Murder in the outback

This is the route I'm supposed to take to get to my stint on the farm in a little town we'll call Arse-end Nowhere (Arse-end, for short).



There's a reason for the giant flaming question mark on the section marked Railway and Middle of Nowhere. Let me explain.

Who goes to Arse-end Nowhere? - a musical chairs game

a. First, I called Company A, telling them I needed to get to Arse-end. An agent of the forces of darkness and stupidity spent a considerable amount of time giving me the route, which included a full one-hour walk, which elicited much anxious questioning as a vision of myself, laden like a pack mule and sporting prize-winning blisters blossomed in my mind. Said questioning revealed that the minion had no clue that I had been talking about a town, and had insidiously given me directions to a nearby suburb instead.

b. I called Company A again, hoping to make contact with someone who wasn't out to sabotage me. This time, I was told firmly that I must try Company B, which is the sister company to Company A.

c. I call Company B, who told me they don't go there. I hang up, call again, and get someone else, who told me they do go there but only on Thursdays, and maybe I should try Company C if I wanted to travel on the dates issued by my university (who obviously did not pause to consider the plight of someone with no car when posting them to a tiny farming community five hours away from the city)

d. I call Company C, who says they don’t go to Arse-end (because who the fuck does, right?), why don't I try Company D.

e. I call Company D, who irritably asks me who told me that Company D runs there. Because they most certainly don't and yet some idiot company always refers people to them. I am told to try Company B. (Again)

f. I take the path of least resistance and shoot off about five emails and three phone calls to change the dates of my stay in Arse-end to suit Company B’s schedule.

How to get there? Harder to find than Atlantis.

g. I call Company B again, and reach someone who explained to me with a spectacular lack of enthusiasm that I needed to go from the Railway to Confusion station and switch to get to Middle of Nowhere. I am given the impression that this stretch of the journey is covered by Company A, whom I don't need to buy tickets from, since they run on an EZ Link card type of system.

h. Later, I call Company B again to confirm the dates of my travel and the arrangements, and am reassured that what I think is the route is correct.

i. I buy my coach ticket for the leg of the journey marked Middle of Nowhere - Arse-end from Company B. Three weeks later, I fly home.

j. I eventually return to Australia, after a virgin flight with Quantas. The stewardesses are scary. They smile like they're thinking of eating you. LovesHerDog was home when I came in, and told me that my farmer had left a message asking me to call him back. I was due to set off on the very long trek to my farm the next day, and was supposed to arrive at noon. I tried calling, but no one picked up. I decided to confirm my itinerary before calling him again, and that was when the agents of darkness sprung their first trap.

k. I call Company B, which was closed. I missed them by five minutes, according to their recorded message. An unexplainable feeling of dread nestling in the pit of my intuitive Slinky stomach, I call Company A, which chirpily informs me that actually, my route's not correct. Apparently, the route from the Railway to Middle of Nowhere is, in fact, only partially covered by Company A, and I needed to buy a coach ticket from Company B.

l. Frantic, I call every single number on Company B's website. I cannot get through. I try buying a ticket online. I cannot, as they are selling tickets from Friday onwards only. I panic, and do a lot of math on a little piece of paper. I call the farmer 7 times, receiving no answer.

m. Eventually, I come up with this:

n. The plan is to call the office at 6:30 am, try and buy my ticket there and then, try and make my connecting trains and coaches, and arrive at noon as planned. This is assuming that the farmer will be there. Because he obviously wasn't there then, and I was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that I might arrive and there would be no one to pick me up and no way to contact him. Something might have happened.

o. I pack, dispiritedly, and set the alarm for 5:30 a.m.


And then. Today.

I wake up at the crack of dawn, finish packing, bolt down breakfast, and ran off in the gathering drizzle.

I caught my bus to the bus port in the city. From the bus, I call Company B, which is mercifully, open for business. I try and elicit more information, which is a bit like trying to kill someone with marshmallows, and discover, to my horror, that actually, I need to catch a coach from Bewilderment stop, and not the Confusion stop, and unlike the timetable on the Net, departs from the station at 8 a.m., which could potentially blow my carefully prepared timetable out of the water if anything went wrong since it ate up my allotted 30-minute safety window which I had given myself just in case. I am also told I cannot buy the tickets over the phone, but must purchase them from the Bewilderment station. This leaves me with an absolutely minuscule margin of error. I now have about as many versions of the correct route to Arse-end as I do the people I’ve spoken to from Company B. I start panicking quietly. If I miss a single connection, I will not be able to get to the farm for another week.

