Out the Back

Went out to the farm today to give Dad and Bruce a bit of a hand to put up a fence and drench some ewes, and to pull up some fences off the sold land. Most of it has been sold, bar 400 acres, to Integrated Tree Cropping company who will Blue Gum it. Accomplished the first task, not that I did much, and they managed to get highly annoyed with each other. The ewes have freshly born lambs, so we left them alone.
I got time for a quick drive out the back to see "my plot" which is 44 acres we fenced off a few years ago to try and revegetate a swamp there. They always thought it was a stupid idea, and when I left for Melbourne in '03 it wasn't long before they were so low on feed Bruce had to run some cattle through...despite having another 2300 acres of farm.
Now I think that's a seriously flawed management system which can't organize itself to do without a one 60th fraction of the total - they must've been running pretty close to the wire. Either that or that just couldn't stand the sight of all that "unused" land, and that beautiful clover just sitting there. And my brother is a selfish cunt.

So anyway, it means not much reveg was allowed to occur naturally. But I have yet to have a thorough investigation, because when the old man drove me out there, he wouldn't stop to have a close look. Don't ask me why. I don't know.

It's funny how I've manged to put off being pissed about this for so long. Now I'm writing it down, I can feel my blood starting to boil. Like, Fuck! Seriously I mean for Fuck!

It was a really beautiful paperbark swamp. I counted 30 types of birds there one day, including black swans, a breeding pair of Cape Barren Geese, a wedgetail eagle and a few other raptors, heaps of other things I don't know the names of, plus lots of frogs, tiger snakes by the hundreds (potentially!) and a wierd blue snake that frightend the bejesus out of me one day by following up the hill. Who knows what else. The wetland systems in Esperance have such extremes of fluctuations it's amazing to consider what is possible.

One year, we had a huge flood and the seasonally dry, sandy drain that runs diagonally through the farm filled up with so much water the boys lay on a surfboard and floated the whole way down: previously unheardof depths. In the stream that year appeared swarms of small fish, that none of us had ever seen before. They were substantial too: about 6 inches long.

But where did they come from? Had their eggs had been lying dormant in the sand for decades? Who knows?

Ah well, I guess I'm not the one who's ever going to find out. I find Esperance a difficult place to be. And now the farm's been sold anyway.