It doesn’t often come up in farming conversations, but my title is officially Dr. I’m not the useful sort of doctor, though — just an academic. In retrospect, I should have studied medicine, as I originally intended. Instead, my academic qualifications extend to explaining climate change, but are totally useless in the project that is about to take all of my time and energy for the next few weeks: lambing 33 ewes.
This is the first time in six years that I’ve had lambs of my own. I had lots of good rationalisations for why it was a good idea to buy in lambs, but the truth is I chickened out. Lambing, like ageing, is not for the faint of heart.
An early season bush fire on my farm earlier this year led me back to studying the knowledge of indigenous Australians about using fire to shape the landscape and enhance biodiversity.
Note to self: you need to change your mindset well before shearing next year. Let this be your reminder to practice staying in the present moment almost all the time, rather than just occasionally. If you don’t, you will, at the very least, leave a critical gate open and lose your sheep into the back country when you really, really don’t want them there, and don’t have the time to gather them back into the fold. There was a lot of swearing, none of it particularly inventive, when I did precisely that two days ago on my fifth straight day, and 7th out of a total of 12 days of shearing.
It was a cross between a flying tackle and a wrestling pin to the mat when I tripped and fell on top of the old ewe I was trying to catch. She’s a 14-year-old with severe cataracts, and she’d gotten lost in Chicory Hill tree reserve a few days ago. It was pure blind luck I found her when I did.
As I held on to all four legs of the squirming, hapless young kangaroo, all I could think was. “WTF am I going to do now?!” With my five working dogs swirling around me, I couldn’t let the little bush kangaroo go—they’d already had him up against the fence once, which is how I finally caught him. Three of the five dogs were intent on finishing the job I’d so rudely interrupted.
I don’t know why I seldom write about my working dogs. Maybe it’s precisely because they are such an integral part of my life. It would be like writing about the sun coming up in the morning—a common miracle. When I do stop to reflect, I’m amazed all over again at the way my dogs and I can forge a bond through work that transcends the seemingly insurmountable barriers separating two different species.
The working dogs are so much a part of my everyday life on the farm that I’ve neglected to give them their own Yarn. A friend recently asked me how the dogs were coping with the abrupt onset of winter (two big snowstorms in the last 2 weeks), and particularly whether the dogs were allowed in the house. They aren’t. But their kennels have floor heating, so I don’t feel guilty. Plus, Oscar and Skye, the house cats, would have plenty to say, none of it politically correct.
Continuing my jazz and shepherding analogy (new subscribers click here for the previous Yarn), there’s a wonderfully apt line from “Birth of the Blues” (1941), set at the turn of the century. A ridiculously young Mary Martin is quizzing Rochester about how to sing the new jazz and blues. Rochester says, “Well, it’s like this. You listen for a note, and when you find it…you don’t play it. Instead, you listen some more, until you find another note…but you don’t play that note, either. Eventually, you find the right note to fit into the music.”
t is undoubtedly too early for me to write this Yarn. In fact, I’m not supposed to be writing at all today, on two counts: first, it’s meant to be a shepherding day, and secondly it’s a weekend and I’m supposed to turn my computer off for the weekend, to help break the "dumb gas thrall" syndrome. I’m not shepherding because it’s snowing and blowing a gale (this on the southern hemisphere equivalent of the first of May) and I just plain wimped out.
Had I any idea of the pivotal role she would play in my life, I would have given my lead ewe a better name. Boadicea, for instance. Or maybe Elizabeth. Or even Frances Darlene after my difficult and undeniably contrary mother. But at the time I saved her from the usual fate of 5 year-olds on most sheep properties, I only knew that she was a pretty good leader, at least at times. So she became simply “Old Leader”.