I get graded for this farm stay.

Barely three minutes after I hang up with Company B, the farmer calls me. And drops the bombshell. Yes, there is a problem about today. He's not in Arse-end after all. In fact, he's in the same town as I am, and won't be leaving until tomorrow, so maybe he can pick me up and we will all go to Arse-end together.

I . Am. Gobsmacked.

"I guess I'll go back home then." I say weakly. am barely able to form coherent sentences. It's not even 7 a.m.

And then, there's a sudden jolt and everything goes dark.

And the bus breaks down. On the highway. And it's still raining.

The bus driver radios in to ask if he's got authorization to open the doors and let us walk to a nearby bus terminal. I start to think that maybe the bus breaking down is a good thing, because then I don't have to go all the way into the city and then come all the way back. The bus terminal is the halfway mark between my house and the city.

As I am thinking this, the bus driver is still waiting for authorization to open the doors. And this is when one of the passengers goes berserk, and accuses the driver of holding us hostage.

I could not make this shit up even if I tried.

Eventually, the situation is defused, the driver gets authorization, the doors are opened, and Mr. Crankypants goes stomping off into the rain. The best part of all this is the driver running after him, yelling, “Hey mate, you’re going the wrong way!”

I run up to my bus stand, where I find out that the next bus which will take me home is due to arrive in (drumroll please)....one and a half hours.

I am wet, very cold, and very tired when I finally make it back home, two hours after I started out and going essentially nowhere. This is the point where I decide that I need to be somewhere safe and warm where nothing can hurt me, and accordingly, I crawl under the duvet, turn on the heater, and knock out for the next three hours.

I wake up and decide I need to venture into the world because I have no groceries whatsoever, having believed that by now, I would be on a farm with 3000 sheep and a hospitable farmer anxious to feed up a skinny Asian girl. So I take a bus to the nearby supermarket and library, where I happily immerse myself in the latest issue of Cosmo, only to find out from a friendly librarian that the local council had issued dangerous weather warnings for the next three hours because of unusually heavy winds an rain. It started pouring down, right on cue.

Sigh.

I trudged back home with the hard-won groceries, soaked to the skin and freezing. It was 3:30, and the last thing I had eaten was a bowl of muesli at 5:45 a.m., when the trek to Arse-end had first begun. I pop in A History of Violence on the DVD, cut up the veggies and think happily to myself about the upcoming warm meal I popped the gas on the stove, lit a match and..... nothing.

We had no gas.

LovesHerDog strikes again.

I eventually get my hot meal thanks to the wonders of modern technology (read: microwave). Two hours of Viggo Mortenson later, Mormons invade on the neighborhood. Like, really.

So here I sit, assaulted by idiots, the weather, religious nutters, gas companies and misinformation, waiting for my farmer to call me and tell me what the plans for tomorrow are. It's eight o'clock. I am still not confident I will hear from this farmer / go to this farm. Wish me luck.

IN THE BEGINNING

The farmers were H, and M, H’'s wife. They're both over 60, and it was an excruciating 7-hour car journey. Slinky's not a sociable kitty, and being confined in a little moving box with elderly strangers ranks pretty high up there on my list of Things Least Enjoyed.

On the weekend, I was also dragged to watch my very first hockey match, where I mistakenly believed I was watching the town's finest young men until M. said, "Oh look, that's Isabelle." Gah. At the community gathering of tea after that, I was introduced to a horde of extremely large people whose names I promptly forgot, and in the same breath, informed everyone that I didn't have a license. Sympathetic "oh"'s greeted that. Apparently, I'm not much use without one, being unable to pilot tractors and sprayers and thus was a millstone around the neck of my farming family. Meh.

"You're not really going to be real vet, are you?" one rather nice girl said doubtfully as she eyed my scrawny frame. I assured that I was, and tried not the claw her eyes out as she looked at me, unconvinced.

Earlier in the day, I wandered into the kitchen to track the source of this terrible smell I detected from my room, which is about 20 metres away from the kitchen. "What's this?" I said in a friendly manner, lifting the lid to something suspiciously cloudy. Bad idea. "Soup," came the curt response. "Yummy," I said faintly, replacing the lid and fleeing.

We had soup for dinner. We had this soup for five straight days. By Tuesday, it had congealed into a wobbly mess the color of fake tan. And there was no salt in it. They do not cook with salt.

