Masterclass
28 March 2010
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Ben took Deborah and the little girls over to Straight Creek on Sunday morning. They went in the truck, and they brought the Campbell's stallion back with them in the afternoon.
Masterclass is a registered thoroughbred whose job is to upgrade the Campbells' stockhorses on both the properties, and he is what Buckle would call a Christian, a Scholar and a Gentleman. Ben thinks he is about twenty, which is early old age for a horse, and he's much more of a family pet than you would normally expect a thoroughbred stallion to be.
Cow Down
28 March 2010
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Yesterday we saw the first cow bogged in the mud at the edge of a dam.
This is what happens as the water and feed disappear. The older and weaker cattle give up trying to make the journey from the water to the remaining grass in the paddock, and then as they grow weaker they can't negotiate the strip of mud that surrounds the water.
In situations like this cattle and horses seem to go into a kind of trance. They give up struggling and appear to resign themselves to death.
The Yellow Mickey
28 March 2010
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I had my first close encounter with the yellow mickey yesterday.
We were having a comparatively easy day gathering cows and calves out in the Breeder Paddock, when our peaceful mob was suddenly detonated into a panic stricken riot by the sudden arrival of a huge tan coloured mickey. It was like a bomb going off in the middle of a Sunday school picnic.
The yellow mickey is a seriously big feral bull. He has to be at least four or five years old and he stands at least a hand taller than any of our horses. He must weigh something close to three quarters of a tonne, and he carries a pair of wicked horns that look to be well over a metre from tip to tip.
How to throw a wild bull
28 March 2010
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We were sitting on the verandah after supper a couple of evenings ago.
It was the end of the day when we thought we'd finally mustered the yellow mickey.
This is the wild bull that Ben described
when we were unsaddling in the yards as by far the biggest on Cockatoo
Creek. By the end of supper, Buckle was considering whether it might be
one of the biggest he had ever seen in 40 years of mustering. "Haven't seen too many bigger than that. My very word."The Ghan
28 March 2010
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I noticed the other day that this year is the 80th anniversary of the year they opened the Adelaide to Darwin railway.
Back in 1929 they called it The Ghan, because before the railway the only form of transport that could cope with the hundreds of miles of waterless desert in the middle of Australia was the camel. So in the later half of the 19th century Australia imported camels from what was then called Persia, from northern India and from Afghanistan, and they imported camel drivers from these parts too, many of them Afghans. Aussies don't like long names or long explanations, so they called the whole lot Afghans, and then when they built the railway they called that The Afghan as well, but since that wasn't as short as they could make it, they cut it down to The Ghan.
Maternal Instinct
28 March 2010
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When we were working in the yards, surrounded by hundreds of cattle, we were always advised to keep an eye open all the time. You never knew when you might find yourself on the receiving end of a sudden charge.
Back home I knew from first hand experience that you should never, under any circumstances, turn your back on a bull. But in Queensland you could be flattened unexpectedly by pretty much anything from a two tonne cleanskin bull to a furious old cow, and if you had to put money on the animal most likely to stick a horn in you, an old cow with a calf at foot would be the safest bet.