the…continuations | Memoir and reflection, history and culture. Scroll down for the first post. Best read in order. Please follo
Description: Memoir and reflection, history and culture. Scroll down for the first post. Best read in order. Please follow or share if you like it.
Bore-pulling camps must dream of beeps. On the Barkly Tablelands, on the grasslands, there are two sources of water, one from above, one from below. Water is everything. The more water, the more cattle. The rain came, and the Rankin River flowed, and every dip and fold of the landscape became a water source. The cattle were hard to muster, not just because of the mud, but because they were spread out, and had no need of the permanent water sources. But soon the puddles dried up, the river stopped flowing, b
Tripods could be discerned through the heat- and dust-haze only indistinctly at first, like Omar Sharif riding his camel to the well through mirage. Often you weren’t clear if you were seeing it or not, let alone how far away it might have been. In the ‘zuki, I could watch them clarify as I approached, the resolution marking the passing of time and distance. When the season got hot, and the camp was ‘shiftin’ cattle’, moving them from boggy, dried-up waterholes to permanent water at a bore, the tripod was t
Bos taurus indicus cattle walk better, but they’re wilder, you lose bos taurus cattle to heat, and bos indicus to the scrub. Sometimes the small, red shorthorns ( bos taurus ) at Soudan walked alright, especially if the wind was blowing the right way and they could smell water ahead. The time of day made a big difference. Only a few times did I see ‘the cattle slowly stringing’. Brahmans ( bos indicus ), maybe, not shorthorns.
the…continuations | Memoir and reflection, history and culture. Scroll down for the first post. Best read in order. Please follo