For The Record

This morning there were 64 white cockies on the ground foraging in the one acre paddock next to what I used to call the 'galah feeding paddock', now known as 'the gouge'. Also there were 16 galahs, four magpies, and several minas. The two horses that I used to give a handful of lush green grass from outside the fence, or a carrot from my bag, are no longer there. Moved to another paddock with more grass I suppose.
At 'the gouge' there were four cockies searching through the chocolate brown earth for God knows what. A bricklayer and his offsider has been putting up the first of the walls of the house for a week or so. The sound of a generator providing power for the mixer can be heard a hundred metres or more away as I approach. The bricklayer's apprentice is young with bleach blonde long hair, lithe body and tanned skin. He wears not hat nor shirt in the blazing sun on hot days. I wonder if somehow his education missed the skin cancer warnings, or is he simply young, vain, and/or rebellious.
A little further on my way up to the town I saw something well ahead on the road that looked like a squashed plastic soft drink bottle from a distance, but was in fact a dead galah, which must have been hit by a car. Restraining 'Pip' who would have loved to chew it, I picked it up off the road and threw it onto the top of a thick photinia which I thought was a more suitable resting place than being pulverised to oblivion by a day's traffic on the road.
In the main street outside St. Silas's church on my way back, young 'Pip' stopped suddenly on the lead. I watched her nuzzling the earth between the gazzanias and noticed some turkey thyme, growing well and spilling out onto the pavement, so I picked a bunch for the lamb shank stew I've just put in the crockpot. 'Pip' pulled on the lead, she wanted to go back to where 'Snowy' was agitated, darting in and around some agapantha plants.
I don't like letting the dogs make me backtrack, it could become a habit with them. I don't mind stopping here and there, they like to sniff and pee. On the main rd. where there's no pavement I have them both on leads for their own protection from cars. On the little dirt roads and in the park I let them run free, and when I get to the station I put 'Pip' on the lead and leave 'Snowy' free till I reach Launching Place road again.
I was expecting a baby rabbit to run out of the garden as 'Pip' and I reached 'Snow' but it was a movement toward the small birch tree that I noticed. Thinking baby bird of some sort, my immediate reaction was to hope neither dog grabbed it, but before I could do anything it reached the trunk and ran up. It was a young bushrat. It climbed to the top of the tree, only about 15feet high, and sat there.
I don't know why, but seeing the rat was soothing, and went someway to lift the annoyance I felt when I read the sticker on the four wheel drive in Innes Rd.
"If it moves, shoot it, if it doesn't move, cut it down, and if it's green, piss on it."
Also soothing was the 30 ml of rain we had last weekend. Lib and I were at Blaigowrie visiting friends so we didn't see it, but after a hot dry month with no rain registering in the gauge, it was lovely to come home to a wet garden.

My tree of the week is the spotted gum, Eucalyptus maculata. There's one down the back at farm which I planted about twenty two years ago. I was cutting grass in that steep section with the whipper a few weeks ago when I took a break and admired the trunk, which is now five feet in diameter. There's one at home of the same age, both purchased at the same time from the state schools nursery in Melbourne when Michelle* worked there. It's nowhere near as big as the one at the farm, not having the benefit of a moist gully to grow in, but it's a handsome tree with its typical smooth white/grey/lemonny trunk.
Spotted gum forest in coastal NSW is some of the most attractive scenically in eastern Australia. It's an important honey source for commercial beekeepers, especially on the south coast where the winter flowering is ideally combined with mild dry stable weather. As you move north it becomes less reliable. I remember when at Gatton college Qld. our instructor placed a test hive onto breaking spotted gum not far from the college. Nectar flowed heavily for a week but as he was about to move an apiary onto the flow he checked again and it had cut out completely, yielding no more.
Its timber is useful for heavy construction, poles, house building and flooring. Being rock hard, it's one of the best for tool handles eg picks and axes, which is I think its major use in Qld., the better stands being more south.
There are a few spotted gums on my walk, mostly medium sized, probably planted about the same time as my two. They must have been popular as a nursey line back in the 1980's. I enjoy seeing this tree, one of the more attractive of the eucys with it's clean mottled trunk and slightly pendulouus smaller branches and leaves.
My book says spotted gum has been grown in many overseas countries with limited success except in the Union of South Africa where it has been grown since 1910 and there are now (1975) several thousand acres established.

* Michelle, the propagator there, would have grown them from seed. I must mention it to her when I see her as she still does gardening for us a few hours here and there. She's now manager of the nursery at the helmeted honeyeater sanctuary at Yellingbo, propagating indigenous trees and shrubs for planting to help the honeyeaters increase their threatened population. She started work with us as a youngster mowing lawns for pocket money while still at school in the late seventies. After leaving school she worked at the farm as a casual for a year or so till she started a nursery apprenticeship. Ten years on the gov't closed the state schools nursery and she was retrenched, became a gardening contractor, again working at our farm.