Cows, Guns and Garlic

A Tale from Australia's Wild South

 

 

There is another Australia.  Far beyond our teeming cities with their glittering skyscrapers, mean streets and seagull eviscerating falcons.  Look to the south stranger, where the horizon beckons and the land blurs so much it could almost be the sea.  Actually, that is the sea so don't go walking there unless you plan to hop from drilling rig to drilling rig.

 

Away from the cities, across the water you will find Tasmania, Australia's southern frontier.  Tasmania; where the forests still ring to the sound of the woodsman's axe, bouncing off the head of a persistent environmentalist who in response has poured sugar into the guys petrol tank.  A tough place, a rugged place where spare, rawboned individuals with faces beaten by experience lean against fences and gaze into the middle distance while waiting for their welfare cheques and methadone doses.  It's a place of startling natural beauty despite the best efforts of the inhabitants.  Its a place where civilisation has trodden but lightly (or not at all according to some), a place where you can go to get away from it all (sealed roads, modern dentistry, jobs) and get in touch with how people used to live.  You know, before we decided "sod this, I'm moving to the city".  Down here a man can be a man or at least a part time garlic farmer.

 

Like many ignorant city dwellers I have little idea of where my food comes from.  If pressed I wave my hand in the general direction of that part of Australia not covered in concrete and asphalt.  I do realise that farms grow wheat and cattle (although I've no idea how you plant the latter) but I find it difficult to grasp the concept of someone actually farming something as small as garlic.  It would be like herding mice.  But down in Tasmania where man can still roam free (as long as he doesn't mind dying of exposure) a person can strike out on his own, plant garlic and lovingly tend them when he gets home from the office.  One of my colleagues is married to such a man.

 

 

Using only weekends and time off work this man hacked out a few hectares from the unforgiving existing farmland and planted garlic.  Now, apparently, it is sprouting.  Come Christmas time it will be ready to harvest in keeping with the ancient natural rhythm which demands that the work be done at a time when the kids are off school.  But before that happy day a thousand challenges have to be met and overcome, heartbreaks endured and garlic rustlers defeated.  According to my colleague last weekend's challenge was a mad cow.  By mad I don't mean "unsafe to eat" I just mean mighty pissed off.  The neighbouring farm (owned, not coincidentally, by my colleague's father in law) has a small herd of cattle (due in the fullness of time to become a large pile of beef).  Possibly to give them a change of scenery it was decided to move them from one field to another.  This relocation involved persuading them to cross a road.  Most of them did this docilely enough, probably just glad to undertake a journey that didn't end in them getting eaten, but for one cow it was the final straw.

 

There's always one isn't there?  This cow looked at the road and decided she was having none of it.  With fire in her eyes and her cowbell jangling defiance she stood her ground and prepared to fight to the death.  I'm not sure what happened next as I stopped listening but I'm pretty sure it involved guns, cattleprods, chainsaws, flamethrowers and children hiding under their beds weeping in fear.  I do know my colleague spent a good proportion of her weekend in the road stopping traffic before it was stopped by something more terminal like seven hundred kilograms of cow.  While she was engaged in traffic control a wild eyed cow was thundering back and forth damaging fences while her husband clung desperately to its tail and tried to steer it away from the garlic.  At last report the garlic was safe but the cow was still on the wrong side of the road so they're calling it a nil all draw.

 

So remember gentle reader, when you eat your pizza with extra garlic, to pause for a moment and give thanks to the rugged outdoors on weekends at any rate men down in the tames of Tasmania whose struggles against the odds can be thanked for your flatulence and bad breath.