20160316 – Wednesday – Leaving Cobar and goodbye to the goats.

Today is the day we are all leaving Kaleno. Barry and Pauline will drive me to Cobar and to Tristan Cole’s place to pick up my car. From there they will drive on to Cowra and stay in a motel overnight there and then they will go onto the show in Sydney.

Before we left Pauline had to send some faxes to her bank and she had trouble sending them but after some time managed to get the wretched things sent off.

They have a frog that has lodged itself in their air conditioning unit and it sits there and croaks away, interrupting ever conversation. They haven’t been able to find out where it comes in so have got used to having a third “person” involved in all their conversations!

I am sad that I am going to be leaving today. I have had an absolutely wonderful time at Kaleno, Pauline and Barrie’s farm and they have been so very generous and good to me.

Pauline asked me if I had seen the cat when she came in at nights and I said that I had. She had come up to me while I was sitting on the veranda and head butted me until I petted her to her satisfaction.

I commented to Barrie that I had noticed that it didn’t take much rain here at Cobar to get puddles forming on the top soil. I asked again about the composition of the soil because I could not understand the water pooling so quickly without the presence of some clay in the soil. I felt that if it were just sand, surely the water would just drain away through it? Barrie explained that the soil does get a hard crust on it that retains the water in puddles.

Barrie said that it does get a hard crust on it and that retains the water in puddles. He said that if you ploughed the land up like you do to get a crop, it would take a lot more water to make the same puddles on the ploughed land.

Barrie said that when they first came to Cobar, they thought that the woody weed was a terrible curse to the land because you simply could not get rid of it. If you pushed it down it just grew back in no time because it grew from suckers. That meant it was very hard on the farmer trying to grow grain and other crops. Now that he farmed goats, he felt about the woody weed in an entirely different way. It was an endless supply of good food for his goats!! Acres and Acres of good food for his goats. People say to him, “How can you run so many goats?”  We have had in our time 25,000 goats in here and you could never run that number of sheep, never.

Not only are we able to run enormous numbers of goats, we also don’t have to look after them. We don’t have to ride around on a horse to see how our stock are doing.

I said to Barrie that I thought he had hit the jackpot. It is as though God has just dropped them “manna” from heaven and he and Pauline don’t even have to worry about feed for their “stock” either, because the woody weed is prolific and the goats love it.

I feel as though God has blessed me so much as well on this trip. Before I left I spent ages planning and worrying a bit about how much money I would need for the trip and thinking I would have to do it on a “shoestring.” Instead of that I have received so much generosity from my family and friends that I have been able to forget about money worries and just throw myself into enjoying my travels.  I feel really blessed.

At 10.00 am, we all climbed into Barrie’s 4-wheel drive and began our journey to Cobar. On the way we discussed various aspects of Pauline and Barries’ life on the farm.

We discussed the variety of trees that are in the Cobar region and I asked Barrie if he could tell me the names of some of them. There are, he told me, black cyprus, native cyprus, ironwood – that big broad looking tree, the woody weed – which is hop bush, turpentine – the darker colored tree, butter – that looks like a little tree, Leopardwood, sandalwood, mulga.

Bimblevox, coolibath – the ones with clear bark, box trees – all suckers so they don’t necessariy grwo from seed, they grow a root formation and if they get knocked down, if you don’t get the roots under the ground up and kill them, then they will germinate and grow again. Instead of having one tree that you knocked down, you will have three hundred trees. Wonderful if you are a goat farmer, not so wonderful if you are sowing grain.Yesterday we had seen a tree which was a leopard wood tree with a wilbur tree growing close underneath it. I took a photo of that distinctive tree.

“What do the goats mostly eat,” I asked Barrie. They eat a very varied diet, they eat anything. If you knocked a eucalyptus tree down they would eat a little of it. They’ll eat the top out of a cyprus and out of any of the woody weed and the rosewood. Rosewood grows in the soft country, the country that’s got that melon hole stuff in it. Rosewoods are all very edible, then there is warrior bush.

“I like the variety of trees and the fact that there is no heavy undergrowth on the ground,” I said to Barrie.

“Yes, well farmers don’t like the ground cover either because when it gets dry it is a fire risk, but here we don’t have to worry about it because the goats keep the ground cover down so we don’t get that fire risk. That is why it is so stupid when Forestry says you cant have animals on certain areas because of fire risk. It is the animals that reduce the fire risk and when they are not there, then it becomes the Fire Department’s job to clear the undergrowth in summer.  When it heats up and there is a fire, then the Forestry people say it was the Fire Departments job to see this didn’t happen, but if they had allowed animals on the land, then they would have eaten all the undergrowth and there would have been no fire. People just don’t seem to understand, it seems. God intended for the animals to eat the undergrowth and for man to eat the animals, then everything is in balance. All these disasters occur because people go against God’s ways.

