Lots of new friends at "Uamby"

UAMBY NEWS 16 October 2007 BBQ for our "Family"

Lynette from Grays Point summed up the reaction of our guests who came to Uamby for a BBQ on 13th October: "Alana and I had the most wonderful afternoon. We discussed the day's event all the way home. Thank you so much for inviting us to join your family. My husband now wishes he had gone along with us. It probably meant more to us than it did to you but it showed us the face and generosity of country people. We also enjoyed the opportunity to meet some of the other people who also really care about our farm friends and our photos turned out so well."

It meant as much to us if not more than it meant to you, Lynette. You and our wonderful 'friends of Uamby' saved our life here on Uamby and make it possible to keep going towards our vision of a place we can grow superfine wool, native grasses, and relationships with lovely people like you.

We had a spit roast pork/beef/chicken lunch (no lamb!) cooked by Col the Shearer. Sitting under the trees, we were spared the attention of the flies because of a slight breeze. It was perfect.

There were two main events of the day: a visit to the new lambs before lunch and a shearing exhibition afterwards. The ewes and lambs we have been handfeeding are fairly tame and came rushing down to greet the rather large audience. Then, just as fast, they turned around and ran back up to shelter under the trees. We laid out some grain and lupins, so a few of the braver ones came down. (They were the ewes without lambs, at first. Later ewes with lambs ventured down.)


There were many day-old lambs and just borns. Daniel - like the Pied Piper - led the children around behind the camp and get close to the new lambs. The enthusiasts (Miro and Tony) crept up alongside the feeding ewes to get better photos. The sheep were camping in the shade during the heat and were reluctant to leave their lambs. Even so, their taste for oats overcame their reluctance.

Coming back from the lambing fields, we had a tray load of sheep lovers. Others chose to walk the short distance. It was a fantastic day to be outdoors.

Later, in the shearing shed, Dan gave a masterful exhibition of shearing while explaining the process and the danger points. The display took 15 minutes and the ewe (who would, normally be held there for only 3 minutes) was very patient. Col also shore a sheep (5 who had escaped shearing last August were cut out from the lambing ewe flock.) He displayed how to pick up the fleece and throw it onto the 'skirting' table where all the dark discoloured bits are pulled off.

Carson volunteered to 'throw" the fleece and Col gave her a lesson, and she threw it like a real bush rousabout. Not an easy task.

Young ones got a hands-on feel for the wonderful world of wool.


Miro and Judy Cooper - our Kiwi mates - have taken home some Uamby quartz to place in their garden, as a connection device.


UAMBY NEWS 12 October 2007

The hot summer wind came blasting across the western horizon, shrivelling up the cape weed and drying off the lush green. The temperatures hit the 30s on some days, boding ill for Summer. We will have to hand feed or sell off the flock again. So we are gearing up - designing t-shirts and producing a DVD of shearing to add to our offering of adoptions of the new lambs. Here is a range of T-shirt images:





The new lambs are arriving in great numbers - our best lambing yet. Few losses because our ewes are so fit - well-fed, thanks to you and everyone else who sponsored them. I followed them up a rocky section of the hill paddock, as they moved to high ground to make camp for the night.


We have about 50 ewes lambing in a paddock close by and we hand feed them to keep them tame and comfortable with out presence. The other ewes are quite skittish and we stay away from them during lambing.

Meanwhile we are getting ready for the ADOPTASHEEP BBQ this weekend - Saturday 12.30pm at Uamby. Gardens have to be weeded, lawns mowed. Daniel and Xavier fixed one of our water tanks on which we rely for water to the house.


Last weekend we hosted "Mr Sustainable Housing" Michael Mobbs and Helena and Wendy and Julian, his son, and introduced them to "Carbon Farming" pioneer Col Sies. Michael is a famous designer of low energy/high efficiency dwellings and commercial buildings - fit for the era of Climate Change.


We also had a visit from Ciaran and Lenka, from Balmain, who are adopters. They were able to photograph the new lambs.

