Just before Easter Kulin hosted the annual Blazing Swan festival. To provide some context this is the Australian version of the Burning Man festival in the U.S. I was lucky enough to attend the night they do the big burn and hang around for awhile. Unfortunately the pictures I took didn’t turn out great but it’s actually quite an impressive event. The various theme camps have surprisingly elaborate setups and at night they all basically turn into mini clubs where you can just hop around and hang out at the ones you like. In the evening (and still in the morning) I could hear the music from my house and others I talked to said that they could hear it in town, which is nearly 20 km away.
After Easter I gained a roommate and also began working at a farm down the road. My roommate Aoife is Irish and we get on pretty well. She replaced me working for the Boweys and it’s been fun to have someone else around at home. She also has only ever lived in the city before now so it’s mildy entertaining to hear all of the things that are shocking to her out here and observe as she adjusts to life on the farm.
As for work at the Lucchesi farm down the road, I am loving it. Most of the time I work with the stock manager, Morgan, doing all things sheep. I spend a lot of time on my buggy riding around paddocks mustering them, checking feeders, cleaning water troughs, weighing, putting hay out with the tele-handler, and whatever else. I have also spent a considerable amount of time in the shearing sheds as a full time roustabout/wool presser/pen filler and my skills improved greatly. I even got to shear part of a sheep - one of the shearers let me finish his last one which I thought was nice, I had really been wanting to give it a go. I don’t believe I have a future as a shearer but I’m glad I got to try it.
This is one of the larger farms in the area and we’ve got about 12,000 sheep so there’s definitely plenty to do. When we do our weekly weighing of the lambs we’re bulking up we may do up to 2,500 in a day and we’ve tailed about 3000 lambs so far with one mob left that is still birthing. Tailing lambs at this farm was very different than at Bowey’s because at Lucchesi’s we actually cut off the tail with a very hot knife that sort of looks like a flatiron. I don't love the smell of it but it’s part of the job so you just get used to it and move on. Sometimes the tails squirt a stream of blood, which would have been fine, but the first day we were tailing was quite windy and I happened to be downwind of the tail chopper. By the end of the day I was pretty well-covered in spatter and we had had a miscommunication about how to keep track of how many lambs we’d done so we had to count the pile of tails at the end to find out. They were still warm and bloody and I absolutely did not enjoy that part. I did cut off two tails myself with the hot knife and I didn’t love that either, definitely not something I’d like to do often but I think it’s good to try everything.
This employer is really good about letting me try a bit of everything so I got to spend four days in a tractor pulling a roller over all the oats we had seeded. The first day was very stressful because there were a lot of obstacles so I actually had to do quite a lot of steering by hand in an attempt to not hit any of them. The next few days were fabulous as there were minimal obstacles and it took 10 minutes to go from end to end so I could just put on auto-steer and kick back until the next turn.
Another thing I’ve dabbled in on the farm I think I should mention is roo hunting. Sergio, my boss’s old man, has what could perhaps be described as a shooting bus. It’s an old ambulance that he’s rigged up to suit his needs. Behind the main cab is a raised bench where the spotters sit and can swivel the spotlights and in the main cab there is a rope Sergio pulls that opens the dog cage at the back of the vehicle. Going out with Sergio is such good fun because he gets so excited when we spot a roo or a fox and you can’t help but also be very excited. We’ll just be galavanting around the paddocks in the dark driving this ridiculous vehicle until we spot something and Sergio really takes off to get the dogs close. Then we release them and the chase is on! It is an experience I would highly recommend.
My sporting adventures have been going exceedingly well too. My netball career was short lived as I could only play two games without registering, but it turns out I’m pretty decent at it. We got absolutely flogged both times but I had a good time. I still don’t understand most of the rules but luckily my basketball skills translated quite well and my general ability to run landed me in the position that covers the most ground. That was great fun until I hopped on the hockey field directly after to play and simply felt dead by the end of it all, but it was definitely worth it those weeks. My hockey skills have improved greatly the last two months. Not to toot my own horn but I’ve actually been on a scoring streak the last four weeks since getting my first one and scored four goals in our last match (although we did beat them 9-0 so perhaps it is not that impressive after all).
I have now somehow been in Kulin for nearly 7 months and while I don’t at all regret staying this long (and will almost certainly be back again as I’ve had several offers and do enjoy it here) it is definitely time to leave. There have been a lot of backpackers around during seeding and it was a really fun group that I hung out with regularly. At the start of July I will be traveling to Thailand for two weeks with an Irish couple I’ve met before returning to Perth. By that point my friend Ben, who I met at Goshen and worked several summers with, will have arrived in Perth where we will catch a women's world cup game before heading off. We’re unsure of where we’re headed first, but barring any complications we’ll be taking a brief detour to New Zealand in September. A friend of ours from Goshen has relatives who live there that have offered us work, a car, and a cottage in the mountains which seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up. There is much to look forward to in the coming months and I am very excited about all of it (which I will try to do a better job of updating you on, but no promises).