To me that was so logical, why burn off when you can feed it off?

I told Barrie and Pauline about a conversation I once had with Lydia Mednyanski in her garden at West Beach. I commented on how beautiful her garden was and asked what special things she did to make it so beautiful. She said, “It is simply that I work with God and not against him.”

Pauline asked me if I knew that there was a relative in Germany named Josef Mednyanski who has been in touch with Gaby Mednyanski. I said that I had actually been in touch with him at one time. He had heard about a photo I took of the Mednyanski family at an Easter Camp at Glenloch one year.It was a photo of Joe and Lydia standing in front of their caravan and the three girls were inside the van and looking out of the window towards me with their white fine hair that they had when they were children. It was a beautiful photo and Josef wanted a copy of it which I sent him.

Barrie and Pauline then told me a story about a time when Barry once drove to Melbourne and came back towing a big trailer behind. There has been some rain at Cobar and Pauline was supposed to warn Barrie to come in a different gate than usual because he would get bogged otherwise. He came in at midnight and Pauline had forgotten to tell him about the rain. He was just through the gate with the trailer, too late to turn around, when he saw the water across the road. There was no way he could turn around. Straight ahead was the only way to go. Well, he bogged his way onwards, and inch at a time. He eventually got in, but Pauline was not very popular when he got home.

“Well what do you do in winter when you want to drive on your property,” I asked. “We don’t do anything,” said Pauline, “We just make sure we aren’t there. We go away on holidays in winter, as soon as the weather has broken. When we come back it is usually coming in to Spring and Summer, so that’s how we avoid being bogged. We miss all the rain!”

“What a life,” I thought.

“I’m glad you are driving right now, Barrie. I would be skidding around by now for sure.”

“I bet you are glad you didn’t bring your little car in, Fay,” said Pauline.

“I certainly am,” I said. “I finally believe you that I could not or at least should not have brought my car right to Kaleno from Cobar.”

“Barry, I didn’t realize before that you are part of the Joseph clan on your mother’s side, that your mother was Nellie Joseph. I didn’t realize you were my sister-in -law Beth’s first cousin.  loe the fact that I can take a stack of photos and go through and choose the good ones and get rid of the rest. i didn’t know that you were a Joseph and certainly not that you were Beth’s first cousin.That was quite a surprise.” I said.

” Barry,” can you tell me some more about the goats.”

It never took much to get Barrie to talk about his beloved goats and his goat practices.

“A goat is a family oriented animal, not like a sheep, a sheep is a mob animal, so whenever it is threatened, a sheep will mob together whereas goats will split up and go in all different directions. The billy goat, he picks himself a nanny and he will live  with that nanny and he will rear kids to that nanny,  he could, but he won’t necessarily, go and mate with other nannies. He will just stay with his family unit.

“Young billy goat when they get pushed out of their family unit they usually band together and form packs and they go and hang around on the water holes and wait for the nanny goats to come in and then they will try to pick themselves up a nanny and they will fight with each other and take over the nanny and that’s the way they work. and that is totally different behavior to that of a sheep.

“Sheep, they need a shepherd, because they can’t find water by themselves . They can find it again if it is shown to them  You have to show it to them and then leave them and they will walk away from it but they will remember where it is and go back but if you put them in a paddock and don’t show them where the water is, I mean a big paddock like 15, 20,000 acres and one watering hole some will find it by accident but a lot of them won’t find it and they will just perish. You have to show a sheep The sheep does not protect its young as well das what a goat will. A goat is very protective of its young and is better equipped  to defend its young. They have a better horn set up on them and they certainly know how to use them.”

“How did you get onto goats in the first place?”

“When we first purchased the farm, we were going to try to grow grain and maybe carry some stock whether it be agisted stock or stock that we bought and we were still running two trucks at the time.

“Phillip and I were on the road, and  Pauline,Paul, Dad and Stephen were on the farm and Joey. Pauline was talking to some of the mothers, the wives through the school of the air and through home schooling Joey.

“They told her that when they needed money, they just caught a few goats and took them to town and so Stephen and Mum and whoever else was there decided that they would try to catch a few goats and they did. They put them in Dad’s little 75 trailer with a crate on it and took them to town and got nearly a thousand dollars for about 15 goats.

“That was the point where we thought, “Well if you can catch 15 goats in an afternoon and make a $1000, I should be doing that rather than driving up and down the highway trying to make money out of a truck. So we parked the trucks and started looking at the goats and finding out how to do it and setting up our waters – all of our water points and trucking points, and it has evolved from that.

