Life at wooleen Pt 2

From then on, my diary entries get less as we settled down to everyday life on the station, but I'll fill you in on the more interesting highlights...

We went for more sunset trips to lots of lovely spots, including one place that we had to hike to. When we got there, it was a massive expanse of White and purple wildflowers. Really pretty.

I went to see a bowerbirds bower. Male Bowerbirds collect things and take them back to their bower to impress the females. They nest elsewhere, the bower is just a showroom. There are several discarded piles of stuff around that the bird will take in and out, depending on his mood. Bowerbirds from different parts of Australia collect different colours, the one up in northern WA collect blue things, the ones in the murchison collect green and White objects. The prize part of the bower is a sort of U-shaped hallway made from twigs with his prize collection in the middle. I went back there several times and he keeps busy, changing his favourite objects around on a regular basis. There's apparently been a bower in that spot for the past 20 years.

I learnt how to ride a motorbike! Great fun and I was surprised how quickly I got the hang of it!

One of the guys from Durham left and we got a new guy in for a month or so. He was an aussie guy called Smitho (nickname as his surnames smith) and he had a year old puppy with him called 'Mad Dog' who's lovely. He's a blue healer - another Aussie breed I've never come across before. It was nice to have a new person in the group. He was with us for a month and then was an outdoor education leader for another group of school girls who came onto wooleen at the end of September.

Smitho was into brewing beer so I persuaded him he wanted to make a wooleen batch... It didn't take much persuading so we set about making beer. It was great fun and it's really easy to do! He had a can of wort with him (the gloopy syrupy stuff you need) which was good, then we just needed to add sugar, yeast and 23 litres of water and the brewing began :)

We left it brewing for a week, had a quick sample... Just to check it was going ok... And bottled it all. Fortunately there's a tip near the homestead where all the rubbish gets put. Most of it's burnt away, but there's a hood pile of old beer bottles there, which is what we needed. We had to add a bit more sugar to make it fizzy, then we capped them all (smitho had a capping machine with him too - very handy). Then they were left for another 2 weeks to carbonate. A few more were sampled during this time again... Purely for research and quality control purposes if course :)

• I tried my hand at skinning a kangaroo
• we had kangaroo tail stew for dinner one night which was really delicious!
• I rescued a scorpion from the sink of one of the guesthouses. I though he had drowned by he came round again when I popped him outside. I put him to dry out in the sun... I checked on him about 15 minutes later and there was a lizard standing very close to where I put the scorpion... I hope he wasnt eaten
• I had a few guitar lessons
• Saw lots more sunsets, including one on the roof of the homestead which was fun :)
• I did the Wooleen walk trail with Poppy and Mad Dog
• We got bogged whilst delivering sandwiches to the musteres out on their motorbikes

At the start of September, we mustered the cattle on the station. There were about 400 cows and they all needed to be removed from the station over the summer. Unfortunately I couldn't help in the muster, but I saw them coming into the cattle yards which was cool. They mustered the cows using 6 motorbikes and a plane to spot where they were as it's such a massive area of land to cover. They got 300 cows the first try and about 75 on the second muster a few weeks later. In the second muster we kept a steer (a bull who's had his balls chopped off - they do this so they put more energy into getting big and fat rather than mating) back to kill for ourselves. I watched the kill - it was very interesting to see. He was gutted in a field and then carried on a tractor to the meat house to be skinned and quartered. And after the meat had hung for a week or two and we cut it into steaks and mincemeat, the steaks we had on the first night were fantastic!

A few weeks before I left, a new girl came to help out as we were really busy with bookings. She was a really fun girl called Sara who was from Sweden. It was her birthday a few days after she arrived so we baked her a birthday cake and went to a lovely pool called Yandi for sunset.

It was fun in the cottage with me, smitho and Sara, one night we played a new game called 'goon of fortune'. This requires a box of goon (cheap boxed wine) and a washing line that spins around. The aim of the game is to peg the bag of goon to the washing line, stand round it at regular intervals and spin the line. Whoever it lands nearest to has to drink from the bag - it was brilliant fun!!

Soon after that, smitho left to go and be an outdoor education teacher for the 115 15 year old school girls that came up from Perth for their camping trip so our little group was down to 4 again. We baked lots of cookies and cakes and were hoping to go camping as the season was starting to quieten down, but then we had some last minute bookings so we couldn't, which was a shame, I was looking forward to sleeping under the stars and cooking on a camp oven!

At my last evening at wooleen, we had a bit of a party. Not because I was leaving, but because the school girls had left that morning and all of the outdoor education staff were still here so we had a BBQ and lots of booze. Dave made a punch. It was pretty alcoholic and I was drinking it like water so I got pretty drunk pretty quickly - bad lorna. I was passed out in bed by 8pm which was pretty pathetic and reminiscent of my 6th form days!!

The next day was the start of the road trip West so I'll put about that in a different post...