Picking up rubbish. Sometimes it seems to take all my spare time.
When I’m in the paddocks I’m always picking-up bits and pieces lying around, you know the stuff, pieces of baling twine, old broken machinery parts, pieces of glass and broken bottles or plastic bottles, old fencing wire, a piece of tin or old oil bottles, whatever.
Just lately it’s become a bit of a chore.
No, it’s not only because I’m getting older and can’t bend down like I used to, it’s more because there seems to more visible now than ever. Why is that?
It probably has something to do with the lack of grass on our little ‘prickle farm.’ Well, there is some dry, stalky grass which is inedible for sheep and cattle but nothing else.
The point being, there’s nothing else growing and it makes the rubbish stand out, easier to see and I have to pick it up. It’s a responsibility thing. I even keep a few old stock feed bags in the ute to put the rubbish in.
40 years and still going …...
Keep Australia beautiful they say but just walk along any country road or highway and you’ll soon see the message isn’t getting through.
What happened to the grass? We normally have native grass cover, some clover and couch, plenty of blue couch among the weeds and other grasses like digitaria, paspalum and rhodes grass; but not at present – because we’re in a ferocious drought.
We’ve lived in this part of Queensland for almost 40 years and droughts come and go – well, some are just dry spells longer than we’d like them to be and others, like from 1991 to ‘94 are devastating for grain growers, dairy farmers and beef producers in our region.
My grandfather spoke at length about a terrible drought from 1898 to 2002 which almost bankrupted Australia.
Locals here talk about the 1950’s drought which was apparently a really bad one.
In July 1956, when the long dry ended on a really cold and bleak winter’s night, the livestock couldn’t handle it. They were in poor or very poor condition, living on anything their owners could find to feed them and when it came in with sleet, cattle and sheep died by the thousands right across the Darling Downs.
So much for owners trying to retain some breeding stock for when the drought was over and replacement breeders would be almost impossible to buy.
So much too, for their mental health.
This current dry spell - here you can read bad drought - has lasted for several years but up until this winter, stock feed wasn’t in short supply as it was in 1956. As long as it wasn’t too far away, graziers were able to transport it in, knowing full-well it would rain before winter – only it didn’t.
Destocking into a buyer’s market
The drought has reached a zenith here, no feed in the paddock, no feed away from here to buy and bring in, no feed for animals anywhere. How bad must it be for those living further west in the drier country?
What it means is de-stocking only this past few years, there has been no agistment anywhere within a reasonable distance.
There’s no feed on the stock route either so droving is out too.
Owners have had to sell good quality stock in poor condition into a buyer’s market and hope they can buy breeders back when it eventually rains.
There’s a saying, every good drought has been broken by rain, but at what cost, both financially and mentally.
God created a perfect world
Three percent of Australians work in rural industry and yet 30 percent of deaths in Australia happen in the very same industry. Too many are suicide.
Do you think God meant to have his land as dry as it is now?
Do you think He meant for people to become so affected by these circumstances they should contemplate ending it all?
When He created the world, it was a perfect place, He said so. No drought, no floods (well, not then anyway), no heat waves, no cold snaps, no ice age, just a perfect environment – so what went wrong?
Sin entered the world via the lies of a sneaky lying snake and we’ve been paying for it ever since.
When sin entered the world, so did weeds, inedible grasses, poison, rocks, rubbish and eventually God’s perfect environment turned into something not so perfect.
The whole story is to be found in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
John Skinner served as an infantry soldier in Vietnam then the Tasmanian Police before taking up the position of CEO of the Australian Rough Riders Association (professional rodeo based in Warwick Qld). Before retirement to his small farm, he was a photo-journalist for 25 years. He is married with 3 children and 7 grandchildren.