Dungay Creek, AUS (pt 1)

Day 1. We have arrived at our HelpX hosts’ home on Dungay Creek Road, just outside of the town of Murwillumbah. Unfortunately the 17 hour overnight commute from Newcastle to Murwillumbah did not allow us to sleep. We were kind of excited getting onto the CountryLink, since we read that it had a lunch car, we were able to check our baggage in (just like an airline flight), it had footrests and reclining chairs. However, what the brochure didn’t tell us was that you may share a car with an older gentleman who was coughing so loudly that you thought it was contagious and fatal. The brochure also didn’t tell you that all throughout the night as we stopped at various stations, a man with a bright flashlight would be walking through the car waking the passengers up who are required to get off at that station (but inevitably waking everyone else up as well). We’re entertaining the idea of using a sleeper berth if we’re planning on taking the CountryLink from Brisbane back to Sydney. Anyways, we arrived, nevertheless in one piece, and met Phil at the bus station. He took us about town so that we can buy ourselves work gloves, which I already am eternally grateful that I have. He then drove us up to the farm.

The farm landscape here is very different than what we’d expect back home. It looks like a tropical rainforest. The private room that we’re staying in has a tree trunk in the middle of the room and a police call box (like a telephone booth) for an entrance.  The room is a TARDIS (according to Phil), and as such is deceiving, because from the outside, you don’t realize that the call box opens up into a fairly large room, with a TV, bed, couch, sink, bookshelf and a place to hang our clothes. The entire property is reflected of our hosts Phil & Lindy Thomas’ personalities, it’s extremely beautiful.

Along with Phil & Lindy, we met their youngest son, Zak, their youngest daughter, Alice, their other son Max and their dog Subie (pronounced SUE-bee and short for Subaru) who all live on the property. They also have other children that have since moved out of the house. So, from oldest to youngest we have: Ben, James, Melanie, Max, Alice and Zak. We’ve only met Zak,  Alice, James and his girlfriend Amber, but Lindy says that Melanie and Max might be around tomorrow.

Today, we had a spot of tea (using lemon-tasting leaves taken from a tree outside) and toast. We then immediately got straight to work (a late start of 10am, since we arrived not so early this morning) papering and mulching new banana trees, weeding existing plants and pouring mulch in an area close to the beehives. This morning task definitely made us break a sweat bead or seven, but it felt good to get the blood flowing again. We also collected the eggs from the chickens, of which there are numerous varieties, each serving a different purpose. We then broke for lunch and snacked on homemade pizza and custard bread. Phil then set us off to pick the persimmon fruits and salvage the ones that had not been destroyed by the birds or fruit flies. After that, we both cleaned out the Feed Store, Dan wiped down the fridges and we moved the feed (bags of old bread from the town bakery) into their new homes. I swept up the floor to get the dirt, feed and ants out. Afterwards, we helped Phil dig out a few holes for a new gate and shed – which I’m sure we’ll continue with the project tomorrow (and possibly the rest of our stay here). We took a quick drive to a nearby school to explore while Phil & Lindy voted, since there’s currently a state election. We also picked Zak up from a birthday party and headed back to the farm. Dan & I then helped prepare dinner. It was kind of cool since we were Zak’s sous chefs. He made Bolognese Spaghetti, so we chopped up fresh bok choy, lettuce, squash, string beans, carrots, radishes, oregano, basil, lentil-like beans, from what they call snake beans, onions and garlic – and of course, all these items Lindy had picked out the garden just before we started cooking. Zak’s spaghetti turned out really good and we enjoyed dinner around the outside patio table under tiki and citronella candle light. It was quite a full day and we’re exhausted, so are planning to sleep at a civilized time. We are expected to start working around 8am each morning, so we have no regrets in getting to bed by 9pm.

Day 2. We had a thorough sleep, following our long prior day, and woke up around eight o’clock. Our hosts were already awake, and chatting with their daughters Melanie and Alice, who had arrived during the night. We got started straight away, and headed out to an overgrown patch of trees situated between two cow pastures. The trees are young, and still competing with many large weeds which the cows are kept, by electric fences, from trimming. Our job was to weed out the weeds, lay newspaper, and cover it with mulch, much like our mulching yesterday, though this region was much more overgrown. Phil used a bushwacker to knock down an area of larger grasses and weeds, then we followed. It was hard work, with lots of bending and lifting, but quite satisfying, since there is an obvious visual result, which looks quite attractive. We spent the morning on this task, until the heat came on strongly enough to motivate us to take a shady job. This next job was cleaning out the persimmon bags, which had been removed from the fruit during picking. It was a nice and easy one, since we did in the shade of the veranda, sitting on lawn chairs and chatting with Lindy, who was inside in the kitchen getting lunch ready.

Our lunch was a vegetable soup, which had been prepared for last night’s dinner, but not eaten. We had the whole family for lunch, so our table held 11 people; 8 family members, one girlfriend, and the two of us.

We had seen a bridge which had a broken board, and which was located in a nice shady spot under some trees near the pig pens, and had thought that fixing the bridge would make a good task for doing when it was quite warm out. We had Phil hook us up with the right tools, and got to it. Then we collected the eggs, and Dan helped Zak sort some tools while I watered the chickens & rabbits. Our next big job was more weeding, this time in the vegetable garden. Once we had filled a bunch of pails with the weeds we took them out to the pigs, along with their usual dinner of bread and recycled cooking oil. Next, we were to spray down the cows with an anti-fly solution, during which Dan was stung by a bee. An authentic piece of farm work that came up around this time was tagging the youngest calf, for which we had to separate the calf from its mother and the other cows. We ran around the fields trying to herd the calf, but she was pretty tricky, so we ended up luring her in with her mother, then separating them once they had been isolated from the rest of the herd. She didn’t struggle much once we had her pinned, but it cannot have been very comfortable.

Our work-day complete, we cleaned up and relaxed for a little while, reading magazines and chatting with the family while dinner was prepared. We ate a filling quiche, with baked pumpkin, baked potatoes, and some sort of cheese sauce with veggies in it. It was a very nice dinner, with a desert of fresh date scones, all of which were prepared by Alice, who is the main cook for the family.

Day 3.  We woke up this morning, after a very satisfying sleep, to the sound of rain.   It was also Dan’s birthday, which I somehow thought it was the 27th, but not until Lindy had mentioned that two of the chicks hatched a day late and it was the 28th, did I sheepishly greet my husband happy birthday.  In my defense it was still the 27th in Canada. 😉 Rain doesn’t mean “no work”, but rather that the scope of work changes from a focus on farm projects to farmhouse projects. We still don’t know if this would be good news, or BAD news though, since the rain let up by breakfast time, so it was back to the same drill as yesterday. Brief coverage of our work duties: we continued papering and mulching on the terraces and in the trees, weeded in the garden, dug holes for shed posts, took a break for lunch (sandwiches made with veggies from the garden), dug more holes, fed the pigs, mixed and poured concrete into the previously dug shed post holes, then collected the eggs. This made for a pretty full day, and we had completed our obliged five hours of labour, despite being only two-thirty.

Phil and his daughter, Alice had errands to run in town, and offered to take us in and drop us off for a self-directed tour. We took them up on this, and spent an hour and a half or so checking out the main strip in Murwillumbah.    Probably the highlight for Dan was that we got to ride in Phil’s favorite car, the Morris Minor.  Dan went on and on (and on) about how cool the car’s wipers were, since they were tiny enough to squeegee your eyeglasses.  Him and Phil got on a bit of a conversation about how economical the car was, how much the tires cost, what the displacement was – you know, boys stuff.  🙂  To celebrate Dan’s birthday we shared lime cheesecake and a morrocan orange and almond cake. I also had an rasberry and cocconut frappe, while Dan had a Crown Lager beer – the most local suds available. We browsed around the shops, checking out the shops, a second-hand book store and the supermarket – to get an idea of what would be available to make for the dinner that we planned to make for our hosts.

Upon our return home we pretty much just relaxed while dinner was prepared. The highlight for me was to take two of the newly hatched baby chicks from the incubator and to put them with the other chicks outside in the chicken coop.

We then celebrated Dan’s birthday by enjoying some “Thomas Family” vintage Semillon wine as. Dinner was a sausage stew served over mashed potatoes, and followed by more samples of fortified strawberry wine. Another success.

Day 4. We spend most of today gardening and tending to the desperate weeding that needed to be done on the terraces so that we could plant our pineapples.  This task took us all morning – and to the delight of the cows, we were chucking armfuls of weed every 10 minutes.  Of course, our arms now have ‘battle scars’ from the weeding, as some of the grass (in particular the leaves from the more matured pineapple plants) are sharp and pointy.  But, we managed to get the job done without (much) blood spilled and thought we  should pat ourselves on the back for how good it looked after. 🙂

After lunch, we picked some of the fallen plums for the pigs, fed the pigs (and at the same time I checked on our concreting job we did yesterday) and then ended the day in the vegetable garden.  We planted regular garlic, HUGE Russian garlic (like the size of Mom K’s), lettuce, cabbage, carrots and peas.  Before heading back to the house we did the daily chore of checking on the chickens and picking up any eggs that may have been laid between the morning and the afternoon.  We’re now relaxing outside in the huge patio area space while Alice is putting together some dinner for everyone.

Now that we’re nearly halfway through our work term, it’s safe to say that this farm is a good place for us to learn new skills and keep busy!  Further to that, my aversion to insects and creepy crawlies are actually starting to diminish.  We’ve seen toads (large & small), hunter spiders, lizards, worked near beehives, a 1 1/2 inch hornet – oh and every night we hear possums scurry along our room’s rooftop, trying to grab at the guavas.  I’ve actually surprised myself that I can slosh around in the mud, slinging concrete, feeding pigs and chasing cows.  Oh one last thing – today the cows got out of the field (the bottom gate was left open) and they came up to the house, it was kind of funny, because we were about to have some morning tea and then all of a sudden, you see a heifer in the driveway.  The interesting life of a farmer.