Wilsons on the road: Saturday 6 April 2013

Saturday 6 April 2013 - Limbunya Station NT

Staying at a cattle station is like living in a micro-town. Now that mustering is in full swing, there are no days off – Saturdays and Sundays are just like any other day, except there’s usually a football match being played on the TV in the social club while everyone eats dinner. All meals are announced by a buzzer. Breakfast is at 6am, smoko at 9:30am, lunch is 12:30-1pm and dinner at 7pm. Everyone is expected to remove their shoes when they enter the kitchen to serve up their own meal and they have to wash and dry their dishes after they eat. It’s the cook’s responsibility to wash up all the cooking and servingware.

Fortunately Vic, the cook, is fine with me bringing the girls in at different times to prepare and eat their meals. Most days we try and time smoko and lunch with the workers so they can spend some time with Glenn, but they usually eat breakfast and dinner in the kitchen. Even though they wake up fairly early, I like to keep them out of the way in the morning so they eat breakfast at about 7am. We’re concerned that their eating a bit too much sugar, plus Yasmin is still very unadventurous in her diet, so we’ve been encouraging them to eat other things than just cereal for breakfast. Vic is really lovely – he’s happy for me to cook them anything, or he’ll even cook them something himself. Throughout the past week they’ve had pancakes, bacon, eggs (not Yasmin!), toast, fruit, sausage (only Sienna), leftover spag bol (again, just Sienna), mango smoothie, yoghurt and porridge! It’s really nice to have so much variety available and a magnificent commercial kitchen to prepare it all in.

Most nights the girls will eat dinner between 6-6:30pm and again, Victor allows me free rein in the kitchen to put together a really good meal for them. Sienna is loving her beef and Yasmin is starting to eat a bit more of it. She’s enjoying roast beef, corned beef and eating a little bit of steak but still won’t have anything to do with mince or sausages. The best thing about Sienna’s love of meat is that you can hide lots of veggies in it, which Victor often does. Yasmin has added a new vegetable – potato – to her repertoire of peas, corn, carrot and pumpkin. She’s tasted gravy and agrees that it’s nice, but I haven’t managed to convince her to try it with her potato just yet. She’s also eating some other greens, like beans, lettuce and cucumber.

While we’ve had a lot of success, there’s been a few nights where we’ve been close to tearing our hair out at her reluctance to sit and eat sensibly. With the Easter Bilby promise no longer current, we’ve had to resort to removing her plate altogether. She’s gone to bed without any dinner one night and had only eaten half of it on another before she ran out of warnings. It’s not gone quite as far as being served up dinner for breakfast and I think she’s finally starting to understand what is and isn’t acceptable. I’ve also noticed that both girls seem much more balanced throughout the day since we’ve been conscious of how much sugar they’ve been eating and restricted it. We still get tantrums, but not nearly as severe or frequent as they have been.

So, back to life on a cattle station. Today has been the busiest yet. All week there was just the manager (Dan), assistant manager (Dave) plus a few contractor pilots (who often just stay for the day and then fly back to base at Katherine), along with three unskilled station hands – Dave’s girlfriend Jackie, Jean the French backpacker and Glenn. Last night, a crew of eight jack- and jill-aroos arrived at about 3am (after a breakdown at Katherine held them up). A three-carriage road train pulled in this morning just after smoko and apparently a couple of boilermakers and two others are arriving tonight. The place is buzzing with activity – fascinating to watch and learn.

On some days Glenn has been working out the back, rounding them up into the race. It involves lots of jogging back and forth, some full-on running, climbing up and down fences, slamming gates in place and of course using arms and voice to gesture to the beasts. He’s enjoyed getting to know how to work with cattle and learning about their temperament, having a few hairy moments with some feisty steers who weren’t too impressed with him moving them around. Today, after an early drive out with Jean to check the fences on a paddock where the drafted cattle will be returning, he’s been working alongside the race, injecting young steers with either a vaccine or multivitamin.

Once they brought the cattle in earlier this week (I think it was Tuesday), the girls and I have spent a few hours every day at the yard watching how they’re processed. I strap Sienna into the backpack and tie a rope attached to Yasmin’s little bike around my waist and tow her the few hundred metres down to the yard. Yasmin frets a bit when she watches the cattle thrash around when being restrained in the crush and doesn’t like it when they bleed after having their horns cut off. I haven’t seen a castration up close as the rear end of the bull is concealed by the crush, but when they come out with blood dripping down their legs, it’s evident what just took place.