The useless bastard from the bush

Jason Davies is from the 'old country'. He came down
to Oz to do a spot of teaching and decided to
try the life of the 'wild colonial boy'.

Fading sunlight filtered through the dust kicked up by a thousand impounded sheep.
Another outback winter's day was ending across miles of uninterrupted bushland.
"Move! You useless Pom," yelled Martin the boss, breaking my daydream. But his shout was too late and the flock rushed past me and the open gate we had been trying to guide then through for the last 20 minutes.
"Wave your arms, move around and use your head, Pom,'' he railed again, adding a few choice insults regarding my parentage.
Since shortly after sunrise that morning, the dozen-strong team, including one light aircraft pilot, six riders on farm bikes and the rest in back up trucks had been mustering sheep from the first paddock.
Under the guidance of the pilot we had shepherded the mob from waterholes, over the dunes and through the bush at the start of shearing, the farmer's busiest time of the year.
I had been at the station in Western Australia almost a week and, along with five other backpackers as farmhands, would spend the next month rounding up and taking back the 12,000 sheep spread across 350,000 acres of outback territory.
This was my first job since returning to Australia a month before. I flew back into Perth to enjoy more of the warmth and hospitality of family friends I had had before leaving in April. Already the city was comfortable and familiar, yet still full of surprises such as sitting in a suburban park surrounded by parrots and watching kangaroos bounce past as we ate lunch.
After a few days I set off north to explore more of W.A., jumping in a car with other backpackers with the same aim of seeing what was on offer and with the luxury of not having to be anywhere tomorrow.
The first stop was the Pinnacles Desert, a unique collection of spire-shaped sandstones between knee and head height tall and scattered across the sand between the forest and the ocean. Apparently it achieved international fame courtesy of Billy Connolly and his naked cavorts during his world tour of Australia.
Further north the coastal resort of Kalbarri offered inland gorge and cliff top walks and as if that wasn't enough to strain the legs, the sunset horse ride across the beach certainly was, but worth every moment of pain. July, and the Aussies' idea of cold was approaching and travelling north we were passed by numerous camper vans and four-wheel drives heading for the season in the sun. Midway up the coast at Carnarvon we had to look for work.
The town is just within the fringes of the fruit growing area but every banana plantation we passed turned back potential workers, all except for the one place that offered "lots of work - no pay".
I was put in touch with the sheep farm by the tourist office and was eventually taken on trial. The farmer's wife drove in to pick up their 13-year-old son at the airport returning from school for the winter holiday and warned me that the work was hard, conditions were basic but the food was good.
The station was more than 100 miles inland along the dirt road, passing no evidence of civilisation except for a handful of signposts for other sheep stations.
We six farmhands comprised three Poms, two Dutchies and the son of a New Zealand farmer, who was the youngest by five years and the only one who knew the back end of a sheep from the front. A cyclone had swept across the region in March, bringing a year's rainfall in three days. The metre-wide river at the back of the homestead had swelled to more than a kilometre across, uprooting trees and fencing. Windmills and farm buildings had been blown over or damaged and the farmer needed a good return of wool to cover the $75,000 repair bill.
Before the shearing team arrived we spent the days repairing the miles of wire fencing in preparation for when the sheep would be brought through. During early mornings and when the sun began to set, swarms of timid red and grey kangaroos would hop across the bush. We saw the first of many wedge-tailed eagles swoop on a group of lurid green budgies and snatch one for lunch.
We learned to identify tracks and tricks of certain animals, such as not to stand still before the lizard-like goannas that run up anything vertical and immobile, thinking it's a tree. One of the Dutchies also experienced the maternal instincts of emus, as he was knocked off his motorbike by one after straying too close to her nest. It was hard to keep a straight face as he told us how he lay dazed and confused with a ferocious emu staring down at him.
The land was flat with eucalyptus trees breaking the bush, sand and dirt that spread to the hill ranges and property boundary 15 miles north. Soon there seemed no point wearing a watch or asking what the day was. The routine began at around 6am and after breakfast we climbed in the back of the "ute" (utility truck) and were bounced off for another day under the relentless blaze of the winter sun, drinking rainwater for the first time in my life from the homestead tanks. We drove home at sunset grateful that the day's work was done except for lighting the wood fires for the water boilers.
The pace picked up once mustering began. Three of us and the three farmer's sons rode motorbikes, taking radio instructions from the pilot while the rest of us followed the mob in trucks to pick up the stragglers. These included lambs as young as a day old and cancer-ridden and fly-blown sheep, riddled with flesh eating maggots to be treated at the shearing shed.
I remember as a child idealising the heroics of being a vet but that was when the nearest I had been to surgery was forcing my cat to swallow a pill. Faced with chopping off a cancerous ear and trimming a fly-blown fleece, I knew as I retched that I was no James Herriot. Those sheep with cancerous noses fared worse. We had to bring forward their inevitable fate with one strong blow to the skull with a ball hammer.
No, this was not work for the sentimental, who prefer to see lambs gambolling over spring meadows rather than them having their testicles ringed to make them drop off and horns and tails cut.
An outside team had been hired for shearing and they worked for 12 days, only taking a break one Sunday for W.A's Aussie Rules derby between Fremantle and Perth-based West Coast, which was televised live. The shearing shed became a cauldron of noise, speed and heat. Each shearer would clip one sheep around every two minutes and complete almost 200 a day. They expertly whipped the clippers around the fleece, which was then picked up by the roustabout and classified by the woolgrader before being pressed into 190kg bales.
The working days were now 12 hours long and frantic. We returned home blood-stained and sweaty often too tired to worry about the venomous Red Back spiders that lurked under toilet seats and on one occasion, in my pillow.
One evening we drove to Gascoyne Junction, the nearest civilisation about ten miles away. Two roads, a dozen people, gallons of beer and little else passed through the place. The genuine outback crowd drank hard, wore their stomachs over their shorts and dirty feet in their sandals. They slapped us on the back and bought us beer.
The boss had said anything less than 330 bales would be a disaster. The total was 405. We loaded the last one on to the truck early one Sunday morning and watched the cargo head for the mercy of the wool auctions in Perth. The next day the three sons boarded the plane back to their studies in Perth while the 12-year-old daughter continued her education over the airwaves tuned in to the school of the air for a few hours each day.
The boss was still contemplating whether to return to his urban life as a salesman, diversify into farming more goats and cattle or even trying to cash in on the undoubted tourist potential of his land which would rocket once the sealed road arrived in around ten years time.
Out of the six farmhands, one Pom had argued with the boss and left early and the Kiwi had decided to stay. The Dutchies tied a ram's skull to the grille of their car and the other Pom and I jumped in with them to head back to civilisation after a month with no newspapers, radio or e-mails and only flashes of television. A couple of phone calls and a surprise visit from a Dutch girl had kept me in touch with the world outside.
Back in Carnarvon, predictably, we got drunk. Unpredictably, a group of fisherman returned from a month at sea and sharing our lodgings cooked us fresh prawns and whiting at midnight. The next day we fished off the jetty and made plans for how we were going to spend our hard earned cash.
It felt good to be back on the trail.