I don’t think I had placed quite as much expectation on any other place as I had on Kondoolka. My general strategy is to look for certain keywords in the descriptions people submit to WWOOF: conversation, learning, teaching, welcome, curious… good food. It tends to make for warm, homey, cozy sort of arrangements, but it was precisely for the opposite reason I was attracted to this posting. It wasn’t hard or terse; I had read plenty of those. Rather it was direct, not mincing any words (though god knows I love a good word-mince), not remote or cold but warmly detached, if you can understand that at all. It was the kind of vibe that had me thinking of sun-drenched red earth at sunset, dusty shirt cuffs and hand rolled cigarettes, of campfires and 3 day growth (on men, not me), little conversation but eloquent facial expressions; the Thorn Birds and Clint Eastwood all rolled into one. All painted over with watercolours in varying shades of russet and sand…

Though the two tiny adorable toddlers I met in the café hadn’t originally fitted into my fantasies, they stole my heart. Martin (this name is written in my stars; I have always been drawn to it) and Mareike: two of the blondest, rosiest, most blue eyed tiny tots with boundless energy. I did not know Dave, the station manager, had a partner until two days before when I called up, but I was glad to know that I would be in a family situation again. Steff is from Germany, and she met Dave while WWOOFing herself; thought her travel stories ended rather early, what with the whole falling in love and having children thing.

She was WWOOFing at Kondoolka for several months, neither the isolation nor the work leaving her phased. I admired her Teutonic frankness and willingness to share about her life and what it’s like to have two young children while living so remotely. I was originally reluctant to ask her to pick me up in Streaky, knowing that it’s about a 2 hour drive from the station into town each way, but something I got to understand really quickly is that distance and long drives is something everyone makes their peace with out here. If you don’t spend the 2 hours each way once or twice a week, you’re completely isolated in the literal middle of nowhere. There’s a reason cowboys/jackaroos are the strong, silent type. If something breaks down around here, you better be strong enough to lift it and handy enough to fix it, or you’re up the creek. And there’s no one to talk to unless you count the kangaroos, emus, or livestock, so you get used to the silence. For that reason, Steff drives the kids down once a week for playgroup in town, just so they learn to socialize with others their own age.

Having said that bit about isolation and the need for self-sufficiency out here, there is an incredible sense of community out here too. When you just have each other, you learn to lean on each other. To make the hour drive to your closest neighbour for a cup of coffee. To lend and borrow as necessary, because you’ll be on both sides of the equation at one point, and that’s a fact. To have each other’s backs, even if the gossip, as in any small community, keeps a fair few tongues wagging. But that comes with the territory of living in a small place – if you dislike the bustle and anonymity of the city, then you better like everyone in your business.

I prefer mid-sized towns.

Kondoolka is just on this side of the dog fence, a speck on the few maps that remember to show the Outback stations. It is at the foot of the Gawler Ranges, and sprawls across some 270,000 acres of God’s country. The land supports about 10,000 sheep, give or take a few (hundred) and is pretty much managed by Dave and Steff on their own, with occasional help coming from further afield, and hired hands for the most intense periods of lambing season. The sheep they breed are for meat, not shearing, and they have to get the lambs out to market 3 times per year. But that means mustering them, separating them into different age/size groups, and docking, tagging, and castrating them, which means 12 hour days of some of the hardest work I’ve ever had to do. And I got off lightly – I mean, really lightly, as you’ll soon discover, but the bit I did do made me take in a real lesson in hard work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The homestead is nestled a further 45 minute drive from the road turnoff to the station, surrounded by miles and miles of dry red earth, and silvery green bush, clumps of trees here and there, with ranging ’roos, emus, and flocks of sheep. It’s still weird to me to have this much open country and wilderness and not have to think of wolves or bears, though lord knows they’re fairly few in number back home. The house is a lovely, large ranch house, flowing from living areas to bedrooms, with a large play area for Mareike and Martin. A veranda wraps the whole house in its arms, and a stone pizza oven, built by a French WWOOFer who had just finished his apprenticeship in stonemasonry, was a beautiful addition.

 

The back yard attached to the house played host to a large enclosed trampoline for the kids and a playset with all the extras: slide, swings, castle. It also housed a productive veggie patch, tomatoes and all, which I was quite surprised grew well in the arid climate. But there were tomatoes to be had, and Steff is a master of pickling. She made a spicy mango chutney that was to die for and I still crave months later. The yard was going to see a lot of action on the coming weekend, when a host of people came upon the station for the June long weekend, which I had no idea was even happening until I arrived.

