I’ve just read Fleur Bainger’s story on the flood ravaged farmers of Carnarvon in Western Australia, and not for the first time since launching Accidentally Outback, the question in my mind is ‘who’d be a farmer?’
While wool growers in the south of the same state battle horrific drought, there are some farmers where the flood damage in the north is so bad that they will simply walk off their land. Kaput, over, years of dreaming, struggling working, over in a year’s worth of rain overnight.
Meanwhile a group of canny lads from Gilgrandra, whose wheat crops are under three feet of water have become overnight internet sensations with their farcical, tongue in cheek video of ‘Baywatch, Armatree…’ In just under a week more than 15,000 people have watched them duck and dive and imitate Pamela Anderson whilst standing in poetic pose on headers overlooking water soaked paddocks.
These same paddocks were growing their best crops in history, before the untimely rain, and so my hat goes off to them that they could buy a carton of beer on a Sunday, set up the camera and laugh at their predicament, when they should have been banking the cheques…
It’s incredible isn’t it? While we live on the land for the lifestyle, I wonder does the dream only live fully in Country Style Magazine?
Are the brief highs in a market, and paddocks full of pasture enough to sustain one’s sanity through the lengthening years of drought, or now flooding rain?
I’m not sure.
A friend of mine lives one a property that is my idea of heaven. Her babies feed demanding lambs with bottles under beautiful old trees, and a dapple grey pony wanders around the very large backyard as if it is master of the manor… And yet family politics are so intense on who owns what, and who will own what, that it can only be compared to a bad day on the Gaza Strip.
It’s a tricky one, almost farming kharma you could say, and like anything, you become aware that you don’t get anything for free. You give a good year for a tragic year and take it on board as the ‘trade-in’ for the blessed feeling of living the life you dreamt of in the place that you dreamt of. Maybe that’s reasonable economy of it all?
There is one certainty in all of this – farmer’s are increasingly the most resilient, optimistic, and slightly mad people I know (and that last bit’s a compliment.) Here’s the boys of Baywatch Armatree for creative and hilarious coping mechanisms…and to those in Carnarvon, if I could helicopter in a good bottle of red to keep you in a philosophical mood this ‘festive’ season…then I would…
