Billy Tea

Billy Tea

Joe was getting the run-around! He needed a new billy, but the stores didn’t stock billies these days, in fact, the young whippersnapper in one of the stores didn’t even know what a billy was! Joe longed for the old days.

‘Time was,’ he drawled, ‘when milk bottles weren’t even invented yet, an’ folk used to leave their billies out for the milkman. The milkman come along with his horse-n-cart and ’e ladled the milk into the billy.’

The pimply-faced whippersnapper just looked a Joe as if he’d sailed with Noah, and stood there open-mouthed. Joe had a mind to shove something into the cavity but the only suitable thing in his pocket was the acorn he’d picked up from someone’s garden, but he wanted to plant it beside his cabin to provide  a bit of shade.

Joe had all the patience that high country-men have, but it was obvious to him that none of the flash stores in town had a billy, they just sold pots and frying pans. You can hang a billy from a hook over the fire, but you can’t do it with a blimmin’ pot and its half-baked handle! Anyway, Joe saw a second-hand shop sign and thought it would be worth a look in there.

He jumped out of his skin when the door went ‘ding-dong’ to announce to the owner that someone was prowling around his shop! The owner looked up from his ledger book, blinked and looked again. Joe didn’t bother to dress up to come into town, he didn’t have anything flash to wear anyway! He wore a battered slouch hat, its colour long gone, replaced by sweat-stain and dust, the brim was turned down at the front to keep the sun out of his eyes. He wore a sleeves-rolled-up, red-checked woollen shirt, open at the neck, showing his black woollen bush singlet. His moleskin trousers were discoloured by possum fat and held up by a wide leather belt. Hanging from his belt was a canvas pouch that contained a rudimentary first aid kit and an emergency box of matches. He wore leather puttees up to his knees and his boots reeked of the mutton fat he used to waterproof them. A dozen flies followed him wherever he went.

‘Can I help?’ Asked the owner in a hushed voice, but Joe ignored him as he gazed at the assortment of things that nobody wanted. The owner had arranged everything in some sort of order, and Joe got the hang of it. He skipped past the furniture, the musty beds, the rusty garden tools and the mechanic’s tools until he came upon the kitchenware. All the pots had handles, and it looked like he’d drawn another blank, but as he turned to leave he spotted just the thing he was looking for tucked away behind a pressure cooker. He left the lid behind, because he had no use for it and sauntered up to the counter.

The shop owner eyed Joe, and tried to swat some of the flies.  

‘You going to cook your porridge in that?’ he asked, with a supercilious grin.

‘Another smart-arse.’ Joe thought but said aloud, ‘It’s a replacement for me tea billy, me old one’s buggered and don’t boil no more!’

‘I’ve got a right one here!’ thought the owner, but he asked, ‘How do you mean won’t boil?’

Joe looked around the shop, nobody was around so he sat on a wicker chair and relaxed.

‘If ye leave me flies alone, I’ll tell ye,’ he started, meaning to carry on whether or not the owner bothered his flies. ‘I was fossickin’ up Canary Steam. Mind ye business now, what I was fossickin’ for’s nothin’ to do with ye, ye hear? Anyways, this bloody great boar come upon me, y’see. Big bugger ’e was, half as big agin’ as that thar fridge over yonder!  ’e had one red eye an’ a broken tusk! The other was a good six inches long an’ stickin’ out! Mad as a snake he was! Snot outa his nostrils dripped down an’ killed the grass as ’e come at me, made it go brown just like that!’ He snapped his fingers to demonstrate. ‘Like that Agent Orange it was! ’e was chargin’ me, ’e was! “Shit!” I sez an’ I run, run for me blimmin life!’

With every sentence, the shop owner’s eyes widened, and when Joe pause for effect he asked.

‘How did you get away from the monster?’

‘Well, the big bugger was scared off wasn’t ’e!’ Joe said flatly, wiggling his bum in the chair for more comfort.

‘What scared him away then?’ asked the curious owner.

‘Well, here’s me runnin’ flat out with the boar right up me arse! An’ outa the corner of me eye, I spots this spaceship…’

‘A spaceship?’ The shop owner interjected, ‘What, a flying saucer?’ the supercilious smile was back.

‘Nah mate,’ replied Joe, ‘straight up, I don’t believe in ’em either! This was sausage-shaped, silver, shiny blimmin’ silver, with red and blue lights, like a cop car only along its sides. Anyways,’ Joe didn’t give the owner a chance to interrupt again, ‘anyways, the very second I spotted it, it took off like a blimmin’ rocket!’ He laughed at his pun. ‘An’ then I felt a blast of hot air that knocked me offa me feet, the boom made the bloody pig scarper for his life! Haven’t seen ’im since! An’ the, flash! Bright as twenny lightnin’ strikes I tell yer, twenny! Well, it made me teeth chatter, loosened me fillings too, I tell yer! An’ that’s why I come ’ere to look for a billy to brew me tea. Y’see, the flamin’ exhaust from the spaceship musta had outa-space nuclear-fission in it, an’ its damn well altered the metal molecules of me billy! ‘Cos since then, the bloody thing won’t boil water!’