The days usually started off with cuddles and breakfast with Mareike, a curious, active, playful, darling little girl who has a lot of her mother’s spunk. Life is very easy when you just follow the 3-year-old’s directions. “Come here,” she’d say to me very seriously, beckoning with a tiny hand, big blue eyes opened wide. We would play with legos, or sit in her tent and read books, or collect things from one side of the room and bring it to the other. You know, as one does. If something did not meet her approval, the tiny hand would shoot up in a command of “stop!” and blond locks would shake in disapproval. When play time extended to a point where I needed a few moments away, I pulled out her kryptonite: Shaun the Sheep on the tablet, and the whole world would be forgotten, cuddled into my side, Shaun’s every move closely observed. Let me tell you, I totally dig Shaun the Sheep. I started putting those one just as much for me as for her. They’re hilarious! And the Claymation rocks.

Little Martin stuck a little closer to mom while awake to be fed, and snoozed the rest of the time away. A growing boy, he was nearly as big as Mareike at half the age. That kid is going to be a giant, and in the not too distant future. And a good thing too – the station needs all hands on deck during lambing season.

 

It really brings home to me what it means to be raised in a certain environment. When something is surrounding you from birth, you have it seep into your blood. If your field of vision is taken up by a certain thing and you’re brought along to things that reinforce what you see and what you hear around the dinner table, it just becomes second nature. Mareike and Martin both get taken along when their parents are working the lambing season. Largely out of necessity, they nevertheless are becoming little tough jack- and jillaroos, with Mareike learning what is necessary to drive the sheep.

I had a taste of what it takes on my second day. We had a half hour drive out to an enclosure holding a mob of sheep, which we broke down into smaller groups, and then herded them through a few walkways and then separated them according to age into different pens. There’s a reason for all the sheep clichés, and though they’re pretty docile and will follow a certain pattern of behaviour, every so often one of them decided to go against the herd, and turn and refuse to walk through the little corridors create by the pen fences, at which point we had to step in (by “we” I mean Dave or Steff) and turn the sheep around or push it forward by hand. Some of these sheep are big and wooly and decidedly against following the crowd. But sooner or later we separated everyone appropriately, at which point came the more intrusive part.

The younger sheep needed to get tagged, docked and, in the case they were male, be castrated. This is not quite as horrible as it sounds, though it’s still not a day at the Ritz. The tagging happens with a hole-punch type apparatus punches a hole through the sheep’s ear, kind of like a really big earring hole being made in our ears. If it had the shape of the letter “J”. The docking was putting a tight rubber band around the base of their tail, so it would loose circulation and eventually fall off. The same deal with their tiny sheepy balls. It did not look very comfortable, but then again the band would not be on forever. It’s the price to pay for being a wild sheep out there, leading the free-est and protected of lives (until the truck comes to take them away). And at least the ranchers don’t bite to balls off anymore, which I’m sure both rancher and lamb are devoutly grateful for.

 

The lambs were picked up from their pens and placed in a lamb cradle, a cross between a cradle and a gyno’s chair, with stirrups for their feet. This allows easy access to tail and balls, while keeping them upright for the ear tagging. The docking is necessary too, as the tails would keep poo and dirt right by their bums, and flies would lay eggs in the poo held by the fleece near their bottom end. Those fly eggs would grow into larva, and infest the fleece as well as the sheep’s bum. It’s called being flyblown, and is a much nicer term verbally than visually, let me tell you. If only you could see my face as I write these sentences. Ugh. Maggots. Dis-GUST-ing.

Once Steff and Dave had gone through the mob and separated them, we got them all up in the transport truck and drove onto another paddock. We had to leave the cradle behind for the moment, as we were to pick up another ute and drive back to pick it up along with a second load of sheep. While Steff had been busy tagging the sheep in our first round and I was watching the kids and helping herd, the second round had Steff take off with the kids and left me and Dave to handle the second round of loading and driving. And that meant driving the cradle back on the back of the ute.

 

Now, I’m a new driver, and I’ve been pretty antsy about driving on the wrong (yes, my right-hand-side driving friends, you read that right, it’s the wrong) side of the road, so I didn’t drive for any of my time in Australia so far. But that cradle wasn’t going to get itself back to the shed, and there was only me or Dave to do it. And there was also a semi filled with bleating sheep that had to make it to the home paddock too. Sheep or cradle? Sheep or cradle? I took the cradle.

Did I mention the ute was a manual? (Or that I had driven it into a grove of trees on the ride over to the paddock as I was trying to learn how to handle the stick?)

 

It started off pretty well. Dave hooked the trailer with the cradle to the back of the ute, and I put her in gear and followed the truck once it rolled onto the track. I was ok going from first into second, but seemed to have trouble moving the damn thing into 3^rd gear. I was doing the footwork pretty ok, but the moment I switched from second into third, the car would emit a grinding sound like I had never heard before. I could gear down to first and back up to second, but it looked like the car was not trusting me with 3^rd gear. And I think I could get it into fourth, but that would mean a cruising speed of 80 and up, and I didn’t think that was wise of me to do. Anyway, I put-putted along at 40 klicks an hour very happily, until the Sand Dune of Death.