Spring sprong sprung sprang ...

Spring is belting out its overture and the soil is resounding to the rhythm of life. While the APEC circus is in Sydney and the city of my birth has been 'locked down' by the trappings of an Orwellian police state - steel barricades in the streets and police snipers on the rooftops and demonstrations banned (this must make the Communist Chinese leaders feel at home)... out here at Uamby the real stuff of life is taking place.
DOUBLE JONQUILL
Flowers are growing, birds are building nests, insects are flying, Mother Earth is ignoring these "powerful men" having their talkfest in a faraway city. The paddocks are covered with green stuff - not all of it, not half of it edible. Much of it is capeweed - commonly called "daisies". It is a broadleaf plant, not very digestable. Pretty, though. It is a wonderful sight to wake up to a paddock sprinkled with daisies.
DAISY

There are giant thistles everywhere, not very tasty but important in the 'succession' between bare earth and native pastures. They cover the ground, encourage microbes to colonise the soil and make organic matter by living and dying. These thistles stablise the surface of the ground and protect it from erosion.
Former owner of Uamby Mary Bird planted so many bulbs. The pop up through the lawn. Mary's garden was legendary. Her son David tells me that it took 2 tanks of water a week (pumped from the river) to keep it looking beautiful. Marriage parties held their photo sessions in Mary's garden.
JONQUILLA

These 'bells' emerged in the garden for the first time this season. The flowers here at Uamby are nothing compared to the masses of wattle in the countryside. What a gardener God is!
BELLS

The birds are flocking in vast numbers. Galahs and cockatoos have such harsh voices. They stretch their vowels like true Aussies. Perhaps that's where our accent came from. I crept up to get a good shot of them bursting into the sky. But the shot didn't work. (My little Canon Ixus400 is not up to it. So I have a new camera. A Panasonic DMC FZ50 with x12 zoom and image stabilisation - which means I don't have to creep up so close and my shakey hands will be compensated for by the camera.)
GALAH FLOCK

We have a resident family of swallows, who we have tried to evict several times because they build mud nests in every crevice. They fly around the back verandar, depositing dung on the windowsills and walls. It's like Painting the Harbour Bridge - the cleaning job never stops. Occasionally one will find their way inside, flies around 'painting the walls' and has to be captured and evicted.

SWALLOW INSIDE
They are "Welcome Swallows", so I guess we shouldn't be kicking them out. But they have 2 broods of young each year. They breed like.... can't say "Catholics" anymore, expecially when I'm a Catholic.
SWALLOW ON LIGHT
I will be using my new camera to get some beautiful shots of the new lambs. You see, we can't go too close to the new mothers. They can easily get spooked and abandon their lambs. Itb is a sensitive time. So I can't rush around. It takes a lot of patience to sit still while the flock slowly grazes up the hill towards you, hoping they'll keep coming even after they have seen you. Bruce Christie from the Catchment Management Authority also teaches Stress-Free Stock Handling (which training Louisa and Daniel have done) told me never to circle around sheep because that is the action of a predator. Instead you walk in straight lines and invade their personal space by small increments.
LAMBS AND EWE
This little fellow is a good example of how a blundering photographer can endanger lambs. He/she was just born and I moved into the area without noticing until I had practically stepped on it. It's mother had moved off with the flock. She camed back and the little one got up and ran off with her.
RECENTLY BORN LAMB:

The whole countryside around Goolma is dotted with new lambs. It is a carnival of woolly wonders. Soon they will form little gangs and race madly together across the paddocks, leaping for joy. The joy of being alive. They are the spirit of Spring.
NEW BABY LAMB


Finally, meet Joe. The Father of both Ravi and Kodie. He's Col's working dog. He is normally muzzled. (Bites sheep.) He's an intelligent dog, but he can sometimes appear to be hard of hearing. Ravi is the Brad Pitt of kelpies and Kodie is the Big Bear (his Mother's name is Bear).
THIS IS JOE.