THE FIRST WEEKDAY

Today, I was finally introduced to some hard labour, and now realize why H takes the weekend off to relax.

We all wake up at the crack of dawn, where we had oats. I've never really had an adverse reaction to oats, but that's because I turn it into the breakfast version of Disney’s Fantasia. M and H, on the other hand, cook their oats with water. No sugar. No milk. No honey. We will eat this wallpaper paste eery single day.

Then it was off to herd sheep.

Having read James Herriot devotedly for more than half my life, I finally understand his deep hatred of fences. These are not your normal fences. These are the primordial version of those fences, with great big teeth and predatory instincts. They're dinosaurs. Our fences are Pomeranians.

Opening them may necessitate subsequent corrective cosmetic surgery, because the handle, conveniently placed at jaw height, can whip around and knock your teeth out. Or break your jaw. Closing them requires an ungainly ballet of one foot braced against the bottom of the post, one hand in the middle of the post, and a lot of bhangra dance movements with your head to ensure you don’t take your eyes out with either the handle or the top portion of the post. My particular hatred is of the ones with the barbed wire running along the top. I get hooked, then flail like a dying fish until I am able to extricate my arm.

When we weren’t opening and closing fences, we were driving along veeeeerrrry slowly staring at the ground. This was, apparently important. Then I had open more fences, and made to stand in the path of oncoming traffic with a two-way radio while the sheep were herded across a road.

Then I had to act as sheepdog. "Get in there and charge them and yell. They're going the wrong bloody way!" H barked. I ducked through bush and sand dunes, ran into the open and promptly came face to face with a solid wall of about 400 sheep. For a long moment, the sheep looked at me, and I looked at the sheep. I thought, "Oh man, that is a lot of freaking sheep." Then I remembered instructions and started flailing my arms like I was being boiled alive and yelling "Buggeroff!" and the entire herd turned and stampeded. Sheep are the stupidest things on God's green earth.

After a quick lunch, it was off to the sprayer, which is this massive vehicle with wheels taller than I am. I was under the mistaken impression that we were actually going to use the sprayer, but noooo. We were going to fix the sprayer. I'll spare you the details but I basically wore a welding mask for the first time in my life, I nearly lost an eye, my poor Hollister quilted windbreaker looks like I wrapped a grease monkey in it and my cheeks are still pink from the howling wind, four hours later.

Then there was filling a 3' x 5 hole in the ground which had been dug to gain access to some underground pipes. This necessitated moving the mountain of earth which stood downhill from the hole in the ground, first sieving out all the rocks and concrete. I found a wheelbarrow and patted myself on the back. "Oh wondrous wheelbarrow, one of man's greatest inventions," I was warbling deliriously to myself in my head as I trundled it easily down the slope to my waiting mountain of dirt. I spent a good twenty minutes shoveling dirt from the ground onto my trusty wheelbarrow, remembering to test it for weight and feeling smug that I had remembered to do so.

Note to self: wheelbarrows only have perfect balance when empty. When filled with about fifteen kilos of dirt, it will gently tip over like a dying whale, creating a magnificent dirt waterfall and destroying about 20 minutes worth of backbreaking labour.

After some frantic re-shoveling, I managed to wobble the wheelbarrow upright and thought, "Right, let's get this show on the road," - and then realized that being as puny in upper body strength as I am, I couldn't get the wheelbarrow over the small ledge at the base of the slope. More frantic shoveling to create a ramp. Then the discovery that wheeling stuff up a slope is significantly harder than wheeling stuff down a slope. And then, most important discovery of all, the realization that I would have to lift the wheelbarrow into a completely vertical position to get the dirt into the hole. Taking into account my aforementioned complete lack of upper body strength. That's like asking donkeys to do calculus.

I was shoveling and filling for about an hour, by which time my arms were trembling with strain. But after all the dirt was shoveled and wheeled and dumped and raked, I still had to replace the squares of turf which had been cut and removed so the hole could be dug. Each square of turf was about a foot square. I had no idea, until now, that grass could be so heavy. Weakness of the flesh clashed with the pigheaded pride of the spirit, and they both compromised so that I knelt down and hauled on the turf squares until gravity and leverage worked their magic and it thumped into my lap, knocking me on my ass. Then I crab-walked/ shuffled/crawled to the hole, where I squeegeed the turf into place with the steel-toed boots. God bless those steel-toed boots. That took another hour. I nearly couldn't do the last turf square, but I hugged the grass to my chest and managed to stumble to the hole just in time to let it plop into place. I earned my fucking salt-free dinner that night.


