Old writer on the block

The writing diary of a well-mellowed science writer who cares about the public understanding of science and knows the ropes. This blog bounces between my curiosity, the daily realities of professional writing, the joy of pursuing nature, and my recycling of ideas that won't be in some book or other as far as I can see, but still needed sharing. I welcome comments and suggestions! Spam will be blocked and reported. For my books, see http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/index.htm

Friday, 5 September 2025

Clearing the Snowy Mountains for winter

To foreigners, Australia is always seen as a warm, almost tropical land, but we also have our snow. In the south of New South Wales, the aptly-named Snowy Mountains reach 2000 metres, and the highest peaks usually carry small remnants of snow, right through the hot days of summer. Looking more like lumps of muddy ice, they slowly melt, then partially re-freeze at night, only to melt again the next day, providing a trickle of water to the plants of the windy and exposed areas above the treeline.

Now, as the first chill winds of our winter blow up out of the Antarctic, the alpine vegetation has turned brown, the first snow drifts of the coming winter are starting to grow under sheltered overhangs, and the traditional graziers have moved into the area to round up their free range flocks before the cruel cold of midwinter. In the past, these graziers ran cattle over the ‘High Country’. Now we know more about the ecological damage caused by these animals' hooves, and cattle are now replaced by light-footed polyesters.

Because of the name, most people assume the polyester filament is a polymer, like polythene, but this is a false derivation. The first European visitor to the area was Count Strzelecki, a Pole, who named our highest peak Mount Kosciusko after a famous Polish patriot. It was Strzelecki (an excellent geologist, by the way) who named it the ‘polyesta’ after the traditional furry winter socks worn by Polish peasants. The complex laws of zoological naming forced the spelling change, as the name Polyesta had already been assigned to a completely hairless lizard by another Polish scientist with a warped sense of humour.

The Australian polyester, Polyester kosciuskensis, is a large and harmless arachnid, related to the flannelweb spider Polyester onkaparingensis, which is found below the treeline. The flannelweb makes a blanket-like web in two layers, and nestles between the blankets, gaining warmth from the paralysed birds that are its main prey (the birds often live five days after they are caught), but their ‘flannel’ is useless for commercial purposes, as it cannot be combed, worked or spun, as it is extruded in the form of tight spirals.

The polyester, on the other hand, covers its body in long threads of ordinary spider silk, using this cover as water-proofing, insulation, and camouflage. The wild specimens are smallish -- about the size of a hamburger, but the Australian research organisation, the CSIRO has succeeded in producing a domesticated strain of much larger polyesters, about the size of a dinner plate, and with a much finer coat, which is produced in much greater quantity.

The wild specimens are ruthless hunters of small vertebrates: frogs, lizards, small fish, and even the occasional young snake, but they seem never to attack birds or mammals, and have been shown to be non-venomous to all of the larger mammals of Australia. The larger cultivated breeds also avoid warm-blooded vertebrates, but they specialise in larger snakes and the introduced rainbow trout.

This presents something of a problem, with ‘sporting fishermen’ complaining about the loss of a valuable resource, the trout, while green groups are concerned about the ecological effects of falling snake populations, and delighted at the attacks on the feral trout. They are more concerned, however, at the risk the polyesters represent to certain of the alpine frog species, and the authorities have been asked to build a polyester-proof fence along part of the Ramshead Range.

Tradition, however, is on the side of the polyester herders, who drive their flocks up into the High Country in the middle of October, just as the ski season is at an end, as they have done since time immemorial or 1999. There are twenty such operations, and each herd carries subtle DNA tags which allow the herds to be separated at the end of the season. So far, there have been few examples of cross-breeding between the herds, so this does not appear likely to be a problem.

Now it is time to round the polyesters up again, and bring them down to safety for the winter. Fish-oil lures draw most of the polyesters in to the mustering sites, and trained dogs are used to round the stragglers. The dogs are also used to drive the polyesters into flat trays, which are then loaded and stacked on trucks to carry the polyesters down to sun-warmed sheds in the valleys below the snow-line.

