Welcome back, readers,
It’s been a month since I last wrote to you, and much, as always, has happened both on and off the farm. In this letter, I tell you about how the Melbourne Cup is celebrated in the valley, cover the Agricultural (A&P) show, bring you more tails of mad sheep, and tell the story of the dog with nine lives.
Settle in with your favourite tipple, and let’s begin.
When you drive into Carterton from the south on your right, you will find one of the oldest pubs in the area. The Royal Oak is a bit of an institution here and often where local town meets close rural. Sunday afternoon are their social club days.
A wise man once said in order to be profitable, you only needed three or four alcoholics. It’s hard to say how many alcoholics this place has, but I dare say it’s fair share. These days, of course, pokie machines contribute, and at the Royal, you can see that the TAB has a firm presence and, in fact, has a human TAB person, which is unusual in this day and age.
I’ve tried to convince some of my townie friends to come here, but they are scared. I am not. The patrons are relaxed and friendly for the most part—a mix of tradies, the retired, contractors, and farmers. Good people who are willing to help out, make you welcome, and tell you that you’re being a dick when you’re being a dick.
The place is crowded; it would be one of their biggest days of the year. All the tables have betting slips and data on them, there is a queue to the betting desk, and I dare say some people have started quite early. Some have even made the effort to dress up, and we watch a rotund woman in a floral dress make her way precariously around the room.
Geoff, K, and I helped ourselves to the food provided. Mini mince pies and club sandwiches of two types. Corned beef and relish or egg. A round here, two jugs and a glass of wine is about $30. Try that in the city; that would set you back close to $60. Granted, my jug looks like it’s been through the dishwasher 30,000 times, but the beer is clean and good. As for bar snacks in the city, forget it. Most country pubs still give out food on social club nights.
We all pretend to be experts on horses; the only one who is actually an expert is K, who picks the second-place getter and earns a small reward. I look for names I like and choose Shiraz, what could be more Australian than that? A rank outsider, it comes in third, and my TAB account is replenished.
Like most old pubs, there are two ways in and out. This is helpful if there is a police checkpoint on one side and not the other. I remember a pub in Gisborne where if the police were at the front, then we would, giggling, leave out the back and drive through a couple of paddocks with our lights off (this did not always end well, sometimes Saturday morning would be fixing fences) to avoid the checkpoint. Things are different these days; drunk driving is considered unsociable and dangerous and is no longer a sport.
Within half an hour of the race finishing, the majority of people have left and the Royal falls back to its usual cadre of locals telling stories, whoppers, and putting laconic bets on other races.
This month has seen the annual A&P show at Clareville. For those who don’t know, this is the highlight of the agricultural year. A strange mix of people turn up to these.
Bogans from Masterton stick around the fair section, getting onto some extremely dodgy-looking fairground rides and gorging themselves on candy floss by the barrel. Cowboy boots are in abundance, the dust flies, and small children are turning green.
All manner of animals are shown to win prizes. Some incredibly serious-looking children are leading calves around an enclosure while two eagle-eyed judges watch on. I am reminded of Children of the Corn. Sheep, chickens, highland cattle, and alpacas are all paraded.
It’s all business in the baking and crafts competition, with a vast hall set aside for entries. Rotund, elderly women circle the tables judging the products while a bored man tries to sell spouting or some such in a corner.
Equestrians come from far and wide, darling, in their incredibly expensive horse floats, with their incredibly expensive trucks, their incredibly expensive horses, and their incredibly expensive outfits. The ride in circles jumping over things and doing other stuff I don’t understand.
There is sheep racing. It is organised by a man who has just time-warped in from the 1970s. Inappropriate Man, as I shall call him, manages to be racist, sexist, and very rude in a constant stream of banter. It’s hilarious. The city folk are somewhat aghast, and the locals give as good as they get. If he were let loose in Wellington, he’d be cancelled in three seconds, the Millenials would organise a protest, the Mayor would try to run him out of town, and the Race Relations Commissioner would be overrun with complaints.
There are wood chopping competitions, also very serious, people trying to sell incredibly expensive machinery, old machinery from the turn of the century, no doubt fired by coal and food trucks. I call the food trucks the Circling of the Wagons of Yellow Food.
Overseeing all of this is our friend Margaret, the Master of Clareville. She runs the site through the year, overseeing the chaos from a control tower-like office in the centre. Lost children are reunited, instructions are issued, directions are given, disputes over fruit cake competitions are no doubt mediated, and paper flies furiously. Minx, the Master’s dog, lies in her bed and greets guests with a tail that never stops.
