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Once you have stopped blogging for some time, it is so difficult to get back in the groove. It seems so much easier to write when there's only a week worth of stuff to report, but when you allow six months to elapse without writing anything, it just seems like an impossible task. But as Mrs. Palmer reminded me, if I don't write it while it's fresh on my mind, I'll quickly forget all the details. And it's the small details that really make the stories worth telling. So I suppose the only thing for me to do is to begin with the latest happenings while they are at the forefront of my conscience.
I have just returned from my trip to the Outback. I'm not sure if the farm can be fully considered as Outback or not. There is no clear definition of what Outback truly is. I suppose it really depends on who you ask. To anyone living in Sydney or Melbourne, which constitutes nearly 40% of Australia's population, then this place would likely be considered Outback. But the people living in this place would consider themselves to be "bushies," or people of "Bush."
The farm I visited is located near Baralaba, Queensland, a small town with a population of approximately 200. It is only about an hour and a half drive to the coast of Queensland, where the city of Rockhampton lies. Rockhampton has a population of around 60,000. Even though this farm might have been considered Bushland rather than Outback depending on who you ask, it still had the iconic red soil of the Australian Outback and the strangely beautiful trees only found in these special areas. My favorite of these trees was the Queensland Bottle Tree, an oddly shaped tree that looks like it has been squashed. And no two bottle trees really look the same. They can vary greatly in shape, and they grow well in drought-stricken areas.
Although this farm was located in the red-earth area, there wasn't much dirt to see due to the lush, waste-high grains growing in the fields. This was quite unfortunate for the sake of my film, but quite fortunate for the farmers. According to the owner of the farm, the area has historically been known for periodic times of drought followed by heavy rains that replenish the land. He said this was the first time since the seventies that the area has seen a full recovery to its former lush state. If I had arrived only a few months back, I would have found a red farm with scantly any grass in sight. When Baralaba does see good rain, it means Rockhampton has seen floods, which is exactly what I encountered during my stay. It's very strange, but it seems that whenever I travel somewhere, they experience fairly unusual weather.
The owner of the farm, Peter, is a one-eyed 75-year-old man who has been farming his entire life, and as a very forward-thinking man, he has stayed up-to-date with emerging technology. Quite the perfect subject for my film, I should say. Also working on the farm is a man who once worked for the biggest cattle station in the world in another part of Australia. He was on the tail-end of the old farming ways and has seen the old vs. the new. I ended up recording approximately 13 hours of footage, which I think should suffice for my movie. Though I'm very tempted to begin editing now, I'm not going to be able to do much with it until I get back home. School will soon be upon me, and I'll have too much going on to worry about this project. I think it's going to be a good one, though.
On my way to the farm, we passed a bunch of wild emus, which I was able to catch on my camera. We also found a wallaby that had been killed by a car. We stopped because Peter wanted to check if there was a baby in its pouch. He has rescued a good number of kangaroos and wallabies over the years and has released them back into the wild. There was indeed a teeny-tiny baby in the pouch, to my amazement. This thing was absolutely tiny. Peter figured it had to have been born only a short time ago. He had never seen one this young in the wild. And I caught it on tape; but not all that well, I'm afraid. The meat ants had already found their way to the carcass of the mother; and meat ants aren't something you really want to be standing in. They are infamous for crawling up people's legs and biting something fierce. The funny thing about meat ants, though, is they usually stop at the knees when crawling up people's legs. That's quite fortunate because I can't imagine having those things in my pants. The baby wallaby was too small to be nursed by bottle, so Peter had to kill it rather than let it suffer a slow death.
Since they had gotten a good rain only the day before I arrived on the farm, the weather was quite nice. Wonderful overcast skies made it ideal to film, and it kept the temperature at a comfortable level. I stupidly thought the overcast skies meant I didn't have to worry about sunburn, but not in Australia. Needless to say, I ended up quite red after my first day, but I learned my lesson for the rest of the week. Along with the lush, new grass, the rain also brought a surge of mozzies. (Mosquitoes for those who don't speak Australian) These weren't ordinary mozzies, either. These were great, big evil mozzies that could bite through jeans with ease and even managed to bite through the three shirts I had put on as a defense. No repellents seemed to work, and they even came out in the middle of the day in the blaring sun. I think these were genetically modified mosquitoes that were manufactured as a new military weapon; they were nasty and came by the hundreds. I had a great new look of red polka dots by the end of the week.
Gradually over the course of my week's stay, the clouds moved on to reveal the harsh sun, which quickly raised the temperatures. On my last day at the farm, the thermometer registered 95 degrees in the shade. I have no clue how hot it was in the direct sunlight. I just know after an hour of filming in its rays, I looked like I had just jumped in the swimming pool. I mean that quite literally. I was absolutely drenched in sweat, and I didn't quite realize it until I got out of the sun. I had to chug quite a few glasses of water once I finished. I don't see how anyone could actually work, let alone live, in that climate. I'm just happy to be back in the reasonable climate of Sydney. I'll never complain about the heat in Sydney again!
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