Once there, the polyesters will be fed a rich meal of fish waste and abattoir offal, which causes them to moult, to swell and burst their skins, which can then be gathered and sent to the factories for processing. For the next seven days, the polyesters are at terrible risk, until their new coat is hard enough for them to cover it in a new layer of web, but in the sheds on the valley floor, very few of the animals are ever lost.

Research continues on transgenic implantation of genes from the closely related flannelweb spider, in the hope of producing a hardy breed which can survive outdoors right through the year. So far, these experiments have only resulted in spiders which produce commercially useless woven coats, rather like the flannelweb spider's ‘blankets’.

In the past, the authorities have quietly allowed the misconception about the true origins of ‘polyester’ to go unchecked. Now, as the polyester industry approaches maturity, the herders are less concerned about people's reactions to wearing clothes made of spider web. They can sell all the polyester they produce, and they argue that nobody minds wearing silk. You are likely to hear more about the polyester herders of Australia's High Country in the future.

The Fancelli sisters' gym and health bar

The Fancelli sisters were devastated recently when their landlord put up the rent on their shop. They have had a successful time over the last twelve months, but now they have been forced to move on. Regular readers may recall that the sisters originally ran their castle museum, until they were forced out by a malicious council by-laws inspector.

Now an even more savage blow has fallen upon them. They left their castle in despair and opened up a corner store and coffee shop, while continuing with a few of their more prized sidelines, like their herb-enriched tomato sauce, second-hand goods, seedlings and some most unusual home-made and highly illegal liqueurs. It was the liqueurs which were their undoing, as the landlord discovered what they were doing, and tried to blackmail them. Being women of principle, the sisters left, taking almost everything with them: the prawn heads under the floor boards are something we need not go into …

Now they have taken over a bankrupt gymnasium in the middle of our suburb's shopping centre, and set up their business there. They have evicted the Coke machine, but the taller Miss Fancelli is continuing her tradition of drastic tea-brewing. Over the past year, the shorter Miss Fancelli has become a true master of the espresso coffee machine, in between offering sculpture and plumbing courses for the elderly at the local technical college.

I am delighted to be able to bring my readers news of the world's first fluid-computer wall-mounted coffee machine and sculpture, which is now beginning to take shape on the highest wall of the converted squash courts.

The essential principle is binary logic. As a fluid passes from the stem of a Y junction to the two upper arms, it will usually flow into one arm only, unless it is given a nudge, after which it flows into the other arm until nudges again. This simple bistable unit forms the basis of the coffee machine, with sensors shunting weak coffee back through the grounds, and others pushing cool coffee back through a heating unit.

That, at least, was the starting point. With the Fancellis, nothing stays simple for long, and the logic units started to multiply. They replaced the original pipes with clear glass, added more controls to maintain a supply of hot filtered water, fitted a solar-powered peristaltic pump, and began to plot serious computing power. By the end of the year, they expect to have something with about the same power and usefulness as the first Altair microcomputer, but a great deal more aesthetic charm.

At the moment, they have to use mains power to drive the pump on cloudy days and after dark, but they have hinted to me that they are working on a couple of pleasing solutions. Given that their favourite movie is The African Queen, I suspect that it will involve steam in some form.

The Fancelli sisters' store

The Fancelli sisters were later forced to give up the Rhine Castle tea rooms and museum, their home of many years. I described a while back how they survived mainly by taking in paying visitors, but a new Council ordinance put an end to all that. In fact, by the time I reported on their castle, the move had already been forced upon them. I hesitated to report their problems then, but they have sprung back, and I can report both their calamity and how they got over it.

They sold up and moved out, not without regret. Still, they took much of their "collections" with them, shuttling back and forth in their elderly Studebaker between the castle and their new home and base of operations, a corner shop quite close to where I live.

There was a time when Australians always shopped at "the corner shop", a small store which carried most of the main household needs, situated in walking distance of people's homes. Cars were rare, refrigeration was little more than an ice box, and many foods had to be bought fresh each day. After World War II, about the time the Fancelli sisters' Studebaker crossed the Pacific, Australians started to acquire cars. That was when the writing went up on the wall for the corner shop.