Kodie is our new Kelpie - didn't need her but Daniel came home with her after a night drinking around a campfire with Col. Many truths were told that night. Kodie is a willing worker - loves chasing after sheep. Still, as a puppy, she is stealing our shoes from the back door and hiding them. The Joy of Childhood. Life. Spring.
KODIE

A Double Header

This is Chapter 2 of a long catchup blog.

Louisa's brother Chris and his wife Kerry (our photographer) came up for the first 4 days of shearing to shoot a DVD of shearing... Here they are shooting a few seconds of footage in the shed the night before it all began. (Col can be seen ducking out of the way.)


This is the first wool ever sent to market under the label Carbon Credited. We are launching this brand to signify that we have entered into a program to reduce our emissions and to sequester carbon by our land management techniques. We used an old Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) calculator to discover what out emissions are: mainly methane from the sheeps' rumens. And we have applied to join the AGO's Greenhouse Challenge to join more than 700 other Australian companies who have embarked on the journey towards "neutral".



This is a photo of Brodie taken by Xavier. He borrows the camera and I find photos of the floor and the walls and people without heads... Such joyfull photos. I should do an album for him.



Like this shot of the window. Nothing less that capturing the artistic beauty of the mundane.


Spring means jonquills (spelling?) popping up around the garden. Mary Bird, who lived here for many years, had the most spectacular garden. And we have the remnants of it. We'd love to have the time to recreate it.x


No it's not a new dance. Louisa is demonstrating to the film crew and director of our shearing at Uamby DVD what will happen once the day starts and the wool starts flying. (She'll kill me for this. But I've got some other photos I could have used.) Daniel has a new dog - Kodie. I'll photograph her tomorrow.

Spring means shearing

Here's the littlest Uambyite Brodie with his Mum Rachael, my daughter. Brodie started crawling a few weeks ago, and has discovered the ground, dirt, stones, dogs that lick his face.
He had a 'coming out". Like the Balinese who wont let a child touch the ground until it is a full 12 months old. Well Brodie is nine months - close enough. He took to the ground like a puppy dog.





This curious little ewe lamb wandered over to aks me if I had any more hay after we had fed out to welcome the lambs to "Shearing 2007" - their first experience of getting their woollen jackets off. The chilly winds will be gone by tomorrow when they start losing their pure new wool underwear.



Xavier just loves tractors. He won't be hard to recruit as free labour in a few years... He and his mom and little brother Brodie are up from Sydney for 10 days to help with shearing. It was a brave call by Louisa to have them up during shearing, because the stress of shearing is added to by the stress of having an active 5 year old (X-man) who wants his Nonnie's attention all the time. But he was a good boy and amused himself playing outside the shearing shed.



Here are some of the rams looking longingly towards the ewes who are by now heartily sick of them, with the first lambs already having arrived. The rest look ready to lamb.


Father John Frawley is our Parish Priest. We celebrated his 25 years as a priest last Sunday with an "RSL" meal at the RSL. John was made a Monsenior (spelling looks wrong) by the Pope recently for his long and distinguished service. He became a priest after a long time as a Christian Brother, the teaching order established by Irish businessman Edmund Rice. I was taught by the Brothers and they were not ones to spare the rod (or the strap). I got my share of "Six of the best" - which, in Tamworth on a cold winter's morning, could make your hands throb for hours. That was then. This is now. John Frawley is the best churchman I have known in my sporadic relationship with the Church. He works hard each week on his homily (sermon) which he delivers to on average 15 people at Goolma. He comes out to us from Gulgong where the parish is a difficult one for a man of John's age. I'll tell you why later.










Louisa and Lucy the cross kelpie/collie that we bred have become a good team. Lucy would have got a bullet on most other places. But this dysfunctional dog is finally starting to understand. She's got a criminal mindset. Always leading the other dogs astray.







