G'day
Praying for rain
In the vast and empty spaces between the steaming tropical wetlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria and the icy waters of the Snowy River, Australia is one of the driest places on the planet, and drought is a persistent hazard for everyone who tries to make a living in the outback.
The cattle station in Queensland where I worked as a jackeroo just - well, a little while ago as the crow flies - was caught in a bad dry spell, and trying to find a way to save the cattle on Cockatoo Creek from the drought added a vivid extra dimension to the extraordinary experience of life on an outback station.
Sometimes the ‘dry’ is shortlived and sometimes, as it has been recently, it can be prolonged and deadly. The Australian outback is littered with the shattered dreams of hopeful cattlemen and the bones of drought stricken cattle in their unknown millions. But wherever there's a drought in Australia, and there's always a dry somewhere in Australia, the station owners will be struggling to keep their cattle alive and praying for rain now as we did then.
Britain suffers drought occasionally, but these are minor inconveniences compared to an Aussie dry, and we haven't suffered a ban on garden hoses for a few years now. In fact, for the past three summers farmers in the UK have been praying for two dry days together, and the word drought has grown rusty from disuse.
It’s raining again today here in England, but I can still feel and smell the heat and dust on Cockatoo Creek as though I was sitting on a horse on the bank of our bone dry creek, watching a mass of cows and calves hurrying anxiously towards the water troughs in the house yards, bawling and bellowing in the sudden tropical evening,
I can feel the sudden heart in your mouth thrill of chasing wild cattle through the trees. I can smell the sweat drying on my horse’s neck as the baking day cools into dusk. I can feel the bruises on my backside from a twelve hour day in the saddle.
I can hear the mad, mocking cackle of a kookaburra and the soft early morning song of the butcher bird, the invisible dingoes singing in the dark on the far side of the house dam, and the laughter of a handful of people sitting on the verandah after supper in a tiny pool of light, surrounded by the infinite, uncontaminated starlit darkness of the outback night.
The outback is a tough and unforgiving environment. It isn’t a place that has much room for sentimentality. But my time as a pommie jackeroo left me with a deep affection and respect for the people and animals I lived and worked with there, hanging on with quiet determination in the hope that the drought would break before they did.
Living and working in Queensland left me with with a million fantastic memories,
and a huge debt of thanks that I’m sure I left unsaid to all the people who kindly put up with that callow jackeroo. I’ve changed their names here and the names of local places to protect privacy, but I’ve done my best to be as truthful as I can in every other way.
If you happen to read this and remember me, forgive me for all the things I have misremembered or forgotten. And if I didn’t say it then… many, many thanks.
read more... A Good Place To Start
read more... A Good Place To Start