Joe paid his money and left the shop owner with his mouth flopping open and shut. And Joe wore a supercilious grin.

Times Two

Times Two

There’s another branch to the river, unromantic titles perhaps, but there’s the North Branch and quite remarkably there’s the South Branch too. Not that I’ve measured them but I’d say the South Branch is the shorter, after having walked both because both, happen to be boundaries of the forest. There’s an old pack track that crosses the South Branch, a pack-horse track, carefully built to drop down onto the river bed. The track’s built up with flat rock because it’s very steep and anyone packing provisions or equipment wouldn’t want to have wanted a horse stumble in a place like that. Once across and with height regained, crossing the tussock covered hills is easier. Likely it was a trek that required overnighting under the stars, and in the very early days, Gib, who became one of my forest workers used to lead a horse on the passage.

It’s still wild country where the weather can turn in a matter of minutes, so being prepared was essential, but it’s been decades since horses traversed the area. We opened the track back in ’78 to allow Boy Scouts across during their Asian-Pacific Jamboree. I wonder if any of those boys remember the experience. Nowadays my guess is that the crossing is covered in broom and gorse. Horses are spreaders of broom, if they happen to have the opportunity of ingesting a few seeds before the trek.

Over time and on its way to the sea, the river formed alluvial river terraces formed high above the riverbed, some are sheer bluffs of thirty metres or more. Over time the silt among the stones matured to clay, which happened to be very useful when excavated and used on a road formation. It went down like concrete. Sometimes it was crushed, which made it even better. So the council made a quarry and excavated the bank for their roading projects at a time when there were no face-height restrictions for working on a quarry site.

The man who farmed the terraced river bank was Ted, a short, well-muscled man who worked hard to make his dryland farm pay. These were the days of regular droughts and hard times but Ted was a good farmer. Betty, Ted’s wife was a hard working housewife during a time when baking and cooking wholesome meals was important to attract the best shearers and of course to provide for their young family. Active in the community she served on the local school committee and was a member of a local women’s group.

Weather in the region can’t be relied upon. The month of June is usually the driest of the year, in fact there have been Junes with no rainfall at all, but just to be different, the wettest month ever, happened to be a June. After a drought, rain begins and it forgets to stop! The south-easterly drizzles can last for three days, while back in the hills there’s heavy precipitation and the river rises rapidly. This time there had been several floods, perhaps a week or so apart, it didn’t take much rain to bring the river up again. The soil was saturated too.

It was the tail end of yet another three day drizzle, Betty taking a spell from housekeeping, left the house and watch the floodwaters and listen to the roar of the surging water. From the clifftop vantage point, she had an impressive view, standing thirty metres above the raging torrent that carried whole trees along with it. The water was caramel coloured and tipped with a foam frosting. Watching water is a pastime for many and Betty was no different, she was mesmerized. Without warning the clifftop collapsed taking Betty with it! She was lost forever, never seen again! When Ted came in from the farm he found Betty missing, and knew she would be watching the floodwaters. He found the collapsed cliff-face.

Years later, young Lenny took over the farm. He and his wife kept a weather eye on old Ted through his lonely senior years and Lenny tweaked some of the practices he had learned from his father. When the Forest Service bought the block of land from old Bert, we needed access to walk the dozer from one block to the other. Happily we were successful in having a good relationship with Lenny who allowed us through his property and across the river. We had to widen one gateway, but that was a small price to pay for the access.

Sheep have a reputation of being dumb, which pretty much a myth, any good shepherd will tell you that to be successful, you need to be able to out-think them. The advice is sound and there are easy ways of handling them as well as difficult ways. Anyway, just after weaning Lenny turned his wether lambs out onto the paddock that overlooks the river. As all good farmers do, he made his rounds to check on them.  Farmers can sense trouble so he had a rough count. One short. He counted again. Still one short. He peered over the cliff-face and there was the missing wether, stranded a metre of so down.

There was enough of a footing to get down to the frightened wether and a handy gorse bush gave him a handhold. Another bush just down the face would give his right foot somewhere to gain purchase, to get back out, so he gingerly climbed down towards the wether. River-worn stones rolled under his boots and he lost traction! The bottom bush’s roots were too weak to support him! Lenny plummeted, and the wether went with him! They were both found, broken, at the bottom of the cliff.

Two tragedies for one family in the very same place.