After a hard day's shearing - Louisa is wool classing - we have a couple of drinks with the crew. He we see Col and Louisa chilling out. Col is a brilliant giant of a man. I should be his PR agent.



Len Cooney is roustabouting for us. Daniel is working outside the shed, mustering and feeding out. Len gave me the words to a song - well the first verse - and said 'you can finish it...' What?

Those black caterpillars are back

We are having our annual emergence of Pasture Day Moth caterpillar. They come up from under the soil and head off into the pasture to eat broadleaf plants. (Such as capeweed, sometimes called daisies.) We get a lot of these caterpillars emerging from the soil around the hay shed.
WA Agriculture tells us the caterpillar is the lava of the moth and is called Apina callisto. "The caterpillar is a visually striking insect especially when fully grown to 60 mm long. It is dark brown to black with two yellow spots near the posterior end. Large numbers of these caterpillars may be seen on the surface of pasture where they remain and feed until fully grown."
The moth is brown with yellow markings on the wings and orange rings around the body. "Eggs are laid in pasture and hatch at about the onset of rains. When the larvae are fully grown they may be seen burrowing in the soil before becoming pupae," says WA Agriculture. They aren't a real pest. They need autumn rains to emerge and they only become a problem in very bad years.So now we know... Why are they important? Because they are part of the biodiversity - the network of organisms that support each other in ways we don't understand but if we deny or disrupt it, we play dice with the force of nature.

Red Rumped Parrots, our constant companions

We have large flocks of red-rumped parrots who live in the trees and among the grasses. They flock like budgerigars, but not in the same numbers. They also live on grass seeds that grow in abundance in native pastures. If your pastures are all introduced species, you are not being hospitable towards the local wildlife.
They were perching in the tree outside my window this morning, most of the time with their heads tucked under against the wind. Then, when the sun comes out, they flit to the ground to feed on seed.
My poor little Canon Digital IXUS400 does a good job considering it has a very inaccurate x11 digital telescopic facility which my shaky hands renders blurry, and a slightly more accurate physical x3 telescopic capacity. Otherwise you have got to be like an Indian scout, creeping up on the wildlife to get within range. They have promised me a real telescopic lens, but I don't believe the finances will bear the pressure.

When the ibis return

We have a flock of Straw-Necked Ibis visiting the farm in the aftermath of the soaking rains. They are feeding on the caterpillars and other crawling bugs emerging from the soil. This is a good example of how increasing soil carbon in the humus zone promoted biodiversity. The food chain begins in the humus line. Microbes feed bugs. Bugs feed birds. Birds feed... etc.

They have visited before, about the same time of year. They stay for a week or so, then go off elsewhere. They are commonly found across all AUstralia, according to SLater's Field Guide to Australian Birds. My little Canon Digital Camera isn't up to wildlife photography. But I caught a large wallaby watching the Ibis. It was raining at the time.


Louisa saw this post and comments: "You could have also explained that messy is the new neat, and all those standing dry grasses are habitat for lots of little 'things' and have given that kangaroo enough confidence to come down and be there."

Jessica to be married to Fred

Louisa and I were driving back from addressing the Waste Management Association/Compost Australia in Canberra last week when Jessica called us from the business class section of a Qantas jet about to take off for Paris to tell us Fred Schebesta (her boyfriend) proposed to her and she accepted! Fred was taking her to Paris for her birthday.

Fred is ceo of Freestyle Media, 26 years old (J. is 31), has just sold his first business. He is an Internet guru and Young Direct Marketer of the Year. (I was a judge.) We have known him for 4 years.They met at a young entrepreneurs networking function that Jess ran. Fred shared office space with Louisa and I for several years. Fred became a family friend and a mate of mine long before Jess decided he was the one.
It stunned us when she announced that they were 'going out together', then they moved in together... It has all happened fast. Jess just bought out her partner in her training business.

(Jessica when she appeared in BRW Magazine last year)







(Fred clearing the vegetation from the cemetery in 2005. He has been a frequent guest at "Uamby".)