ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A farmer out on the Betoota City Limits has welcomed the decent drop of rain he got earlier this week but he couldn’t help but ask Huey why he also had to take every bit of flood fencing on his place.
From his small-acre sheep farm, Rob Davling spoke to The Advocate while he sat on the verandah of his weatherboard and iron homestead just past lunch with his boots off. A cup of tea, now half cold, sat on the balustrade while he chatted freely on the hands-free.
“We had about a hundred points this morning, I’d say about four-hundred yesterday,” he said.
“That’d be about a hundred and thirty millimetres in the newspeak. A pretty good drop in any language. We might actually put in a crop of oats this winter, actually. Will need a bit more on it once it’s in but there’s a hell of a lot of moisture in that soil there now,”
“We chisel-ploughed the fuck out of those paddocks earlier in the year. Down almost ten inches we went so that rain has gotten down right in there,”
“But, ah, yeah. Could’ve done without all my flood fences getting swept down the gully. Most of them are fucking G-O-fucking-N-E gone! It’ll cost me thousands to fix. I was hoping to get down to the auctions to restock but that has just about fucked me, it has. Looking through AuctionsPlus online, there’s a lot of good stock about but if this rain keeps up and fucks all my fences, what am I supposed to do? Buy a hundred first cross ewes with my splurge account?”
“Tell you what, you just can’t win. Can you?”
Our reporter said you cannot, which lead to about 15 seconds of silence on both ends of the line.
“Well mate, better get back to it.”
Rob then said goodbye three times before hanging up the phone on the balustrade next to the now stone-cold cup of tea.
More to come.
