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The "arty" shot. Australia. Not so bad when you get off the beaten track! After a fairly shit first few days downunder, it was finally time to go to the ranch. On the coach from Rainbow Beach to Gympie, I got my first real look at some of the Australian landscape. This to me is where the real appeal of the country is, if you come to Australia looking for culture and history, you would be sorely dissapointed. Obviously it is a realatively new nation, but the two-dimensional stereotype of the typical beer swillin', footie lovin' Aussie is scarily accurate !! The real draw is the natural beauty of the landscape, and I should get to see plenty of it working on ranches in the outback...
On my arrival in Gympie I was met from the bus and taken to the ranch outside a small (inbred!) town called Goomerie. My week on the ranch was great fun, it was more like playing than learning !! First up was bikes and quads. Having ridden motorbikes for such a long time, it was easy for me to adjust to off-road riding and I was tearing about on the dirt tracks straight away, I even helped
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Made lots of new friends... out teaching a couple of the other ranchers that hadn't been on a bike before. Quads were great fun too, I think everyone loved the quad because its so fun and easy to drive as well.
The following morning was spent on horse riding. Although I have ridden before, I am not the most confident on a horse, and I struggle to climb on the bastard things because you have to mount on the left hand side (my dodgy knee!). It was a great crash-course (thankfully not literally) in horsemanship. To start off, you had to learn how to actually catch your horse, then how to tack and saddle him safely. These are actually fairly essential skills, and not ones I have covered before. You don't genereally have to do this when you go on a daytrip by horse, or even when you get lessons at a riding school. My horse was a feisty little bugger, and I ended up fighting him the entire time to keep him in control. If I let my guard slip for a second, he would try and gallop off! In the afternoon we covered bikes again, and I was let loose on some
tricky dirt tracks in one of the paddocks. I was absolutely flying up and down the steep, loose gravel terrain, at one point almost completely out of control. I got pulled off the track on a sharp downhill section by a rut, and ended up jumping the bike about four foot down a drop! I kept the bike from sliding by resisting the urge to use any brakes, but landed it so hard with me stood on the pegs that they broke off !!
The next day was the highlight of the week, cattle mustering. We were a horse short, so I volunteered to take the motorbike to save someone missing a ride. The paddock where we were mustering was harsh terrain, with big hills and valleys, and I was warned to be very careful on the bike because there are so many boulders and logs hidden in the long grass. I also had to be aware of the horses and keep my distance a bit to make sure I didn't spook them. By now I was an offroad pro, powering over massive bumps, ditches, logs, and anything that got in my way !! I got the hang of
controlling the cattle, two of them made a break from the herd and I was straight on them. I chased them flat out, cut them off and pushed them back to the others, it gives a real sense of achievement! In the afternoon we did yard work with our newly caught cattle, seperating them up and catching their heads in a big metal thing to punch tags through their ears.
Penultimate day, chainsaws and fencing (no, not swordfighting, the less exciting construction of barbed-wire fences!). It was a good laugh felling trees and hacking up trunks, although it could be far too easy to get complacent with such a lethal piece of equipment! The rest of the day was spent building wire fences, gates, and installing a massive fence post which was the trunk of one of the trees we had felled earlier. It was actually more interesting than it sounds, but I should imagine if you were building fences day in, day out, it would get boring really quickly!
My final day on the ranch, tractors and machinery. You can see why there are so many deaths and horrific accidents using farmyard machinery when confronted with with
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Fools gave me a chainsaw !! the various implements that attach to the tractor. Rotating blades, exposed gears, if you got caught in any of this stuff it would not be pretty !! The tractor itself was fairly easy to drive, although it did have some fifteen gears ranging from painfully slow, to very slow, to still slow!
I am now prepared for work as a rancher in Australia thanks to my time training here. I should really start a job on a ranch here, but I still have some money left so I'm going back to Thailand for a month! Stay tuned....
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Kevan
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G'dai
Good to see that you're being put to work there Adam and thinking seriously about improving that them town down there. And them beers seem to be endemic! Now there's something we didn't know. Take care and take care of them.