Under a hotter Sun; The big clean up;

The bulls;

The big clean up.

The grassland around the home paddock looked messy, strewn with discarded roof iron sheets, bricks, broken tools, wooden, broken carts, rusted cars with and without wheels, many old water tanks with rust holes in them lots and lots of sherry flagons who probably kept a few of the McPhee ancestors happy. Tangled fencing material and fallen trees brought by we don't know how many previous floods ago. Peter had to call a bulldozer to make a few big holes in the ground to bury everything.

Peter had already bought a tractor, bright orange, his toy, and a slasher to cut the old grasses.
The Rep., Gary was his name, came many times until Peter had bought all the machinery he needed. He would always stay near the window, look out into the countryside and say:" Lovely view, nice cup of tea. My wife she is a funny lady, a funny lady, nice cup of tea. These sentences he repeated many times but we have never found out why his wife was a funny lady, so he drank his cups of tea!

Peter went down to the river where the grass and weeds were man high to clean up a field to make it ready to sow new grasses. The good news about floods is that they deposit silt and this makes the very sought after alluvial soils on river banks.
Peter and the tractor were hidden in the tall vegetation. From time to time when the
front wheels hit a hidden object the tractor would rear up like an angry beast! He had to drive very, very slowly not to cause an accident. One other field also along the river was already planted with corn. It looked a bit bedraggled but it would be harvested later on. The mending of fences would take a long time and contractors were already scheduled in the new year to come to dig the post holes and help in general. The wooden posts are very heavy and most of them had to be replaced. All the fences were in a sorry state.

A new stockyard had to be build for the cattle to be checked and for treatment and as well for loading and unloading. So there was very much activity going on little Gem. People from around the area liked to come and have a look what was going on. They always asked have you got money from Switzerland. They thought we had this Swiss bank account which would spew out the money when ever we needed or wanted some. This sort of arrangement would have been nice.

A part of the riverbank is badly overgrown with huge weeds and a lot of bamboo. So Peter thinks the fastest way to clean this up would be to burn it. As soon as the fire was lit, we got scared, it burnt with lightening speed and the bamboo started to explode. It sounded like a very, very noisy Chinese New Year fireworks. We tried to stem the fire with buckets of water....we got very hot, dirty and tired, until the flames were brought under control. Next time we have to be more careful.