A few of the shops survived, if they were in key locations: near a park, close to factories, or opposite a school, for example. The sisters have found such a little store, across a quiet street from a sheltered park at the end of a Sydney harbour backwater. There is a stream of locals driving past the door each afternoon to buy bread and milk, and on weekend afternoons, picnic groups besiege them all day for ice creams and drinks. Each morning, the sister on duty can sit serenely enthroned in the shop window, listening to music, drinking tea, reading, and serving the occasional customer.

That occasional visitor needs a strong stomach for their music and a cast-iron stomach for their tea. Those who qualify may sit at one of the free tables, but you need either eclectic musical tastes, or a foreknowledge of which sister is "on" that day. One certainty is that the music will be loud, and superbly reproduced, but it can vary greatly, unlike the industrial-strength tea.

The taller Miss Fancelli (as I have mentioned before, nobody seems to know their names, other than "Miss Fancelli") has austere tastes in music, favouring opera and vocal music above all else. She sings along with most of the operas and adds a new dimension to what she calls her "light relief", the CD of "The Three Tenors".

Her voice was probably once a rich contralto, but now her tannin-impregnated larynx usually gives a close approximation to a tenor in need of minor repairs (a rebore, perhaps?). The taller Miss Fancelli draws in the "blue-rinse set", women of past retirement age, and she is now taking names for a Wednesday matinee opera theatre party.

The shorter Miss Fancelli ranges across the full range of 20th century music, with a strong Australian bias. Her collection includes John Cage, Arnold Schonberg, several Australian groups favoured by moshers (if this means nothing, take it to mean "heavy metal"), the aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi, and the fusion groups Gondwanaland and Sirocco. She also favours several well-known avant garde Australian composers, all of whom she claims as former lovers. Her current following is younger, but equally loyal. I cannot, however, speak of her lovers.

Saturday and Sunday mornings are special. The sisters both work, and offer us their version of a compromise: full-strength Romantic pops. "Nothing heavier than Mendelssohn, nothing lighter than Tchaikovsky" is their motto, and it seems to work well. They are both kept flat out serving hot scones and their potent tea (though the taller sister is now teaching herself to brew equally dangerous coffee!!).

Beyond this, their shop is still a shop, selling staple foodstuffs to the locals, but being the Fancellis, they have already started to acquire a wider range of stock. If a customer asks for something they do not carry, the sisters will buy some in. If they need something themselves, they order a wholesale consignment, then sell the rest at retail rates. The shorter Miss Fancelli delights in attending auction sales, and this has also added many novelties. She tells me she is currently looking for an espresso machine for her sister.

Already they have been forced to add new shelves, right up to the ceiling on all the spare walls to carry such items as a range of wallpaper oddments, bath toys, stationery, Willow-pattern china, and a range of brass and steel screws. The second-hand bookshelf has been relocated three times, ending up as a rummage bin near the door.

Kitschy "scene in a snowstorm" globes are doing very well, especially the tasteful one with two dolphins on a seesaw and "Greetings from the Gold Coast" in luminous gold letters. The snow flakes also glow in the dark, and the globes have been given a special shelf of their own "just in case they're radioactive, dear". The ceiling has sprouted hooks from which some of their lighter and bulkier stock items dangle.

At the back of the shop, the garage that contains their venerable Studebaker, is also home to a load of bagged sand and cement, pool chemicals, scented candles, dog food, home brew beer kits and more, including a huge pile of the sisters' own brand of tomato sauce (for Americans, that is ketchup), sealed into any sort of recycled glass container they can gather in. Each Friday, their car can be seen cruising the streets, ahead of the recycling truck, as the sisters maintain their bottle supplies. Beside the garage is the greenhouse where they grow their "secret herbs" for the sauce.

I am happy to report that they have not only brought their collection of historic vacuum cleaners with them from the Rhine Castle, but they have developed a profitable sideline in selling new ones, and several are on display. On the footpath out front, they have set up a table with seedlings in punnets and tubes. The taller Miss Fancelli offers punnets of herbs and annuals, the shorter Miss Fancelli germinates the seeds of hard-to-grow Australian native plants.

One small problem with their diversification is that no single part of their business is totally viable. During the day, they may sell three sandwiches, which means they break into a loaf of sliced bread, and at the end of the day, they still have most of a loaf left over.

