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.
Those of you who know me personally and through reading the Yarns will have a pretty good idea of the horrified fascination with which I watched the US election campaign—a bit like watching a forest fire raging out of control—and the dismay I felt at the result. Until yesterday, I hadn’t found the words I wanted to write, but after watching changes in flock behaviour after I re-united the “mothers-to-be” with the main flock, I was inspired to share the following perspective with you.
In the past, October has been lambing month on my farm. Logically, it makes perfect sense: mid-spring (April equivalent for you in the northern hemisphere) with plenty of new growth for the mamas to make milk. However, year after year, September has seen reasonably settled weather and October has been truly awful.
Although I’ve lived in Australia for 20 years, I will never have an Australian accent. This is not so much because it’s hard to put on an Australian accent, as because it is difficult to get away with it. Australians have an uncanny ear for accents, and can distinguish a faux Aussie from about a kilometre away.
We've had 3 ½ inches of rain in May (hooray!) and the property is looking better than it has in months. Admittedly, it looks better from a distance than at worm's-eye level, where there is too much bare ground showing. However, the lovely spring green look is most welcome, along with the beginnings of run-off.
Come Shepherding is a new initiative I’ve started, designed to give readers a more personal experience of shepherding, White Gum Wool style. Each time I do a shepherding circuit, I first post the map and plan for the day on the Come Shepherding blog, then provide a few photos via Instagram as I’m shepherding. At the end of the day, I write up my notes and add them and the photos to the Come Shepherding post for the day.
As often happens to me, I mis-remembered this quotation. I thought it was about doing six impossible things before breakfast, thereby revealing my lamentable tendency to jump into things with all four feet without due consideration of the consequences. Believing six impossible things is a lot harder, I think.
Devoted Tolkien fans will recognise “Flies and Spiders” as the title of the chapter of The Hobbit wherein Bilbo and the dwarfs enter the dismal forest Mirkwood on their way to reclaim their hoard of gold from the dragon Smaug. In Mirkwood, the flies are a nuisance, but the spiders are a fatal menace. This season in Tasmania, the roles are reversed.
This is a mini-skein of a Yarn, one I wrote alongside “Epiphany”. Although I wanted to include it somehow, it would have made Epiphany much too long. So you’re getting it as a bonus track. I didn’t take any photos of this episode—I was too busy trying to manage it. Instead I’m giving you photos of wildflowers blooming on the property at the moment, in defiance of extremely dry conditions.
Not the religious sort, more the “uh, duh” sort. Wikipedia describes this kind of epiphany as “an enlightening realisation that allows a problem or situation to be understood from a new and deeper perspective”. Sounds better than “uh, duh”, huh? It started a few months ago, though I didn’t recognise it for the turning point it has turned out to be.
Life on the farm was pretty intense all winter, and particularly so after my trip in July. As I finally sit down to write this, shearing has come and gone and four tiny cygnets are swimming with their parents on a much-depleted Swan Lake. I’ll give you the shearing and end-of-winter shepherding report in the next Yarn, hopefully fairly soon. Meanwhile, here is the belated trip report.
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.”
As I continue my apprenticeship in shepherding, the subtleties of flock social dynamics are becoming more and more apparent. I’m on the cusp of shifting from the usual approach of “driving” the flock, with the dogs and me at the back, to “leading” the flock, with me at the front and the dogs where they need to be to hold or steer, but not pushing. Don’t get too excited about this cusp—I fully expect to teeter on the point of it for months, as the relationship of trust between me and the flock develops in fits and starts.
If over the last few months I’ve given you the impression that growing White Gum wool is all sweetness and light, November was certainly a counterpoint. It was a tough month, and December followed suit. The refrain has been “desperately dry”—we have had only 60% of our annual average rainfall, and our official 12-month rainfall deficit is sitting in the “severe” category.
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.
I used to think design was an endpoint: a place you could hold clearly in your mind, once you had it figured out. The easy part of the job. The hard work was then finding your way to whatever it was you had designed. Farming and knitting have, between them, blown that concept clear out of the water.
In his 1943 classic “The Little Prince” Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote (more poetically in French, mind you): "The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years. For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same. And is it not a matter of consequence to try to understand why the flowers go to so much trouble to grow thorns which are never of any use to them?