“We changed those set ups from what they were originally and we are using trap and sell methods and we process somewhere between 3 and 5,000 billy goats a year, depending on the year, and depending on how many walk-ins we get. We grow our own goats but we also get walk-ins – drifting goats in the district that come into our property.

“They come into our property because when we have taken a lot of billies out, they come in for the nannies. When they go into the yards and then into the dams and finally into the traps, they get taken into town and are sold, and that’s how it all works.

“The goat is very well adapted to this area. It is almost like a little camel really. A goat can travel three days without water and he can survive on very poor food sources and he is not just limited to one source of food. He doesn’t just like grass. He is a browser. He will eat anything from  bushes, shrubs , bark, leaves, sticks on the ground. He will climb up trees and eat the leaves, he is a very industrious and is very well suited to this area.

“We don’t get lots of wet seasons and it doesn’t take long before all the grass is eaten out and there is only hard feed from then onward.  We use molasses and salt licks to attract them to the water holes and that also helps them with their digestion. When they eat this hard food the molasses and salt licks help them to better digest the hard foods. It helps them to get more nourishment out of their food sources. Se are able to catch our numbers and keep our numbers. We are not sure how many nannies we are running but are probably running several thousand and that’s how it all works.”

“What about wild pigs in this area. You do get occasionally pigs through here?” I asked.

“There is a market for pigs, but they are much harder on your country and pigs like to eat the root systems of plants and they dig them up, they  plough everything up. They will eat the young goats. They eat meat as well. Pigs are omnivores. They eat grain and plant life and they also eat meat. They are as much a threat to your goats as foxes are. The goats can defend themselves against foxes but not against a big boar.”

“Are there wild dogs around here?”

“Well, we pay a wild dog levy and we do bait from time to time. That’s what those “bleedin’ hearts’ are for. We are baiting for foxes more than anything else. I’ve never seen a wild dog in the area.”

Pauline grinned and said, “I will tell you a big-bad pig story.

“This car sits in the garage One morning I came out and the back tailgate was up. I said, “That’s a bit odd.”

We don’t normally leave the tail gate up because all the dust gets in.

I said to Barry, “Did you leave the back of the car open.”

He said, “No.”

“So I shut it and I noticed that one side of the number plate was curled up. There was like hoof marks on the back tail gate. Inside the car we had several bags of dog food , those little biscuits.

“The next day when I came out, the other side of the number plate is curled up and there are more marks and we thought,

“It must be a pig that has done that, a goat doesn’t do that.

What has happened is, that underneath, just above number plate there is a latch, and I think the pig had his nose under that sniffing, sniffing, and he caught it on that latch and opened up the gate and was trying to get in.

“A big giant mother pig it was.

“The next time it tried to do it again but it was on the opposite side to where the latch was and it didn’t do any good so we caught it between the houses and they shot it.

“Was that dangerous?” I asked.

“Not really, pigs won’t have a go at you unless they feel they are trapped.”

“City people don’t often understand farm life,” said Barrie.

“I remember when Don McColl came out as a young lad. He was going to university at the time I think, training to be a Geologist at the time. He was a city boy for sure, and wasn’t sure he wanted to eat the meat after he watched uncle Fred kill a sheep and take its guts out and skin it and hang it up in a tree, and next morning cut it up into lamb chops, etc.

“Is THAT what I have been eating since I was here?” he asked.

“You city slickers don’t understand that milk comes out of a cow,” laughed Barrie.

Who helps you work out all your systems on the farm, Barrie? You know TammyJolly,  her brother Brad dies. He he is very clever and I am amazed at what he knows and I don’t know what I would do without his input here on the farm. He can fix just about anything.”

“Barrie, I have watched you and Pauline and how you work. You do bits of work here and there each day as needed but you have your life to yourselves to whether and when you work. I think you have a great life here at Cobar. You have your times when you are busy and then you have your times when you can slow down and maybe take a break.

For myself, I am happy with my lot too. The only way I could envisage being better of would be if I had about 30% extra income. But, I saw this TV program some time ago, that said that it doesn’t matter how well off anyone is, rich or poor, they all say they would be happy if they just had 30% more income.  What we all need to learn, however, is to be “content,” in “whatsoever circumstances we find ourselves in.” That’s what I try to do. I try to save money rather than earn money. because my life is too short to waste it on working for someone else to earn “luxuries,” when I need my precious time to do the things I want and love to do.  If I am going to labor, I want to spend my time and energy on things which are eternal and not things in which there is no profit.

By this time, we had arrived at Tristan Coles’ place and I said goodbye to Barrie and Pauline and having waved them off, went in to spend some time with Tristan and his wife Nock and two gorgeous little boys, Luke and Jonathan, I think are their names.

So ended my trip to Cobar. It was wonderful, and I loved every minute of it.