thank Dog.

a bit of last minute dyeing took place today

so as to have a few props to take

for my talk at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

tomorrow evening

luckily the Dogs were with me

and things turned out ok

and just by way of contrast

[to assure you it is NOT a totally glamorous life]

meet Teddy.

he likes his tucker

and his clean box [smelly job, that one]

small things

i am at home
looking closely about me
and taking time

behind the studio door

 

 

and
out in the paddock

this old friend is
Eucalyptus sideroxylon
an elegant black trunked tree

 

whose beautiful leaves produce a delicious red dye
as does the sap [although a bit too crunchy for cloth]

and in the image above, that blackish dot next to the retreating ewe is a lamb that bears the same colour markings as a Border Collie

if i had a male Border Collie on the farm i would be questioning his priorities. but there ain't. maybe one of the Pandas from the zoo nipped out for a weekend in the country. it's a very cute lambie.

be that as it may, i am enjoying this quiet week at home...especially as next Sunday i'm heading this way

studio assistance/assistants

meet Bumble
she's been hanging around me a bit of late
looking for entertainment

Martha is usually close by as well
here she is, sorting out some important studio stuff

today Bumble ventured into the workroom
to make sure i wasn't just reading a book by the fire

[yes the pix are gloomy, i didn't want to fry her retinae with a flash]
but there wasn't anything good to eat
or
particularly exciting going on

so she went back out to play with Martha instead

loose ends

wandering down Adelaide's main shopping drag
i spotted an interesting window
[at Sportsgirl]
the message surprised me

back in 1981
i worked for this company
in those days
make do and mend was never in their brief
they did have some odd practices though
every Friday, staff were made to wear clothes from the shop floor
if the manager hated you [ie me]
she would dress you in the oddest combinations
the icky bit was
at the end of the day we put all the tags and kimballs back on
and hung the clothes back on the racks
without cleaning
ew.
[i never shop at Sportsgirl for that reason - and a few others]

then a little later in the afternoon i had some stuff to give away
the Cancer Council didn't want it for wigs
even those overseas spurn it
[grey hair not required on voyage]



but lots of this felted together
perhaps with some nice strong wool such as English Leicester
would make a good mat for soaking up oil spills

what are they all going to eat when farmers give up?

the latest brilliant idea from the cunning rats who run our state is to make farmers pay for water used from farm dams.
it's already impossible to make a living from a small-holding such as ours [470 acres] without working off the farm, unless of course you don't mind working 24/7 doing every single task yourself so as not to have to pay someone else.
at 52 that kind of back-breaking labour is getting well beyond me. which is one of the reasons why i wander about the whirled telling anyone who will listen how to get pretty colours out of leaves.

but back to the story.

farmers [and other landholders] already pay water tax. it's called "rates" and these rates are based on the value of the land. this may seem a mere coincidence, but observation shows [quite consistently] that the more rain falls on your property [in South Australia] the more highly it is valued and [consequently] the higher the council rates paid.

installing meters [at farmers' expense] on dams to make us pay for water used [bearing in mind we've already paid for the construction of the dam and all the infrastructure, unlike our city cousins who have it provided for them] is outrageous.

if i'm fortunate enough to inherit the family farm [and this is not a "given", my parents have every right to sell up and go live in luxury on the Queen Mary if they wish] then frankly "farming" is not going to be high on the agenda. i'm thoroughly sick of having to tag each animal with an electronically readable plastic tag. i'm tired of hearing farmers being accused of pillaging the land and emitting excessive rates of carbon [what about all the other industry emissions? the tricky chemicals the politicians can't spell?]
we've just been advised that as stock-owners we'll are required to pay an annual "epidemic tax" [in case some blight descends upon the herd/flock] and i'm not looking forward to the day when we are made to individually weigh our stock and pay methane emissions tax based on their possible gas output [and probably calculated on the basis of feed-lotting as opposed to paddock grazing]. we also had a letter from the MLA telling us that we've been chosen at random to have our "books inspected" to make sure we're not feeding meat products to our stock. what the? if i were stupid enough to feed meat products to ruminants [and unlike the idiots who fed scrapie-infected sheep carcasses to cattle and kicked of the BSE plague i don't], do they really think i'd be writing it all down in a book?

so i'm extremely unhappy about having to pay a water tax on top of maintaining pipes and pumps and associated paraphernalia.


after a cup of tea and a bit of thought, here's the development plan for 'Hope Springs', assuming i have anything to say in the matter.

* discontinue meat production [let the old cows retire in peace for the rest of their days] and only keep a flock of pet sheep [none of whose children will be sent to market]. plant lots more trees and let most of the place become a wild forest, keeping a bit of clear space around the houses so there's a chance of eluding the inevitable fires. [there are plenty of kangaroos to graze under the trees.]

