What Australia Doesn't Have

Suddenly on the 1st of June it got cold! Like 50 degrees cold! I realize that in the global scheme of things, this is still pleasant, and yes, we’re only wearing coats in the mornings, but after 3 months of 100+ degree heat, 50 is FREEZING! And besides. It’s JUNE! June is summer! It’s strawberries and ice cream trucks, sprinklers and bicycles. Instead I find myself craving new school supplies, apple orchards, fried bologna sandwiches, and pumpkin spice coffee. I can barely even fathom the thought that almost everyone I know is going boating and playing baseball while here it feels like September.

Speaking of things that I crave, I have been here for just over ¼ of a year, which I believe entitles me to at least one rant about the things that Australia does not have. Bear in mind that for me, “Australia” means “Northern Territory,” which is kind of like equating America with North Dakota. However, in the version of Australia that I am living, I have found these things to be missing:

Pumpkin pie. Although Australians eat more pumpkin than anyone I’ve ever seen, they don’t have pumpkin pie, or any sweet pumpkin foods, for that matter. To them, pumpkin is a vegetable, and pumpkin pie sounds about as appealing as pickle ice cream. I came to this realization one night at dinner when “it’s like pumpkin pie spice” drew total blank stares as I tried to explain to one of the guys what nutmeg tastes like. Overhearing this conversation, Di, our cook, actually made me a pumpkin pie the next day. It was strange to eat one in May but SO good! None of the Aussies would touch it because they thought it smelled like curry, which meant it was all mine!

Fried bologna sandwiches. Actually, any bologna at all. When I tried explaining bologna to Millie, our govie, she came up with a few potential Aussie replicas, but nothing in its true, delightfully over-processed unique glory. When 10 year old Tom asked me what was in it, it took me a minute, but I finally settled on pig. Sounds plausible enough. But ambiguous content or otherwise, I miss it!

Any spicy food, especially Mexican. The Aussies I work with have an embarrassingly low tolerance for spice. Black pepper can be too much for them. For such tough folks, this strikes me as surprisingly soft. Meanwhile, I would kill for some salsa and tortilla chips.

Saddle horns. The saddles look almost like Western saddles, except… no horn! I’m not sure whether it’s the explanation for or the result of this, but they also don’t use ropes. Instead they tend to tackle stray steers and hog tie them with hobble belts. Also, as a result, rope based rodeo sports – team roping, calf roping, etc, are significantly less popular. Instead (at least in the Territory) they camp draft.

Real coffee. Ok, so this is mostly just a Territory thing. Instead of drip coffee we drink instant. Even at the road houses this is true. I’m not sure why except that I guess it means they can just put on one urn of hot water for coffee, tea (which is more popular) and Milo (similar to hot chocolate but less sweet), and saves them from having to throw out coffee to make a fresh pot. The effect of this is that the Starbucks Via instant coffee that my family sent with me has gone from ‘pretty good’ to ‘phenomenal’ in my estimation.

Hot dogs. This might just be out on the station, but here we don’t have hot dogs. Instead we have a sausage that functions as both breakfast sausage and barbeque food. If you know me, you know that I love hot dogs, and these are just not an adequate substitute.

Ice cream floats. I was overcome by an ice cream float craving one particular hot, dusty day at the yards, so when we got home I fixed myself one and brought it to the Rec Club. Everybody recognized it as an old fashioned drink they call a “spider,” but no one had ever seemed to try one and were astonished that it would occur to me.

Reruns. This is strange, but since they get their TV shows a year late anyway, they don’t seem to bother stretching them out with reruns. As far as I can tell they just run a show all the way through and then quit til next season. One result of this is that individual shows seem to be on for less time during the year and their start dates are staggered so that new ones start as old ones end, unlike at home, where almost everything starts in the fall and end in the spring.

Memorial Day, 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, or any other American holidays. This should be a no brainer, but it’s weird to realize that all of these people don’t celebrate out staple holidays, and generally don’t know anything about them except what they’ve seen in the movies. By the same token, they don’t hold in high esteem the related foods and symbols that we treasure – white can be worn year round, grills are meant for steaks and not hamburgers, and turkey is rarely eaten. To their credit, though, the Australians do have their own beloved holidays – Australia Day in January, Anzac Day in April (which I think is the day that Australia and New Zealand joined WWII), and Boxing Day in December, to name a few.

Baseball, football, basketball, or hockey. All of the major American sports, although known, are essentially overlooked here. Instead they play cricket, Aussie Rules, rugby, and field hockey (which is just called hockey). The absence of these sports also means that the Superbowl is meaningless, “baseball caps” are just “caps”, and cheerleaders are essentially nonexistent.

