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DAY 181: Bidding at a country auction

28 Feb

I BAG my party a sack of root vegetables and a ‘taste of Europe’ beer set from this Lilydale auction held to raise funds for the local footy club. Pretty much the whole town has shown up and everyone’s sportingly bidding for bits of scrap metal, broken prams, rusting tractors and such – most of which will probably end up at the next auction. There’s much hilarity as the auctioneer and his crew hold up each and every ‘treasure’ and give it the patter.

Keeper? Yes.

This dude looks exactly like that one off Wolf Creek.

Eep!

DAY 178: Illustrating a children’s book

25 Feb

AS many of you will know, I’m already a published author (oof!), but now I am also an illustrator. I coloured in this flag for Matt Zurbo’s next children’s book. Let me know what sort of cut you think I am due and I will put it quietly to his agent.

Another of Zurbo’s suggested missions: become a bit-part character in a comic.

Keeper? Soon to be immortalised forever!

DAY 175: Four-wheel driving

22 Feb

THE bush pirate agrees with me that chicks look hotter driving stick, yet I can only drive automatic and that’s without a licence. Something needs to be done about this urgently.

It’s a shithouse day up here in the Otway Ranges, which seem to have their own weather system. A couple of times our 2WD ute nearly gets bogged down in the bush pirate’s expert hands, so when it’s my turn he yells out gear changes, trying not to instinctively slap his head and pull his hair when I crunch, stall and get shirty. Looking hotter by the minute, though.

Next up we swap the 2WD for a 4WD. How fortuitous that I’d put Cinderella’s classic ‘Shake Me’ on the mix CD – it’d been sticking out like a sore thumb up till this point, but now it captures the essence of the moment. We’re shaking so much, in fact, that the knackered tray door comes unhooked without us noticing and we lose various bits of fishing paraphernalia and petrol cans all along the track.

I finish off with some hooning down grassy hills, through deep puddles and up mud slicks. I don’t know if I’m looking hotter, but I’m feeling pretty flushed.

Keeper? Yes.

DAY 174: Milking filthy cows

21 Feb

Dangerous place to stand and sulk.

THINK you get shat upon at work? Don’t talk to me about it – I’ve just been in a shit deluge.

‘Relief milking’, which I’ve got up at 5.15 to do, doesn’t mean you’re ‘relieving’ cows, it’s the milking of cows when someone else doesn’t want to do it – which is completely understandable, as it turns out.

When I first arrive at Graham’s farm, though, I’m blissfully ignorant, and as I explain to the bush pirate, there’s no excuse not to apply lipstick and brighten everyone’s day just because you’re getting down to a bit of hard graft.

My job here today is to herd in 110 cows in groups of 10, pour in feed, hook ’em up to the milking machine by hoovering up their udders with suction cups, unhook them, hook up the opposite 10 cows, spray disinfectant on the first 10 and then herd them out with the aid of a big stick and some plaintive yelling.

My perception of gaily a-milking in clogs and pigtails dissipates in a stream of steaming urine (which smells pleasingly like porridge, I have to say). As I flounder around in the shit pit, dodging downpours, I try futilely to rinse fecal matter off my hands with a hose, and the high-pressure jet propels it into my face instead.

“Eeh scary!” Graham mimics of my little yelp.

Sparkling clean Graham.

“Does it hurt them?” I change the subject, tugging cups off teats while dodging indignant hooves.

“Don’t hurt me,” he shrugs.

Suck it and see.

An hour and a half later I’m well and truly splattered with poo and done for the day. The bush pirate asks Graham politely if he can borrow a towel for me to sit on: “It’s my dad’s car, you see.” Smirks all round. I feel like a child that’s just soiled itself.

Keeper? Ho no.

DAY 173: Bulldozing shit

20 Feb

I FIRST meet Stevo down the logger’s pub, where he turns up at five on the dot every day, or else. With the lube of VB, he’s easily persuaded to give me a go on his bulldozer, so the next day I locate him and his machine halfway down a muddy mountain of tree stumps. It’s like the Orcs have been through and destroyed everything.

Stevo’s a man of few words, but he teaches me well and I soon get this thing shifting a wall of mud from one spot to another. It’s got seven levers, but I only have to shift gears from neutral to first/reverse, wave the digger around, work the decelerator and brake, and use two more levers to steer left and right. Easy.

“Woman drivers, eh, mate?” Stevo yells out to the bush pirate, but thankfully then falls silent again.

Keeper? Sure – great fun!

Whee.

DAY 172: Getting my chops with a chainsaw

19 Feb

It wasn't like this.

BY rights, this should be an incredibly hot scenario. This should be me straddling a tree root, brandishing a chainsaw and spraying chips until a trunk comes screaming down in supplication. In the middle of a goddamn forest!