* grow enough fruit and vegetables to feed the family and trade with the neighbours. carrying the water in buckets from the dam should keep us all quite fit, no need to go to the gym so there's another saving [not that i go anyway, he he]

* compose a lovely "nyah nyah i told you so" song to sing when the government starts bleating about food shortages because nobody wants to be a farmer any more


oh and while i'm having a food and farm rant - the next semi-vegetarian who tells me they don't eat meat on principle but DO eat kangaroo because it's a soft-footed native animal that doesn't damage the country might like to have a little think about how that soft-footed animal is "harvested".  these gentle creatures are chased at night by men in 4WD vehicles with spotlights and guns. they die in agony [very rare to knock an animal out with a clean shot to the head] and in terror.
don't tell me that's sustainable meat production.

sorry about the rant folks, but had to get it off my chest. time for a coffee and then back to the sewing room...

one more thing, as my friend from Soewnearth has kindly reminded me [see comments]....the other item on the grand plan is to consider the installation of meters on our rainwater tanks and charge us for usage as well... i may spontaneously combust at some point.

oooh, look at the baby

we have a ewe lamb on the paddock. actually we have LOTS of ewe [and ram] lambs on the paddocks.
but this one is a bit special
cos
she looks like a Border Collie
[photographic trickery has her and her mother twice on the same snap]

and in case PETA is watching
that ewe is NOT mulesed, just crutched around the tail!

woolgathering

there are worse places to be

than in a shearing shed

especially on a cool day when

it's just begun to mist lightly

but

the sheep are all under cover

so the weather can do what it likes

woolshed time is thinking time.

there are flurries of activity when penning sheep+sweeping the floor+pressing the wool

and

there are intervals during which

one can stand and marvel at the grace and precision with which the shearer is divesting the sheep of its woolly coat

thoughts wander idly by and if one has had the foresight to have a notebook and pencil handy can sometimes be pinned on a page

and sometimes not

there are times when they flutter off like cabbage moths

i remembered a few other places i had worked

the 'sportsgirl' fashion store was one of the early fast-fashion chains

i worked there a while in 1981. the bitchery and backstabbing was unbelievable [Look behind you, Mr Caesar!]

and it certainly wasn't glamorous. each Friday the floor supervisor would take delight in determining which of the garments on hand the staff would be forced to wear as a kind of in-shop advertisement. she particularly delighted in trying ridiculous combinations on your correspondent.

and the truly appalling thing was that after being worn for a day

we were made to replace the clothes on the racks

as if they were new

i wonder if they still do that?

other jobs which seemed dull on the surface had a lot to teach me about life.

six months of picking orders at the Southern Drug Company showed me that there are people who will happily stay in one form of employment [and not wishing for promotion] for twenty or thirty years

showing up five days a week

discussing the football at morning tea

and extending their close-knit working community into a social club that took shared outings and organised old-style dances at the Wonderland Ballroom a couple of times each year

they liked the routine and security and not having to take too much responsibility. i found it mystifying.

what impressed me most at the Southern Drug Company was the manager, Graham Rossiter Gibbs. here was a man not above taking lunch with the floor workers from time to time, who willingly mucked in on the picking team when there was a rush on orders and who always put in an appearance at the social club dance and made sure he danced with each of his female employees.

a gentleman through and through - he was of unimpeachable character, a fine rugby player and passionate sailor; a well-respected and [more importantly] respectful employer. the sort of man you'd be proud to have running the country, let alone a small pharmaceutical supply company.

it's some twenty years since Gibbsy was struck down by cancer. i guess his 150% attitude to everything - whether work, play, food, drink or the enjoyment of his pipe - came at a price.

we spoke briefly on the telephone a little while before he died, his voice was frail but still brimmed with hope, optimism and enthusiasm for life.

it was an honour to have known him and good to remember it

and

a gift that time in the woolshed gives one such moments

a lull in proceedings

after all that excitement with incoming delights it's now time to concentrate on a bit of farm life

sheep shearing begins on Monday

and for the ill-informed who inevitably protest that this is a cruel activity

let me say in advance

that humans have been selectively breeding sheep for over 4000 years

so that they grow lovely soft stuff

that can be spun and knitted and woven and felted

and if you don't shear them, they die often gruesome deaths as fly maggots hatch in the wool and sit down to an endless dinner on living flesh

or

the sheep gets wet [in the rain] and then just gets too heavy to get up

and

fly maggots hatch in the wool etc etc

this one below was just very, very lucky

three tenths of the square root of Pi times __u__k all...

today we were crutching sheep and marking lambs. relatively mindless tasks that allow for lots of thinking and musing time

i began to think about possible formulae that might avoid the actual counting of lambs during marking

you know, if there are a certain number of green rings used what might be the proportion of males to females and how might they be allocated. this of course took me to remembering the wonderful Canadian author Stephen Leacock

and his musings on the fate of A, B, C & poor D as well as 'monkey's mother' and the length of her tail.

not to mention this brilliant story

Puzzle III

(With apologies to the Strand.)

