Hi All!
I hope everyone had a fantastic Holiday Season! Since I only heard one Christmas song, got to wear shorts and a tank top on both Christmas and New Years, and spent it meeting my boss’s family and camp draft friends, I personally had a great end of 2011. But on to telling you what I’ve been up to here in Roma the past few weeks…
As I was telling you in my last blog, a guy named Brendan Fitzgerald hired me to come work on his horse and cattle farm. He has a pretty good-sized ranch – around 7,000 acres, which is a typical size in Australia. He lives by himself (well, except for me now) but has four children that are ages 26-19, two boys and two girls, and I’ve met three of them so far. His mother also lives in town in Roma, whom I’ve also met – it’s just as nice to go to “Grandma’s house” here as it is back home; however there aren’t any banana cupcakes waiting for me like there is at home. The house Brendan lives in now used to be his parent’s house – it was the house he grew up in. It seems like he has only moved here in the past two years, he used to live on a slightly smaller ranch on the other side of town. So the house he lives in now is pretty old, but it’s big and I have my own room so I don’t have any complaints. Okay, well I do. Because it’s an old house, the plumbing is old and all of the sinks have two taps, one for hot and one for cold, and it’s sooo annoying! There, that’s my one complaint, other than that everything is just great.
So when I first got here Brendan had Lisa, a German backpacker, working and living here. However she wanted to leave before Christmas so she could spend it in Sydney with her sister – hence Brendan looking for a new employee. She was here a little more than a week while I was here which was nice to learn how things work around here from her perspective; it was also nice to have someone my age to talk to. Most of the work that Brendan has us do is related to working with his horses. This includes feeding, catching, saddling, riding, unsaddling, hosing down, and moving them to different paddocks. Currently there are 17 horses near the house that I’ve interacted with, but mostly just with 8 of them. And from what I’ve seen and gathered I would guess there are probably another 20 horses scattered around the farm. And though Brendan is obviously a horseman, he also does a fair bit with the 500 or so head of cattle on his land. There is plenty of cattle mustering to be done; to get the steers in with the other steers, to get certain cows with a certain bull, and because a recent rainstorm washed away a good portion of the fences to get the cattle back on to our land from the neighbor’s. I’ve definitely improved in riding horses here; it’s kind of funny to think that I couldn’t canter at the training ranch, it’s so easy! However it’s still hard to muster, Brendan usually has to reprimand the speed I’m going or for not cutting a steer out of the herd at the right time. And as I’m being constantly reminded, if you mess it up on the first go it tends to take an hour or so to correct your mistake.
But overall I’m really enjoying the work I’m doing; it’s exactly what I was hoping for when thinking of what job I would get over here. I wake up anywhere from 5:00am-7:00am and we are usually done around 6:00pm so it’s a long day, but I don’t really have anything else I can be doing besides working so it’s not that bad. A lot of the time we have a longer lunch break so we don’t have to be working during the hottest part of the day – and that’s also why I don’t mind waking up so early, because even by 7:00am it’s pretty hot out, and it can’t get very hot and miserable some days. The temperature has been anywhere from 30-40* C (86-104* F) and that can either be enhanced or cooled down by what the wind’s doing. Sometimes it’s really dusty, especially when you are the one down wind from the herd of cattle you are mustering, which makes it really overbearing and hard to breathe sometimes. It’s also kind of muggy and humid so all around it’s just an intense kind of heat; dry and humid. It’s the worst at night when it’s so hot that even the fan I have does little to cool me down – though I have to say the worst night EVER was the night we had a thunder storm, lost power, I couldn’t use my fan, and as a result was wicked hot and got eaten alive by mosquitoes who weren’t even deterred by my tropical strength bug spray!
Currently I am visiting Miss Kali Emerson for the weekend at her house in Ipswich, which was a 7-hour bus ride from Roma. The house she is staying at and working for is really nice; they even have screens on their doors and windows, a paved driveway, and a pool! They also have 3 children (who are really cute!) and a few sheep, goats, and chickens, so that’s why they hired Kali to help out around the house and such. It’s interesting to see a different type of job that I could’ve gotten – but I have to admit that even though the accommodations are spectacular here, I still prefer where I’m at and the work that I’m doing. But it’s nice to see someone I know and it’s been fun driving around the Brisbane area, doing touristy things, with Kali and her boyfriend Michael. It was kind of a last minute trip, because Kal preferred a weekend in January and my boss couldn’t afford for me to go away starting after the 20th, so with those restrictions this weekend was the only one that worked for everyone. But Brendan knew that I wanted to come visit Kali out here, so when I told him on Monday that I was planning taking a bus on Friday he was okay with it. He was just happy that we can actually communicate – he was telling me that some of his past employees would never plan ahead, or if they did they didn’t keep him in the loop, and more than once he’s had a worker come up to him one morning and say “okay, I need to be at the bus in an hour” and expect it to work out!