I was up at my friend Geoff’s this week for a beer. A bitter day when Winter decided that it needed to remind us that it was still lurking around. His sheep were all in an uproar, bleating and baaing at each other and wandering around the paddock.
As it turned out, they’d been shorn the day before, and because sheep are stupid, take a while to recognise each other again. Lambs couldn’t find their mothers and vice versa, all wandering about “losing” each other time and again.
We have culled two more of ours. Like I said, we eat the annoying ones and keep the easy ones. These were the last two annoying ones, including a ram that was getting to the hard-to-manage stage. When your shearer looks at a ram and says “no”, that’s a sign that it needs to move on one way or another.
The docile ram we are keeping. Not a bad bone in his body and does what we need him to do, which is good, because these are big animals with long horns. The ram that was dispatched could only be managed by Karene lassoing him and the both of us wrestling it to the ground while avoiding being stabbed.
Our friend David came down with a rifle, and we rode in the ute to the bottom paddock, where both were dispatched in front of the new neighbours having lunch on their deck a hundred meters away. The neighbours were up range, I might add; gun safety is a thing out here. And we did warn them because we’re nice like that.
I’m not a big fan of killing things, and I don’t have a gun license anyway. But it does need to happen, and you do, I think, need to be there when it does. You can bring in homekill operators who do it out of sight and mind, which I totally understand. It’s not easy to watch. With ram and ewe dispatched, David kindly did the hard bit of the work, which was dressing the animals.
A few days later, I picked up the two carcasses, plus the ram’s head and some organs, and took them to the butcher. The horns on the head are impressive and probably worth around $1000. We’ll keep it, and it is currently tied up above dog height in a tree so that the environment can do what it does. If anyone said to me six years ago that I’d be tying a ram head into a tree so we could mount it above the front door, I would have told them they were insane.
The new neighbours have also invested in sheep. Just this morning, we could hear a very loud baaing drawing closer, and a ute went past with a trailer full of sheep. One large ewe was clearly very angry about this indignity as was in full song. Ah, sheep. They’ve never had them before, so they are about to learn everything we did. Poor bastards.
The running through fences and ending up on the other neighbour’s deck in the middle of the night, baaing at them through the window, baaing at us through our windows, refusing to be caught, trying to drown themselves in a flood, making the shearer very angry, jumping out of trailers before we can get them to market, refusing to nurse, refusing to give milk, just standing quietly in a paddock as a group staring at you like some local psychopaths, the cost of feed in dry times, the list goes on and on.
They are very ungrateful. But also very delicious.
Finally, dear readers, let me tell you the story of the dog with nine lives and note there is bad language in the above video, which shows the intelligence of our hound who is often bamboozled by the curtain.
We returned from the pub on Friday night, driven home by drink driving limits and the lack of any taxi services out this way. Honestly, a ride-sharing service leaving the pub each hour would make a thousand bucks a night.
After arriving back home, we had a few more drinks, and then K noticed that Koda was staggering. Within short order, he was on the lounge room floor and convulsing with a strychnine grin. So began the saga.
I rang the vet and got an after-hours operator. “Sure, we can connect you to the vet; that will cost $407. Do you want to go ahead?”
Fuck’s sake. What choice do we have? And why is the number so precise? And why is it so expensive?
So I start talking to the on-call vet, and she’s like, “I can’t come out there; it’s against health and safety.” Fair call, except we know the vet, she knows us, and we are, sadly, regulars.
I point out that it is probably not a good idea for me to be driving right now and ask her if she can call the boss and see what can be done. Koda is also a big dog, and he does not like to be picked up.
Granted, she goes the extra distance and rings me back, telling me someone is on the way.
Fifteen minutes through the gate rolls a very nice ute with “Devoted Pet Services” written on the side of it. Readers, it was the local pet cremator.
Devoted Pet Services come and pick up your deceased animal, take it away, cremate it, and return it to you.
The man is incredibly nice, the pet funeral director if you will, and says “Oh! This is the first time I’ve had a live animal in my car!”
I mean, this is tragedy and comedy in action. It’s literally like a hearse turning up when you call for an ambulance.
The dog is evacuated to the vet and sedated. Karene returns home and we cross our fingers. The next day the news is good and bad. Good, because Koda is alive. Bad, because they have no idea what caused it, and we now have a $1700 bill. Likely he ate something. Of course, he did; he’s a garbage disposal unit.
The Grinch, as I now call him because he has put Christmas at risk, is fine and dandy and once again escaped a near-death experience.
There is much more to tell, but I am out of time. It’s been a busy month, and so I’ll write again soon. Until then, stay happy. As always, if you love it, share it, and thanks for continuing to read us.