2.3.11 – Bush fires, cows and kangaroos

Geoff's cattle

2.3.11 – Bush fires, cows and kangaroos

A few years ago, George and Moira nearly lost their lovely home to a bush fire.  The tall gum trees behind the house became an inferno, exploding, as apparently gum trees do, and filling the house with smoke.  A neighbour’s house burned to the ground.  But the next year, the trees had recovered, only occasional black trunks giving clues of what had happened.

Geoff, a friend Bill made many years ago while he was working at Strathclyde University, and his wife Fran, rolled up in a silver pick-up truck, to take us to Hadley Homestead in the mountains of the Blue Mountains of the Great Dividing Range.  We flung our case in the back and piled in.  The seats and floor were covered in blankets.  As it was about 27 degrees, mystifying.  Geoff explained that, in the event of the car being caught in a bush fire, the advice is to cover yourself in blankets and huddle down on the floor.  However, he added that as his petrol tank is plastic, he has his doubts as to how effective this would be. 

Geoff's Pick-up truck

Hadley Homestead

We drove out into the country, through fields of whitened grass, the ubiquitous gum trees, and quaint buildings with delicate wrought iron balconies.  Occasional notices denoted the state of fire risk, ranging from low to ‘catastrophic’.  First sight of a kangaroo, albeit a dead one - a ruckle of bones and grey fur by the side of the road.  We stopped to pick up materials to fix fences at the farm, and drove on.  The road became an unmetalled track, then a rough path, and finally disappeared entirely as we arrived at the Homestead, deep in the deserted mountains.  An old cream wooden house, corrugated iron roof, out buildings including a sheep shearing shed.  A little pool where four of Geoff’s 24 brown and white Hereford cows were cropping the grass.  As we unpacked, one stared uncertainly at us through our bedroom window.  The Homestead was originally carved out of the hillside by a transported convict and became his family home.

Cattle Pen

After lunch, Geoff and Fran, in khaki felt bush hats, drove us over their 550 acre farmlands, in search of the other 20 cows.  Rocking and rolling down steep tracks, grinding up near-perpendicular rubble covered slopes, through landscape empty of people or buildings, rolling hills peppered with lonely gum trees, some of them dead and seared silver by the sun, scratching the blue sky with their sharp finger nails; others scorched black by the bush fires.  A dark brown, stump tailed lizard suns himself by the side of the track; a dark river winds through the bottom of a deep gorge; distant hills unfold, range after range, fluffed green with distant forests.  Copper coloured horses, shining in the sun; cream cattle under the shade of a wide tree.  Geoff showed Bill where he sorts and tags the cattle, where he captures the wild goats we can see roaming in herds in the distance.  Back at the homestead, we go to check on one of the cows – and suddenly see there! Springing away with astonishing easy elasticity, our first wild kangaroo.