The reason he can’t afford for me to come after the 20th is because the camp draft season is starting up again. I can’t remember if I have described what a camp draft is or not to you all so here it goes (again?): it’s basically a rodeo type event where you guide a single cow (of your choice) out of a small herd in the yards, around two cones in an arena, and then through a gate as fast as you can; and of course this is all on horseback. There are three rounds and the rider who has the highest amount of points at the end (points are determined by a single judge who gives or takes them away depending on your speed, style, and how you transition and push the cattle close to the cones). There are different classes of camp drafters, I’m not quite sure what they are yet or what determines you to be in one or the other, but I have a guess that it depends on you and/or your horse’s skill level. It seems that Brendan is pretty good at camp drafting, he’s won one of the most prestigious camp draft cups in his career, and it seems like he does a good job at almost every camp draft he goes to. Very often at camp drafts there are horse sales as well – for example Brendan is planning on selling two horses at the Tamworth (that’s a town’s name, by the way…) camp draft at the end of January. So anyway, as we get into the camp draft season, Brendan needs me to help get the horses ready for the events, which sounds like I will be trotting the camp draft horses everyday in the next couple of weeks. I’m happy to do this, especially because as I learn more about riding and have more experience, Brendan trusts me to ride more and more of his horses. For a while I was just riding one of his older mares, and though I love Star, she is just so slow! Now I’m able to ride three of the camp draft mares and one of the geldings he is planning on selling, and I’m assuming that I will start riding more of the horses to help him get them ready to perform by the 20th. I was hoping that he would have hired another backpacker by now so I would have help and another person to talk to, but I think he is being more picky about who he hires now – I think he is really weary of hiring another English-as-a-second-language backpacker, which is understandable. Plus his son, Lach, has been helping us the past week so with his help I don’t think Brendan has been thinking of needing another person to help yet. But Lach has another job, so I don’t think he will be able to continue to help us like he has so maybe Brendan will think of hiring someone else soon now. Because Lach knows what he’s doing around the farm, it’s been interesting the types of jobs we’ve been doing with him. Our main task was to muster all the cows and calves in and then brand, ID, neuter the males, dehorn and vaccinate all of the calves. It was an interesting and fast paced job – I fortunately didn’t have too serious of responsibilities; I was in charge of the injections, reloading the ear tagger, and then making sure there were more calves ready to go into the crush, but that was plenty of a task for me to handle. Another task we did with Lach’s help was bringing in Brendan’s herd of young horses from one of the back paddocks. Mustering them was a bit different than mustering cattle; you tend to herd them from the front because they like to follow you. But they are really high strung and like to run around a lot which of course makes the horse you are riding more anxious. Once we yarded these horses, I wasn’t really allowed to do much with them because they were so young and flighty. So I just hung around and ran to get more halters or water for Lach while he caught them, worked on halter-breaking them, and just over all handling them. Then Brendan and Lach neutered two colts and we all worked together to freeze brand the two year olds; which is an interesting process where you freeze the brand in liquid nitrogen and then leave it on the horse’s skin for 20 seconds. So the past week was interesting and busy doing all of these tasks Brendan wouldn’t be able to do just with me, but it was nice doing them as well as hanging out and talking with someone who was my age. But it also made me realize how different Australia is from America – even though we are both developed, English speaking countries, that’s just about where the similarities end. It’s so funny how different the language is, the slang words here and the slang words at home are completely different and as weird to Lach as they are to me. Which makes me think that I’ll have to dedicate a blog to all the weird things Australians do.
Well I think that I’ve updated you on my life pretty well. I’m going to be staying at Kali’s for the rest of today (Sunday) and then heading back to Roma via another 7-hour bus ride tomorrow morning. I’ve enjoyed talking to a few of you on Skype and on the phone – it’s nice to be back in the “real world” where cell phone service and internet are easily accessible and available at other places than a McDonald’s. I hope everyone is doing well back home wherever you may be and that 2012 is off to a great start for you all!
xoxo Zee