When the last customers of the day come seeking bread, the eccentric sisters will offer them a part-loaf at discount prices. It says a lot for the locals that this has now become accepted, although their attempts to dispose of parts of bottles of milk are still being resisted. But whatever else you say about them, the sisters have managed to turn the clock back to the days when a corner store would and could sell almost anything. For that alone, we love them.

Adventures in the tourist trade

Some of our tourist attractions are natural, like Uluru (alias Ayer's Rock). Some tourist attractions are institutions: the Australian Ballet, the Australian Opera, Sydney's art galleries, museums and so on. Some popular ‘attractions’ are built especially to cater for the lowest common denominator of tourism: the wish to see novelties. These are always called The Big [Something].

For example, we have the grotesque Big Merino, a 15 metre high sculptured relief of a ram of the Merino breed, complete with shop selling souvenirs and postcards. One of the few reasons for visiting Goulburn, it is featured on roadside signs as ‘the world's biggest merino’.

The bizarre Big Banana offers displays about the banana industry. Nearby, the Big Banana Theme Park features an Aboriginal Dreamtime Cave experience, and a ‘realistic bunyip’. The bunyip is a mythical beast, so the realism must be very powerful indeed!

The list goes on: the Big Dung Beetle, the Big Prawn, the Big Pavlova, the Big Trout, the Big Pineapple, the Big Red Apple, each outdoing its competitors in some aspect of what I call Tabloid Tourism. Aimed at the vacuous, the foolish and the feeble-minded, these ‘attractions’ all claim to be, well, maybe not quite the largest of their kind, but each is ‘reputed to be the largest [something] in the southern hemisphere’. Among them all, only the Big Merino is prepared to take on the whole world.

This ‘in the southern hemisphere’ qualification of the claim is clever, since so little of the world is actually south of the equator. Moreover, most southerly nations are under-developed, and hence unlikely to build giant fibre-glass cockroaches, plum puddings or gumnuts. As a class, these ‘attractions’ are mainly remarkable for the cynical way they seek to trap the tourist dollars and cents.

Yet alongside these calculated money-traps, and often classed with them, we find those gentle innocents, the amateur museums. At the very forefront of these establishments for many years has been the Fancelli sisters' Rhine Castle, near Sydney. The sign outside the gate says it all: ‘Fancelli Sisters, curiosa and Devonshire teas, also dogs boarded and home-made tomato sauce’.

The sisters have survived for many years on the entrance fees and the money they get from the sale of afternoon teas and garden produce, especially their famous tomato sauce, made from their own tomatoes and herbs. Their boarding kennels were closed many years ago, by order of the bureaucrats on the local council, but the legally-sized sign lives on, cocking a snook at petty officialdom.

I have taken friends to visit the sisters many times over the years, to admire their house and ocean views, and to take strong tea on a small terrace facing the sea, all at extremely modest charges. I have even stood on the turret at the top to wave a flag at the tourist ferries, allowing the commentator on the boat (an old friend of the Fancelli family) to draw the attention to the sisters' establishment. This flag-waving task is a role that the sisters allocate only to their ‘friends’, their frequent visitors, and we all regard this as a sign of our acceptance.

The sisters are getting on now, and they speak mainly in croaks, yet they are both well-known for their good works along this stretch of the coast, especially in evangelism. They share a Studebaker dating from about 1947 (a strange model that looks the same at both ends) and both drive with a verve that puts the sternest fear of God into pedestrians and motorists alike.

I was at the castle last week with a young cousin from Perth. As we stopped at the gate, we were greeted by the shorter Miss Fancelli - no ‘friend’ has ever progressed beyond that in naming them, so far as I know. She came to the gate to say they had been ordered to close up entirely by the council, but even though she is getting old now, she recognised me right away.

‘We're still welcoming our friends, though,’ she reassured me in a wheeze. Her bony right hand reached out to grasp the portable ticket machine from the low stone wall beside her, and four dollars later, we were safely inside. My young cousin, on his first visit, was keen to see everything, so I left him to ferret around with the shorter Miss Fancelli. I settled down on the terrace at a rickety table, decorated with seasonal sprigs of holly, and the taller Miss Fancelli put on the kettle to brew one of her drastic pots of tea.