Unfortch, my chainsaw has all the traction of a butter knife with my technique and weighs a sodding ton. And then there’s the hard hat and chaps I’m being forced to wear. And not Xtina Aguilera-style chaps, either.

I keep hacking away at my tree, trying to get the angle right, but the saw’s so heavy that I can’t hold my spindly wrist straight. By the time I step back and survey my handiwork, it just looks like the tree’s been self-harming.

Don't hold it like this.

The lumberjack (I notice HE’S not wearing hard hat and chaps) steps in to make a wedge for me so that I can finish it off with a deft slice to the back, but my blade seems to only tickle the trunk, and whenever I pull it out in a huff it stalls. Jeez, it’s always awkward cracking the shits in front of someone you don’t know very well yet, isn’t it? Still, can’t be helped…

In the end we leave the big trees be and I fell a mighty sapling.

No worries.

“Some assignments are an A, some are a B-minus,” the lumberjack says generously as I order a latte in the logger’s pub. And that’s a D-minus for the availability of the latte.

Keeper? Well, I’m supposed to be going for my licence, so I’d better persevere.

DAY 171: The night of the shooting

18 Feb

“I’LL just let the boys know you’re not comfortable shooting roos,” the bush pirate says, as I try and tell him an actual hunting trip’s out of the question without sounding like a big wuss. “I’m sure they’ll compromise with some foxes and rabbits or something.” Eep.

By the time we get to the campsite it’s around 11pm and the rum is in full flow. I can’t understand any of the conversations around me as they’ve become 90% more vowelly than the usual country talk, thanks to Sir Bundy. Nod, smile. Nod, smile.

One bloke keeps spraying a can of Aerogard into the fire for an interesting pyro effect, while another, upon seeing us, grabs a giant surf-style fishing rod and takes us yomping off down to the black river to set it up, tripping over various dogs as we go. The second his back’s turned he gets a bite and reels in an eel, which gets chucked back in after a bit of yahooing.

We’re here to fire his rifle though, so we all pile on the quad bike and take off to a bit of paddock away from sleeping children and cows. I’ve fired guns before, but this one’s got a sniper’s sight, for that extra “holy shit!” factor. It’s the heaviest I’ve held, as well. It lets off a mighty kaboom, and I let off a shriek, and then we’re hurtling back to the camp again for a Bundy update.

Keeper? If I find myself in this situation again, sure.

DAY 170: The Day of a Thousand Fucks

17 Feb

Screaming next to the abyss.

“YOU get used to that,” the bush pirate says, every time I nearly break my neck, impale myself on a tree or have to grip on to some death-ute or other. “That’s what we do in the country.”

Today we’re doing some rainforest regeneration. This gully used to be a scramble of blackberry bushes, but now it’s home to tree ferns, ground ferns, myrtle beeches and satin boxes, with eucalypts on the ridges and spurs. And it’s ringing with urgent profanities.

“You start digging some holes down there,” the bush pirate points to a sheer drop with a stream audible somewhere at the bottom. I head off down it with my spade, and my boots send rocks tumbling endlessly down to the water, where there’s a distant splash. There are no discernable footholds and I keep sliding down the ravine, reaching out to grab handfuls of handy nettles and thistles. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

This must be some kind of rookie-nobbling joke, surely?

I manage to anchor myself long enough to plant six saplings, sit down to have a fag and spot the bloodthirsty leech sitting atop my fly. Nice.

My first leech.

Keeper? I’ll think about it.

DAY 169: Streaking in the rainforest

16 Feb

He didn't come skinny dipping, if you're wondering.

KINDA cool that I dreamt I was skinny dipping last week and now here I am, lolloping into a swimming hole at 2.30 in the morning.

On the way here, coming out of a seaside town, we see a koala sat in the middle of the road, having a breather. After escorting the furry fella away from the white lines, my cohort takes me to the top of the Otways to do some ‘pirating’. I’d thought this would involve treasure coves and jolly rogers, but instead we’re pulling up young myrtle beech trees that are due to be slashed for increased road access. These’ll then get replanted elsewhere in the bush pirate’s reforestation efforts.

Job done, we go for a ‘walk’ through the rainforest, which turns out to be a near-vertical trek up the ridge, hauling ourselves up on vines, tree ferns and dead branches: two steps forward, one giant arse-slide back, for the most part. En route we pass endless pockets of glow worms and hear bats and barn owls flying overhead. Then off for a nudey swim to wash off those leeches.

Keeper: Yes!

DAY 163: Rolling a fag

10 Feb

Cool.

I HAVE rolled a cigarette before, in my teens, but all the tobacco fell out one end. This is the first functional one. Then I went to bed and dreamt I was doing a skinny dip, but the person I gave my camera to took really unflattering pictures of my arse, so I couldn’t publish it. I think there’s a message in that.

Keeper? No.

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