to explore the roof. Our Colourbond, sun-warmed, rodent desert was not to its liking. With tail firmly twisted around the tree it retreated in a fabulous display of muscularity, balance and athleticism. 9.7, a few points deducted because of the landing. Later that day I found it in the garage, moving along the framework, having knocked to the floor a number of nail-filled glass jars. As its head was a few metres away and it hadn't eaten me already, I ventured a tactile communication. It winced away from my touch. That same day I photographed a pair of tawney frogmouths on a low branch, from less than a metre away. The greenest grass is around the house and at night the local roos wander hither for a nibble. Fortunately they have not eaten any of my veggies, or else ...

Am beginning to learn to live with a busy python. The friendly reptile is very active, when
he went asleep for winter his surrounds were a rat-infested jungle, he woke up to a tidy
snake desert. Photo shows him(?) leaving the garage after a snoop around. He looks at me
but it dosen't seem to worry him. Saw a smaller, 1.5m, python entering the yard today,
much more stroppy, reared up, formed a tight S and generally did the big agressive snake
thing. Might have babies soon.

Have spent much time of late picking mulberries. Only a month ago my 9 trees were leafless, now they are verdant, lush and weighed down with purple berries. I have about enough intrest in the matter to pick a couple of kilograms each day. It is a juicy and splattering business, at the end of which I look like I have indulged in a chainsaw massacre. Some are eaten fresh, others stewed and pretend to be breakfast, more are reduced by heat to a jam and folded into pastry. Most end in the deep freeze. I expect my fingers to stay purple for a long time yet. Have had a few meals lately where all the ingredients have come from the farm. The rain of a few weeks ago has made the paddocks green, the cattle are spoilt for choice. In a past life I spent years live-trapping native animals with sophistocated wire traps. It seems a puddle of water is sufficient up here. Today I found an antechinus drowned in one of the cattle troughs. A month ago I saw my first water rat, drowned in the spring.