Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,39
new baby sister had a present for him. She gave Michael the green corduroy parrot. The grey rabbit, her rabbit, she gave to Little Hazel.
‘A neatly patterned yoke adds charm to this simple jumper for your small daughter.’
The Victorian Dairy Farmer brings them together. The weekly broadsheet is aimed at the dairy-farming family. After Harry has read about butterfat production in New Zealand and the threat of margarine he tears the family pages out with a ruler and takes them next door. Betty reads the short stories, the articles on nutrition by ‘calorie’, the reports from the wives of dairy experts accompanying their husbands on technical visits to Berne or Reykjavik or Idaho. She also reads the back of the farming page so she can engage Harry on dairy topics.
‘Do we have that weed St John’s Wort around here, Harry? It says in the VDF a German woman with a yen for gardening brought it to Victoria and it escaped at Bright racecourse. It causes hyper-mania, depression and skin problems in cows. How on earth does a plant escape at a racecourse?’
When Betty raises the problem of ‘pugging’ in dairy pastures she finds Harry keen to explain and then to explain further … Betty thinks Harry talks about his pasture the way some women talk about their hair. The pasture, like a woman’s hair, is always under some program of improvement or repair. There is generally a difficult stage it has to go through and myriad problems in regard to low yield or poor establishment along the way. Inundation with water can wreak havoc. When things are badly poached a light harrowing is required. Betty keeps her thoughts to herself until he mentions the need for a roller. She looks up at him from her crochet. ‘I’ve heard a heated roller is good, Harry. What about using a heated roller on your poor grass?’
Harry is struck by how much simpler things seem when they are written about in the VDF than in actual life. The dangerous job of hoof trimming, for instance. ‘Trim the hoof to distribute the weight evenly between the two claws of the foot, leaving sufficient horn to protect the corium or inner hoof, then trim the claws to their normal size and shape.’
Some years back he was so taken with an article on an organic manure spreader he went ahead and ordered one. Harry has the standard machinery – a mouldboard plough, a cultivator of the rigid-tyne type, a middle buster, a bedder and an automatic-tying pick-up hay baler. All of this pulled by a dark red twelve-horsepower Massey Ferguson that Little Hazel calls ‘the tomato’. According to the VDF organic manure spreaders were all the rage in the USA. Manure from the cowshed is loaded into the liquid-proof hopper which is towed into the paddocks by tractor. The mechanical spreader at the back of the implement works the ground and scatters the organic material (cow shit) evenly. There’s a step missing, of course: the cows don’t shit directly into the hopper – Harry has to shovel it. Around fifty shovel loads of dripping, liquid shit per milking. ‘Fucking Americans,’ Harry chants under his breath as he pours more and more fuel into the tomato and rides it across the paddocks spreading shit and stopping constantly to unclog the choked outlet shute. ‘Fucking bastard Americans.’
Little Hazel reads ‘Skipper’s Mail Bag’ every week and adds up the small sum awarded to the children who send in a poem, a joke, a drawing or a photograph to be published. She despises Myrtle Broad from Mologa who repeatedly sends photographs of herself on her white pony getting the Good Hands trophy at the local show, or a drawing she’s done of a rearing horse that is so clearly copied out of a book you can see the tracing marks. Little Hazel knows she could do better. She never sends anything in, but this doesn’t stop her looking for her own name in print as she reads and feeling disappointed when it isn’t there. One school holidays she does write away – she replies to an article on pen pals through the American Australian Association in Nebraska. She requests an Indian girl or boy with a spotted horse, but nobody ever replies.
HAZEL REYNOLDS’
NATURE DIARY
July
To-day one of the girls bought a goldfinch nest for the nature table. It had three broken eggs in it. A goldfinch is a pretty little bird that likes to flaunt the feathers of its wings.
To-day we