It's a fine thing to have friends when you're far from home.
Tom and Trish Brooking of
Over morning tea they also introduced me to their neighbors, Donald and
Sally Young, proprietors of Te Oma station just up
the road. Later I drove up to Te Oma for evening tea
and a yarn. Driving up the
A little irrigation race babbles right through the pool in Sally's garden. Coming in the side door I interrupted her animated conversation with a neighbor woman, Ann McAuley. "We're all irrigators," Sally announced, "and so you're going to hear about our problems with water rights." It seems there are some flaws in local water rights, and while the dispute works through the courts, an upstream neighbor has shut off their main race.
Donald was broiling lamb chops out back. We ate well, joined by the local county administrator and his son, and then Sally and Ann headed off for a neighborhood meeting. (I think they are organizing the country.)
Donald did the logical thing with the remaining, all-male contingent--loaded everyone into the ute (4WD utility vehicle) for a tour of the property. Donald was driving barefoot. I rode shotgun and got the gates.
It was up a bulldozed track on some pretty rugged grades and switchbacks,
the rough passage rewarded by a sublime sunset over the
It has been a good year, with timely rains putting the range in good shape
and keeping the rabbits in check, somewhat. The lucerne
(alfalfa) crop has been double the normal. The forage is rank, but so are the
weeds. Donald has been doing quite a bit of development work--defoliating the matagouri and briar brush, bulldozing and burning it, and
drilling in cocksfoot (orchard grass) mixed with lucerne.
Along with the grass has come a tall stand of
Still, Te Oma, a fine-wool operation that harbors about 5000 Merino ewes, spends about $5 per sheep on rabbit control. Donald flags the most infested and inaccessible gulleys to be hit with loads of poisoned carrots from airplanes. Then he goes out to clean up, night shooting over the handlebars of an ATV with 12 gauge and .22 rifle. For the worst areas he calls in contract helicopter shooters.
Back at the house he showed me his most recent technological acquisition for the battle against the bunnies--a laser sight mounted on his pump 12 gauge. We got it out and fooled around with it in the yard. "Just put the wee red dot on the rabbit and pull the trigger," Donald instructed.
Donald had just finished mustering off a mob of 1500 sheep to be treated for footrot, an infection induced by the wet weather. You have to pare the infection off the hoof with a pocket knife and then make the sheep stand in a zinc solution.
Yes, this is the genteel life of the gentleman pastoralist.