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Friday, May 21, 2010

Outback (Dave)



It takes a certain sort of person to live in the remote outback. In an earlier post, I told you about Angus, who hated city life and was totally at home in his sunburnt land. Other young men spent their childhood looking for ways to escape. One was my diving mate, Dave. His folks had a sheep farm on the far side of the Great Dividing Range and that’s where he was born.



There was a time when Australia rode on the sheep’s back, or so the expression goes. A nation at the far ends of the Earth had to find commodities that could be transported by sea and didn’t need refrigeration. Gold was one and wool another. By the time Dave was born the boom times for wool were over. The price had collapsed and the family farm was too small to yield a decent living.


In desperation, his father resorted to all sorts of means to supplement the family income. At one time he was shooting kangaroos and selling the hides to tanneries and the flesh as pet food. When the market for pet food dried up, he boiled the roos in forty-four gallon drums and fed the meat to pigs. The porkers enjoyed cooked roo and there was a steady demand for pork.


Life became more desperate. Twelve-year-old Dave found himself learning how to shear. He was already helping his father dock tails from woolly bums and castrate rams. The neighbours were having similar trouble and all members of the family were called upon to help. On one farm, a fifteen-year-old spilt concentrated sheep dip over his lower body and died before he could receive medical treatment. The boy’s father later committed suicide. Dave found that particularly depressing. It was bad enough for the wife and daughters to have lost one member of the family – losing another was devastating.


Low wool prices and a worsening drought brought matters to a close. Dave’s parents walked off their land. They were behind in their mortgage payments and the farm no longer belonged to them. Like others, they gathered up their remaining possessions and went into the “long meadow”. For me, the term had no more than historical interest. The early colonial governments created broad stock routes so that sheep and cattle could be “droved” to market. In time, sealed highways developed along many of them, which is why many Australian roads have wide grassy strips on either side.


For Dave, the term conjured up feelings of helplessness and despair. The long meadow was a place of last resort. It was where you went when there was no feed left on your land. When your flocks have consumed the last blade of grass, you take them onto the highway so they can eat the grass on the sides of the road. He and his father rode in front on their horses. The rest of the family followed behind in the farm truck. After ten days, they reached Goondiwindi, on the New South Wales/Queensland border, and sold what remained of the their animals. Dad used the money to buy a caravan and signed up with a firm of contractors as a combine harvester driver.


For the next few years they lived the life of nomads, moving as far north as Central Queensland then back down into New South Wales as the season advanced and harvesting began in the cooler parts of the continent. Being the son of a harvester had its problems but there were advantages. Dad no longer had financial worries and his health improved. Mother was more relaxed and Dave saw light at the end of the tunnel.


Schooling was under control. He admits to flunking School of the Air. Peer pressure put an end to that. The kids, in his travelling entourage, were determined to get a decent education. Everything was arranged when they arrived in a new town. The teachers were expecting them and there were friendships to be renewed amongst the locals. Dave left school at eighteen and joined Queensland Rail as an apprentice electrician. He stayed with the railways for a while then set himself up in private business. Like me, he was a keen scuba diver and worked on the dive boats in his spare time.


Farming is never easy but it’s not as difficult as it once was. The tyranny of distance has been eased by better roads and advances in telecommunications. A lot of the smaller farms have gone and more economically viable holdings have emerged to take their place. There are fewer farmers and those that remain are more prosperous than those of a generation ago. Weatherboard homesteads with corrugated iron roofs are being replaced by prosperous dwellings that would not look out of place in a modern city. There are those who feel nostalgic about the vanishing past. Dave is not one of them.





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