A SUMMARY OF SUFFERING

I've decided that being on the farm is like the vacation equivalent of having a root canal with no Novocain. Here's what I've learned about life on this farm.

• It starts absurdly early, but they won't tell you exactly what time it starts. I was told before that breakfast was at 7, so I set my alarm for 6:30. Only to be told that the farmer had been waiting for me for 'ages' and as a result had gotten enmeshed in too many phone calls. Somehow, this is my fault.

• Every day, M told me how all of Australia's social ills are due to the Asians, Indians, Italians and Muslims (a great big non-country specific category all on their own. Apparently, migrants don't understand the Great Australian Way of helping one another. They’re also terrible for society’s cohesion because they refuse to integrate with the nice Aussies (who are just waiting to accept them with open arms, is the implication) It is becoming very, very difficult to not say something rude.

• They chucked me in the middle of town 4 and a half hours before my coach was due to arrive. The town is four buildings, I shit you not.

• On one extremely memorable occaision, I was hiding in the bushes while it rained, trying to shoo sheep by hissing "Pssss!" with hushed but increasing urgency while they stared in amazement at the talking bush.

• Sheep are extraordinarily stupid. Like, really, really, really stupid. I am never going to feel bad about eating sheep again. I used to herd them, muttering, "Move or you're mutton."

• M wouldn't stop telling my how brilliant the last girl was, because she could drive a tractor. Oh, and they weren't actually expecting to take in anyone else, but my uni suddenly assigned them with me. Oh, please, stop, I can't stand any more warm and fuzzy feelings. I

• M also sang praises of how the last girl went to play golf with them. Excuse me for leaving my 9-iron at home.

• They knew the last girl's mother. Figures.

• I got yelled at and sworn at every single fucking day I was there. But that's okay, because everyone and everything, from the dogs to his wife, to the farm machinery, to the weather, to the soil, to his boots, to the sheep was sworn at by H.

• I felt like I was judged and being found wanting, and was feeling pretty bad about it. Until I saw H kick his dog in the ribs for something wrong it had done hours ago when it went up to him for a pat. I stopped feeling lacking in a hell of a hurry after that.

• M tells me that one time, her son-in-law was very upset because he thought he nearly ran over their dog. She said she laughed at told him that it was a pity that he hadn’t actually done so. She laughed when she told me this story. I didn't.

• They hate the dog because it's useless at herding sheep. I'm pretty useless too, on account of my lack of a license. Guess that puts me in the same category as the dog. Possibly lower, since they actually have to feed me. Not enough though. I had tor esort of stealing biscuits on account og gnawing hunger.

• I'm too fucking cynical to feel good about doing menial labour for someone else. I'm not incapable of roughing it out, but that's on my own terms. Being told to clean out a dunny which hasn’t been cleaned since the last World War, with someone’s daggy old underpants and a bucket of antiseptic, is not a learning experience. That's a violation of the Geneva Convention.

• I like shearers. One of them asked me sympathetically how long I had been working for H. When I told him I was a student here for work experience, he laughed and said, "You picked the wrong farm, mate. H moans too much." Australians have a veritable gift for understatement. Substitute 'moans too much' for 'is a bad-tempered motherfucker' and you're closer to the truth.
• M once was helping H move sheep from yard to yard, and slipped on a root and fell flat on her back, and got the wind knocked out of her. H turned around, saw her lying in the mud, and started yelling, "Why the bloody hell are you lying on the bloody ground for! Get the hell up and help me with these bloody sheep!" Can you feel the love.

• We drafted lambs from ewes one evening after along day. It was wet, raining and freezing. I am covered in mud, blood, wool and rain. Half an hour later, while we’re doing somethng else, the lambs break out. Automatically assuming it was because I had not latched a gate properly, he screamed at the top of his lungs, "YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH FUCKING DAMAGE!" when I ran forward to help. Naturally, it was not my gate that had given way. It was his. No, I did not get an apology.

• There are many sharp implements on a farm. Every time I passed one, I harboured fantasies of sinking one in H's back. Visions of blood gouting like claret-coloured fountains got me through each day.

• The last day was the final straw. I got yelled at for something which I was not at fault for, lost it royally and ended up in a screaming match while 300 sheep looked on. He was nice to me after that. This is why I hate people.

It's good to be back.