A rope is passed over a pulley. It has a weight at one end and a
monkey at the other. There is the same length of rope on either side
and equilibrium is maintained. The rope weighs four ounces per foot.
The age of the monkey and the age of the monkey's mother together
total four years. The weight of the monkey is as many pounds as the
monkey's mother is years old. The monkey's mother was twice as old as
the monkey was when the monkey's mother was half as old as the monkey
will be when the monkey is three times as old as the monkey's mother
was when the monkey's mother was three times as old as the monkey.
The weight of the rope with the weight at the end was half as much
again as the difference in weight between the weight of the weight
and the weight of the monkey. Now, what was the length of the rope?

My Solution: I should think it would have to be a rope of a fairly
good length.

when i was quite young i managed to reach a figure but now i don't remember how i got there.

but all this musing then took me on to other things. on a recent bus trip in the U.S. my seat mate confided that she was afflicted with ADHD. i asked her what the defining behaviour patterns were.

and when i came home i looked up the symptoms [out of curiosity]

and it pretty much reads like a description of my life

but i wondered, why take drugs to obviate this? i like being the way i am.

admittedly school was a nightmare from which i absconded as much as possible [ with exception of PLC in Melbourne]

and i have trouble staying in conversations in which i am not rivetted

televison puts me to sleep very quickly

and my "office" floor is kneedeep in receipts

files need to be visible in order to stay on the radar

sigh.

but on the bright side there is always some new and intriguing train of thought to follow

dull moments are enlivened by [possibly] mad imaginings

and life is anything but boring

this [to my mind] is as it should be...

have a nice weekend.

ovine ponderings

this painting is called "Shearing the Rams" by Tom Roberts. look closely at the shearer second from left.. not only is he [unusually, methinks] carrying the ram forwards out of the catching pen [it is usual to drag sheep backwards for a shearing  or crutching procedure] but the ram has been lifted bodily off the ground.

i've always found this intriguing...all of our rams are so huge that not even two people can lift the blighters. the only excuse i can think of is that at the time the painting was completed, merino rams were still quite small framed sheep.

graziers don't like to admit it but the British breeds were used to improve the frame size of the merino. typically anything NOT merino in Australia is referred to as a crossbred. this is ironic given the Lincoln and the Leicester played such strong roles in improving the merino breed.

which makes the merinos the crossbreds.

but back to the matter at hand. if that ram was of a size to be picked up and carried, then the gentleman carrying it must have been jolly strong...and perhaps vertically challenged given the suspected small size of the sheep!

spring has sprung

spring has sprung and brought with it various firmly grounding farming duties, such as the crutching of sheep and the marking of lambs.

crutching is pretty much like being given a Brazilian but is achieved with clippers rather than wax. it's necessary before the ewes lamb, ensuring a cleaner arrival for the lamb as well as more aromatic access to the milk bar. and before any PETA members leap in with howls of outrage, no, the process is not painful (merely a trifle undignified). if sheep kept their posteriors pristine it wouldn't be necessary. as it is, humans have been intervening in sheep breeding for over 4000 years in order to coax them to grow soft fluffy wool rather than hard hairy stuff.

this makes it tricky to keep the rear end clean and so regular trimming is necessary. uncrutched sheep are far more likely to become flyblown in warmer weather. and don't confuse the process with mulesing. this is trimming of fluff, mulesing involves removal of skin. erk.

crutching is also required before shearing as is saves having to pick the stained wool out of the fleece. that same stained wool was used in the manufacture of the naturally dyed "berber" carpets so popular in the 70s. those lovely brown flecks in your otherwise oatmeal coloured floor covering were dyed on the sheep with poo, using urine as a co-mordant. enjoy.

marking of lambs means the docking of tails and in the case of ram lambs, also the removal of their gentlemens vegetables. the tail removal, though admittedly not an attractive thought does help prevent flystrike in later life (see crutching, above). a slow death on the paddock while being eaten alive by maggots is not pleasant.

and why are ram lambs neutered? simple. if the sheep are being kept for wool, then that grown on wethers tends to be more even in style and quality. ewes wool can exhibit the stresses of pregnancy and nursing; rams wool tends to be much stronger and comes with a unique perfume, reminiscent of the billy-goat leather handbag i once innocently purchased at a market in Spain. nasty, especially on warm days. (note to self, never purchase bag without doing sniff test.)

