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1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Accepted Solutions
My fav spot is my front porch, love sitting out there listening to numerours birds and watcing the world go by
I have so many special places, so rather than choose one, I'm going to sit on the fence... ha ha.
🙂
My fav spot is my front porch, love sitting out there listening to numerours birds and watcing the world go by
@bushies.girl wrote:
My fav spot is my front porch, love sitting out there listening to numerours birds and watcing the world go by
@bushies.girl wrote:
My fav spot is my front porch, love sitting out there listening to numerours birds and watcing the world go by
My idea of heaven , what more could one
want
A RUSTY PAINT POT AND THE CLOVER LEAF BRAND.
As I have mentioned before I travel 250 km. out to our remote rural property each week to do a bit of maintenance and check the stock water. What I have never mentioned is the history or signifigance of the property. It is located at the end of the line.......... literally. The nearest town is the last stop for the original steam trains and later grain trains. A junction where the locomotives must turn back and retrace their steps to the city and ports. It is the edge of marginal farming country where the cleared, settled ground meets the deserts with their low vegitation and rising sand dunes. A place where Dingoes and wild dogs still roam and wedge tailed eagles soar majestically in the sky.
My grandfather was the original owner of the property. He was a skilled stockman and astute businessman. Over the years, neighbouring properties where purchased, workmen employed and the sheep flock grew. At its peak, the property ran 3500 head of merino sheep and 100 prime Angus cattle. It was a noted property and appears on many old maps. It even had its own school, where neighbouring kids would ride horses to class each day.
The homestead is gracious with lovely wooden french doors opening onto wide verandahs. The main structure is built of local stone with walls nearly a metre thick. It is set on a gentle rise, surrounded by ancient Bulloak trees. It was boom times for sheep in the 1950,s and a large new shearing shed was built to handle the expanding flock. At 100 feet long, fourty feet wide and 25 feet high it is an imposing structure.
By the late 1960,s my grandfather was ready to retire to a new house he had built in town. His family consisted of three daughters and no son to be the hier apparent. The vast property was split up between the girls and some sections sold off to fund the retirement. The girls where mainly married to city men and so a series of managers and share farmers where employed. They where more interested in what was in it for them, rather than maintaining the iconic property and slowly it slipped into decline.
Fast forward 50 years and I am now the owner of 1100 acres which contains the original homestead and sheds. Like most in the district, since the wool crash of the 1980,s the property has been used solely for cropping. The chatter of the shearing plants replaced by the drone of huge computer controlled contractors grain harvesters working 24/7 to bring in the crops. A few sheep are trucked to the property in the summer to eat any spilled grain from the harvest, but other than that, the property remains empty of stock for most of the year. The young blokes today would much rather sit in an air conditioned cabin than wrestle with contancorous sheep.
The wheels of time have turned and wool and lamb is now a botique, but valuable product. It is so valuable that I have returned a few hundred sheep to the property permenantly. Each sheep has a numbered ear tag with owners details for identification, but the tags all look the same. With quality breeding ewes now valued at $250-$300 each, I cant afford to lose them so I decided to revisit the long forgotton art of sheep branding. It took some time to find the required branding paint. A product that retains its colour for twelve months on the wool, but washes out in the wool scouring process. I chanced upon a can earlier in the week, sitting alone gathering dust on the stock agents shelf. " You can have it cheap if you want it " he said. No-one uses that stuff any more. So twenty dollars later I had my paint, but what to do for a brand. It was then that I remembered the long forgotton clover leaf brand and rusty paint pot hanging on a nail in the corner of the shearing shed. I took it down from its nail to find two inches of dust and a fossilised mouse in the bottom of the pot.
As I tipped it out, I realised this wasnt just dust. Like the rings on a tree branch, this was half a century of history. The dust was the legacy of the many droughts the propery had experienced. It would contain traces of fine ash from the nearby scrub fires, ignited by summer lightning storms and the mouse may have found his way into the pot in one of the terrible mouse plagues when every blade of grass and clover burr was devoured by the hungry mice.
I thought about my grandfather placing the brand and paint pot on the rusty nail half a century ago. It would have been after the last sheep had been branded for sale. Did he think about the finality of his actions ? Did he have the same sense of melancholy that I felt as I pondered the ancient tin. I poured the thick smelly paint into the pot and climbed the stairs into the lofty shearing shed. After half a century of patiently waiting on a nail in the corner of the shed, , the iconic clover leaf brand and rusty paint pot have had one last hurrah. Within a couple of years, microchips will replace tags, but for now, three hundred sheep now proudly wear the brand of a once iconic property.