Fluttering Eyelashes

Eyelash Fluttering

A dairy cow on good pasture can produce as much as twenty eight litres of milk in a day, while a beef breed might produce four or five. Now to the average Joe or Jessica Blow, they’re ho-hum figures and of little importance, but to a young fella like I was, trying to raise a few bob to buy wall lining of the house I was building, those figures had significance. I used to raise cattle, and sell them off at about eighteen months, for projects my wages couldn’t quite stretch to.

House cows were going out of fashion for two basic reasons; firstly, people no longer had time to hand milk a cow night and morning, which is another way of saying they were too lazy. The other reason was down to health regulations. I had a handle on it because my dad was the first person to sell pasteurised milk in the city, later the government made it mandatory because of the fight against tuberculosis. Before the new law, he still sold raw milk, which I preferred and when the new law came in, I weaned myself. So if you had a house cow, TB testing and the drudgery of heating milk, was too much bother, so it was easier to have bottled milk delivered to the gate, or pick it up at the supermarket.

Ex-house cows began to turn up at the saleyards on their final trip to the abattoir, but I delayed the final trip for a few because I bought them to become nurse cows. I didn’t really care about the breeds, so long as they were quiet and had been hand milked. Most were in milk when I bought them, but for others I had to organise a bull. The sex life of cattle? Maybe I’ll go there another time. I had to act fairly quickly once the cow arrived. A swollen udder is a painful thing (I think) and mastitis might result. So until I managed to source a bobby calf or two, I had to hand milk them.

Bobby calves? Well dairy farmers put their cows, to the bull, or use artificial insemination, with the aim of harvesting the milk. Back in the day, the freezing works used to pay a shilling for the unwanted calf. Colloquially a shilling was a bob. So unless the calf was required back in the herd, or somebody bought it to fatten, a bobby calf’s life was short. I used to buy in bobby calves and put them onto nurse cows to rear up as their own.

A house cow that has been hand milked will usually take a day old bobby calf quite easily and some have reared as many as three at a time. There are tricks to it and not all nurse cows take the calves easily. I have even had some cows that reared one set of three and then another in the one season. I found it easier to buy one bobby calf at a time because even with quiet cows, it takes a little time for them to accept each other.

There’s a rigmarole in getting the calf to suck because its natural instinct has been interrupted, especially in its first few days, which is why I kept the calves in shelter but allowed the nurse cow to graze to manufacture milk. The process only took about a week, after which time, cow and calf were turned out into the paddock, but some cows were cunning and unless I watched over them for a further week, they would try to abandon the calf. Once the calf was strong enough, they insisted on being fed. It was a busy time for me during the calving season, because some of my cows may have needed birthing assistance, and with the mothering up. Meantime it was full-on planting season on the forest.

Daily I passed through Lindsay’s property on my way to the planting site, he lived in the same homestead as old Bert if you remember the story Cassius. Anyway… Lindsay was a full-time cattle breeder and sheep farmer, he also used nurse cows and bought in calves. He had a different system. He used dog collars joined together by a piece of chain about eighteen inches long. One collar was put on the cow’s natural calf and the other on a foster calf. He insisted that it worked super-well and to prove it, he loaned me a set of collars and chain. I didn’t want to be squeamish, but I thought the natural calf would have some dominance over the foster, but anyway, I thought I’d give it a go.

The collars and chain sat around until a heifer I had kept for breeding birthed her calf. Heifers can be a bit contrary, but this one, even though she wasn’t hand reared, always behaved and was approachable. After she calved I bought a bobby calf and drove her and her calf up to the shed. She didn’t mind me chaining both calves together, but when she sniffed her foster calf, all hell broke loose! She bellowed and attacked both calves, raking them with her horns! Neither calf was safe! She was mad with death was on her mind! She was for too strong for me tip over so I tried to drive her off the calves by whacking her on her rump with a shovel, the only implement handy! It made not a hoot of difference, but I had to act quickly!

There was a stick of two inch by two inch macrocarpa leaning against the shed wall, which I grabbed and gave her a swift crack between her horns. The stick broke! Down she went like a sack of spuds! She lay there on her back, legs straight up in the air! I didn’t check her, I undid the dog collars and biffed them over the fence. I thought the heifer was dead, because she lay there like an upside-down statue! Suddenly she fluttered her eyelashes! Life! I separated the calves, rolled her on her side and allowed her to get up on her own and to mother her calf. They were ok.

I put the bobby calf on another old nurse cow, and all went well, but this nurse mustn’t have had quite enough milk, so within a fortnight, that stubborn little bobby calf, now strong, found the best place for a meal. The back teats of the blimmin’ heifer! Whenever her own calf was sucking, the bobby calf took its chance! The new mum turned to look behind, so she knew what was going on and didn’t mind a bit!

Animals can be unpredictable, but that’s what makes them so interesting.