this perfume can also be tasted in the meat in the event the sheep is destined for the table and while some cultures and religions specify the consumption of entires it's not a flavour i would actively pursue in my cooking. mind you, having assisted at sheep births over the years i won't eat the stuff anyway, roasting lamb smells too much like freshly born lamblet and i'm no baby eater.

selling the lambs to someone else at 6 months when they've turned into monsters that destroy fences for fun and beat up their mothers for the last drop of milk is an easier proposition.

and now i can pootle off to my next two teaching engagements (Geelong, Victoria later this month; and Mandya, India in October) with a clear conscience. fingers crossed they'll all still have nice clean bums when in comes to shearing time when the weather warms up later this spring.

signs of life

narcissus encircling a stone ruin, you'll just have to imagine the delicious scent...



a ewe, clearly optimistic about how the season will shape up, has produced triplets. obviously she hasn't read the newspaper and doesn't realise we are about to become a desert through climate change...or maybe she just knows better!



and Sam the Hunter, doing his bit for the environment by having a daily snack of wild baby bunny. clearly this is not an image for the squeamish reader. bear in mind though, that since the British introduced the wild rabbit to Australia a lot of environmental damage has been done by these otherwise delightful creatures. and I'd rather Sam caught bunnies than robins!

woolgatherings

as a wool grower and one who works with wool (both on and off the sheep) on a daily basis AWI (Australian Wool Innovation) is providing me with a constant source of amusement. the sort of amusement generated by situations/experiences so bizarre that it's a case of you either cry, or laugh. so i opt for the latter. in the last edition of 'Beyond the Bale' there was a story about someone developing a brilliant new technique for digitally printing (look for pp 22 in the Dec-Jan 08 issue) on to wool for the American 'camouflage' market.

who needs a digital technique? i asked. I've been contact printing camouflage patterns from leaves to fabric for years and it doesn't need a machine or adjunct chemicals. it's a technique i've called the ecoprint which can use those by-products from tree-harvesting called leaves... but when I wrote to AWI about it they were supremely uninterested.

never mind, who wants to help Americans (or anyone else for that matter) go into the forests and shoot defenceless deer and wolves anyway.


and then in the current edition of BTB they showed a picture of a sheep that was described as being 'the answer to mulesing' the bare bits inside the hips aren't anything new....but the jolly thing has been tailstripped!!!!! this is a practice that is just as nasty as mulesing and i'm willing to bet that sheep wasn't born with a brazilian. someone is telling little fibbies here, aren't they? here's the picture, if you don't believe me.





and here's a detail















and here, for good measure, is the caption









but perhaps the most entertainment this month came in the form of a DVD ostensibly to help farmers deal with flystrike. helpfully labelled 'fighting flystrike'. as a tool for someone who is new to sheepwork, sure, it would probably be quite helpful. but to send this out to all of the shareholders in AWI is a joke. for the most part these are farmers who have been working with sheep all their lives. we don't need to have a special section with photographs on a DVD telling us how to identify flystrike for goodness sake. send these things to agricultural high schools, yes, but stop wasting the wool tax on producing nonsense, and start thinking more practically in terms of wool marketing.

after all wool is the natural fibre with all the qualities that the (polyester) synthetics have been trying to copy for years. it grows naturally on sheep and must be harvested annually to keep the sheep comfortable - and PETA can stop complaining about that, too. the reason sheep grow wool is because humans have actively selected them for these characteristics for over 4000 years. we're responsible. if we stop shearing just cos PETA says it's cruel, it will be far worse for the sheep. wool is a brilliant fibre, naturally grown, easily dyed, warm in winter, cool in summer, fire resistant, carbon-storing and a fantastic nitrogen-rich slow release fertilizer when it eventually gets too tatty to wear.

grown responsibly and processed with care wool is (along with with sustainably grown silk) an eco-fibre. we know this. AWI should be telling the world.

visibly risible

here's an amusing sign. i'll agree that suffolk are an excellent meat breed, and i'd happily stuff mattresses with their resilient and springy wool...but lingerie? we're getting into Billy Connolly's Auntie Agnes' territory here. particularly hilarious given Aotearoa's fame in the merino department (second only to the bigger southland a little to the west in terms of quality and itchlessness). suffolk wool is best suited to making socks for trampers and wayfarers (preferably worn with a merino or cotton sock on the inside) as it is inherently resistant to felting as well as being extremely durable.

the thought of it knitted into knickers leaves my knees knocking.