My list seems to be almost entirely food oriented. I guess this makes sense, since I am a fat kid in a skinny kid body and food is my one true love in life. For the record, the point of this post is NOT to get you all to send me these things. As much as I would love a package of hot dogs and a baseball player, I don’t think they would make it through customs, so mostly I just wanted to reminisce with an audience that I know would care as much as I do that there is a whole country of people who can’t sing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song. Because I’m sure you do care.

Photos

Here are some random photos of my life here in Australia. It's hard to take photos while working, and even rarer for me to actually be in them. Oh well.

Some of the folks I work with.

Cattle in the yards.

Mustering.

The station from the air during the wet.

Cattle from the air.

Bulls in the yards.

LOTS of hay.

Me & the Melbourne boys.

Me mustering on Candle.

Lucy on Smokey.

Me & Dingo.

Weaner camp.

Road Trains

Before coming out to Australia, I was talking with my Aunt Dacia about what I knew (or assumed) about the station. Over the course of the conversation she asked how one moves the product of 50,000 cows from the land to market. Unlike America, Australia is not a country whose development was heavily shaped by trains, so how then does one transport that volume of animals? The answer – road trains.

A road train is an 18 wheeler on steroids. More accurately, it is a 62 wheeler. One truck pulls 3 trailers at once. Given the remote nature of life in the Territory and the huge distances between population centers, road trains are the dominant means of transporting goods. On the road you will pass trains with 3 tankers full of petrol, some of standard box cars, and sometimes combinations – a truck pulling a freezer car, a box trailer, and a flatbed, for instance. Livestock is transported in double-decker trailers – 3 cars each with 2 levels of cattle. It’s a LOT of cows.

Walhallow, like almost every station, owns its own road train, which we use to move cattle around the property (usually to bring weaners back to the house yards from a paddock yard). When we sell cattle we use a trucking company like Currlie’s or RTA (Road Trains of Australia) to haul them for us. Our cattle end up in several different places depending on their fate. Older culled cows go straight to the abattoir (slaughter house) in Townsville, all the way toward the coast in the east. Young steers are sent to a fattening station in Davenport, also in Queensland, where they grow a while longer before moving to the feed lot. Last week we filled an order for over 1500 culled heifers to go to the Philippines, where they will live in a feed lot eating pineapple pulp. We loaded 9 road trains that went to Darwin where the cattle would be moved onto a boat and shipped overseas. What a strange life for a cow!

Our road train is a giant black and red serpent of a vehicle with a matching white and red cab named the Georgina Drover. On trucking mornings Cameron sets out early since the truck has to drive fairly slowly over the dirt roads. You can see it for miles by the plume of red dust it throws up in its wake. In spite of his early start, we usually beat Cameron to the yards to get the cattle loaded into the bugle and set the gates for the truck to pull through. All of our yards are designed with the road train in mind, so they allow for exceptionally wide turns and have “trucking gates” that allow the truck to pull up next to the loading chute and then drive straight out. Unlike American stock trailers, road trains load from the side. Obviously backing one of these rigs is a bit tricky.

Each trailer has 2 levels and each level has 2 bays. With cows we usually load 15 to a bay, but with smaller weaners we do 20-23. That’s as many as 276 animals per load. To move the cattle between cars there are “load throughs” – bridges that fold down between trailers and have sides that swing out and are chained into place. As soon as the truck hisses to a stop we all scramble up the sides, first setting the bottom load throughs and then balancing on the gates of the lower ones in order to set the top ones. This is hands down my favorite activity on the whole station. It’s like a jungle gym for adults. And they pay me for it.

Once the gates are all in place, we send the cattle up the race, one bay at a time, starting with the top level, loading from back to front. As each bay is filled, the gates are shut behind them and the load throughs are put up. To reach the top deck, the floor of the first trailer is lowered to form a ramp. Once all the top deck cattle are in place, the ramp is raised and we start with the bottom deck. When the cattle load fluidly everything moves quickly and we can usually load a road train in under half an hour. Unfortunately, when weaners get stubborn and start bailing up in the race it can take much longer. The whole process is VERY loud, with the deafening rumble and clatter of cattle trundling through the cars and ringers whooping and hollering, driving them up the race and to the back of the truck. The noise and the dust gives the process an air of excitement that would not be out of place in the Fort Worth stockyards at the turn of the century, loading trains of cattle bound for the east.