On the farm

I'm just back from three days on cousin Hazel's farm. She is in Gunedah in Northern New South Wales, and lives alone in a 100-year-old farm owned by a relative of her late husband, raising cattle. What a wonderful experience! It's quite isolated, and the farm house is built of wood and corrugated iron, with a veranda all the way round, sulphur-crested cockatoos, galahs and fairy wrens in the trees all around, and starry, starry skies. We went out into the paddocks (huge fields) in which the grass and weeds have grown as high as an elephant's eye after all the recent rain, with my cousins Hazel and Marj in an ancient utility truck and me on the quad bike to see the cattle and the swollen river and the new windmill pumping water up for the cattle. There are usually loads of kangaroos there, (and probably were, hidden in the long grass) but we only saw one, on the second day.
John and Susan came down from Hamilton Island via another cousin in Brisbane and some friends in Lismore, narrowly missing the latest lot of floods. We all went to a wildlife park near Gunedah, and saw koalas, kangaroos, emus and the back of a sleeping wombat, as well as numerous birds, many of them beautifully coloured.
Life there is quite hard, and there is a need to be self-sufficient, drinking rainwater, and washing in water pumped up from a bore-hole; burning wood gathered from the fields. There is electricity, but only bottled gas, and no modern air-con but a cooling system using the water from the bore-hole and the leaving open of doors with fly-screens to try to prevent flies, mozzies etc from coming in. The nearest neighbours, Ruth and Malcolm, are over a mile away, but lovely, generous people who will lend a hand whenever needed.

Only 2 more days in Australia now; we leave on 11th Jan for a week in Thailand, and then we're home in freezing England. I can't believe it's nearly over.