 

That fucking thing. You need to be going at a fairly fast clip in order to scale it properly, and 40 was just not going to cut it. I got halfway up the dune and then the car could not get enough traction and slid right back down. This occurred several times until I had to admit defeat. I was stuck at the bottom of the dune for ten minutes or so until Dave made it to where I was. Poor guy had to back up the semi with the full load of sheep for god knows many kilometers to get back to me. He then had to drive the ute up and over the sand dune. I at least was glad that I wasn’t the only one to ever get mired there, but something happened when I got behind the wheel again. The clutch just refused to cooperate. I could not for the life of me get her in gear again, and poor Dave had to stand there and listen to me murder the transmission as I was trying to get the car to go forward. But eventually I finally got it going and crawled along for about 40 km at a snail’s pace, and when I finally got it back to the paddock I practically fell out of the ute.

The next day was the day to put what I had observed into practice. There was another mob close to the homestead that needed to get processed, and they were generally bigger than the ones we took care of the day before. Steff kept the sheep coming through the pen walkways, while Dave docked and castrated, and I tagged. It took a few hours to get through the mob, and by the end of it, my right hand was cramped beyond belief. As these were older sheep, their ears were thicker and harder to pierce, and especially the more rambunctious ones were bucking in their cradle, making my job extra fun, as I had to be mindful of the rams’ budding horns too.

Steff was quite sympathetic to my plight, as she had been a WWOOFer on the station for several months before becoming a part of the household, and had been through it all before. “Wait until you have to do this for 12 hours a day for two weeks,” she said with a meaningful glance. I got the feeling the word ‘exhausted’ would take on a whole new meaning if I stuck around to do that. “So, is that what’s on the menu tomorrow?” I asked, half excitedly, half fearfully. I would love to see if I could hack it, but at the same time…damn, it was not easy doing it. “No, tomorrow we are preparing for the weekend. You got here at the right time of year!” she laughed. “There’s a long weekend and a few people are coming down to camp at the station!”

Since travelling, I hardly look at the newspapers, calendars, or clocks, outside the necessary ‘what time am I supposed to be at the bus/airport/train station?’ awareness. I barely know what day of the week it is, much less which national holidays are coming up. Apparently I had managed to make it to the station for the Queen’s birthday, which is a national holiday. For the whole long weekend, Steff and Dave were going to play host to various friends and the station’s owner, Greg, and take a mini holiday from the station work. So, somehow, I went to the station to put myself to the hard-work test, and ended up spending 3/5ths of the time partying.

It was a wonderful weekend. Big bonfires, cookouts, and making new friends while taking drives and little hikes around the property, made it a wonderful little vacation. I started feeling really guilty for not really doing anything, but Steff and Dave were both really relaxed about the whole thing. “Sometimes you luck out and come on a relaxed weekend. You could have just as well been worked to the bone…it’s just the luck of the draw.” I wasn’t going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth for too long, so decided to just sit back and enjoy myself.

Everyone I met was beyond lovely and friendly. There was a host of children about too, which made Mareike really happy, having a host of teenage girls to watch over her and a bunch of 5-8 year olds to play with. It’s amazing how independent and physically aware she is. Steff doesn’t really have to worry too much about her as she entertains herself and is able to play fairly unsupervised for respectable tracts of time, scampering about the house and yards, aware of “no-go” zones. It was just really nice to be a part of a large social group and all the little ones; kind of like when I was little and my parents would get together with their friends while we kids ran off and did our own thing.

It’s also quite nice to be the center of attention as the curiosity of the district, and tell my bag of tales to a whole new audience. A pair of Steff and Dave’s good friends, Mark and Teresa, I felt especially drawn to. Both are such kind-hearted, fun and outgoing people, and I just felt immediately like I had found another pair of kindred spirits. They have such a plucky, adventuresome, welcoming, and open vibe about them that it’s hard not to respond warmly. It was awesome to hang out on the porch having some beers and food and trading stories and jokes.

Slowly families began peeling off over the Sunday and Monday, as people had various lengths of drives to make to get home (and a fair number of kids to prepare for school in a day or two), and the station took on its remote, lone atmosphere again. I had only the rest of that Monday and Tuesday with the family before Steff would take me back to Streaky on Wednesday. I really wished I could have stayed an extra week, as I was getting quite attached to the kids and loved talking to Steff, whom I admire immensely for her fortitude, practicality, honesty, warmth and forthrightness. She’s a wonderful woman and a great mom and I loved being around her. And Dave, a man of few words, but a great sense of humour and a solid presence, made the place feel like a salt-of-the-earth, strong and warm place to be. I miss them still.

But I had promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, as the poem goes, for another adventure awaited just around the corner, in Bridgewater, the Adelaide Hills.

 

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And in other photos: