How we became cowboys

So when I last wrote, we were about to hit the road to go through the Great Sandy Desert. I must have remembered a different section of the Great Sandy (it continues after Broome), because the part we went through was anything but sandy... or a desert. The bush was very high and there were even quite a lot of trees. But it was big, so we did not drive through it with one day, but stopped for a night.

When we got to Broome, we decided that there was no point in looking fr a job because it was Sunday, so we decided to be tourists for a day. In Broome there occurs a natural phenomena called The Staircase to the Moon (actually you can see similar thing in other places in the northern part of Aus as well), which happens on about three days of the month (and not the whole year) during the full moon. The last time we were here, we got here on the second day of the staircarse, but there were bushfires around Broome, so we could not see it (plus we locked ourselves out or our car, hurrying to go and see it and had to ask a former car-thief aboriginal guy to help us break into our car) and on the other day that it was supposed to happen, there were clouds. This time we were determined to see it. So this time we actually saw it on one evening (the second one was cloudy again). The Staircase to the moon is basically the moonrise (the moon is very big and orange and seems to be close) over the low tide areas of the gulf of Broome. And when you are located in the right place then the big pools of low water are lit up and they create an image which is similar to... a staircase to the moon. So that was very cool, but I have so shitty camera that I did not even try to take pictures of it so you can google it.

The next day was supposed to be our big job-searching day. We did apply to some of them that we found in gumtree but we spent most of our day not doing much. So when an Italian bloke that we met, saw us sitting in the caravan park, he was telling us „I thought you were going to find a job. You are not going to find a job sitting over here in the caravan park.“. Well... a couple of hours later, an Aussie guy that we had had beers with the previous night came home from work and brought us a piece of paper with an add „Station hands wanted“. I had actually thought about working in in a station before (actual cowboys and stuff) but I never thought that I would be considered for the job as I don’t have any experience. So we called them immediately and they said that they would consider us if we thought that we were up for the job. We promised to rock up at the station to talk about it more specifically. After a 70km drive (20 of which is not tarmac but sand, and it is used by heavy trucks every day, so you can imagine the condition) we arrived at Kilto station, had a couple of words with the manager and promised to come back the same evening to start the next day, as we still needed some working clothes for the job - steel-capped shoes, as we don’t want to lose our toes when half a ton of cow steps on them and hats... I did feel kind of pretentious showing up with a cowboy hat but it was the same price as the normal hay-hats plus my head is so big (because of the hair) that I did not have much of a choice anyway.

So what exactly do we do here? Erik is mostly driving around with a tractor and doing stuff (cutting hay, meintenancing the machines and so on) and I am in the export yards. That basically means that we have big yards with several different pens full of cows and bulls (about three thousand of them at the moment) and we are chasing the cows all day from one place to another. The cows have previously been brought up in open paddocks (or completely in the wild... so they are wild, free-range cows) and then brought to the yards. From here, they will either go to the abattoir (a fancy word from slaughter house), to Indonesia, be put on more feed (if they are not big enough) or to some open paddocks to wait for their time. So we are sorting them according to their size, sex, if they are going to be breeding more, if they need any medical attention, branding, cutting the tips of their horns (mostly for themselves, as they like to poke each other. but also for us, as they get stressed when we are trying to make them go from one place to another and they try to attack us) and so on. So yeah... a lot of chasing cows, climbing fences, opening gates and being chased by cows, all in quite a heat (the fences are burning hot during the day but I can’t be a pussy and wear gloves when noone else is wearing them), as the winter is ending now, plus we are more in the north as well. So far I have liked the job, because it is very different from what I have done before, the pace of working is quite relaxed, except the running every now and then, and the people I work with/for are also nice. You don’t have to worry about looking neat – I can be covered in cow shit and nobody cares; you can swear and curse all you want, as your supervisors are doing exactly the same. I wouldn’t even mind dragging dead cows away with the car if the smell at the death-pit would not be so horribly disgusting and thick (but that’s just one fraction of the job- usually 15min to 30min of the day)

We live in a shed (as everything is a shed in Australia) and we get fed every day so no cooking after or during the long days of working. There is more wildlife here as well, than in the towns. For example there are big lizard-like animals (goannas) living here; the ones we have seen are about 1,5 metres long. A pink geko lives in our room, although it does not want to show itself often. There are frogs living i the bathroom-toilet shed. One time when I decided to go to the toilet, I saw two or three frogs in the shower, two-three were on the walls and edges around the toilet pot, and as I pushed one off the toilet seat (thinking this was the last one), I saw three in the toilet, who did not care at all that I tried to flush them off (they usually jump out when you flush). So I decided that it is just so much easier to go behind the toilet. And of course there are cows and bulls running around as well – the naughty ones who have escaped the pens or paddocks and also some friendly pet-cows. There are also very cool birds – many different colours of birds that I would call parrots, but also storks, hen-like birds and so on.