Out to sea, a yacht race was in progress, and there was a scattering of sails along the horizon. In the background, my cousin was being shown legend-rich items like the Tam O'Shanter left at the castle in 1939 by a young man who came to the headland each night to play his bagpipes. He left the cap behind when he went away to the war, and never came to reclaim it. Or it may have been the ornate cast-iron key that fitted no lock in the castle, or some other equally unusual relic. After a while, these priceless relics all seem the same . . .

Just then the gate bell rang, and three people of about my age were ushered in. I quickly realised that, like me, one of them was a ‘friend’. The taller Miss Fancelli took them in hand, darting back every so often to check the brewing of the tea. Finally satisfied that it was sufficiently tar-like, she poured sturdy mugs of the brew for all. Then the other ‘friend’ asked a question in low tones which I did not quite catch. The taller Miss Fancelli shyly pulled a small case from under a settee, a well-worn Globite case, such as my generation carried each day to school.

The three gathered around to marvel at something unseen in the case. Then the lid was closed, and the old lady half-slid it back under the settee before turning to me and croaking ‘Would you like to see the mummified cat?’.

I felt a stirring of jealousy within me. In all my visits, I had never had this treasure opened for me, one of the best of their friends. I had waved the flag for them, brought them new friends, and more. This other visitor clearly knew the treasure well, but I had never seen it. Still, now the chance was mine, and I put those churlish thoughts aside. Eagerly, I stepped forward, and looked down into the case, held open for my inspection. There, grinning up at me, was a very dried very dead cat, lying on its side.

It was old, perhaps even as old as the Fancellis, and it fitted perfectly into the case. It must have crept into the case one day and died in gentle seclusion, in some hot attic room. There it would have remained, baked and solar dried until it was discovered and hidden beneath the settee. I duly admired the mummified cat, and said it was the finest example of a mummified cat I had ever seen. I forbore to mention that it was the only such specimen I had ever seen.

Then I looked up to see the shorter Miss Fancelli standing in a doorway. Her eyes were flashing, and I realised I was not the only one to feel the venom of envy that day. Hissing slightly, she drew her sister to one side. Their exchange was brief and to the point. Furiously, the shorter Miss Fancelli opened fire on her sister at short range. ‘You shouldn't have got it out,’ she spat.

Here sister was mildly defensive. ‘Why ever not?’ she asked.

‘It's beginning to crumble.’

The taller Miss Fancelli now crushed her shorter sister, once and for all. ‘Nonsense! It's as good as ever it was.’ She paused for a moment, considering the closed case, then she drew the argument to a brutal close. ‘Besides, a bit of fresh air does it good.’

I do not know when, I do not know how, but one day, in some way, in some moment of need when I am caught out for lack of a valid argument, I shall use that line on somebody. In an instant, I had realised why the shorter Miss Fancelli is less tall than her sister.

New Year's Day in the bush

My last visit to Yandackworroby was to visit that most unusual event, the Yandackworroby and District New Year's Day Picnic Races. Back in 1977, Ernie Rutherford dreamed up a few silly events one night, all based on country life. Chatting in the pub on a winter night, he proposed a sock-darning contest for the women and a goanna-catching contest for kids between the established horse races at the ‘Picnic Races’. Ernie is a potato farmer who has the farm nearest to the pub, and he runs a few hundred sheep. as well as breeding assorted beasts to sell to the hobby farmers who are beginning to move into the area.

Australia has a long tradition of silly sporting events, like the Henley-on-Todd Regatta, where the boats have no bottoms, and are carried by their crews along the dry river bed of the Todd River. One year, that regatta was actually cancelled because rain outside the town had flooded the course! The Bondi Icebergs swim throughout the year, and start their season in May with a dip among ice blocks in their outdoor pool. The Yandackworroby Cup is in this same rough and humorous tradition.

The first year, everybody joined in the purely local fun, with contestants coming just from the local district, up to 100 km away. Soon their competitive spirit blossomed, and the ‘novelty’ events began to be taken seriously, with hamlets and old families engaging in friendly feud. More events were added, and in 1980, these were combined into the much more complex Yandackworroby Cup.

The modern pentathlon is supposed to simulate the main requirements of a cavalry officer: riding a horse, shooting a pistol, sword-fighting and so on. In the same way, the Yandackworroby Cup is a simulation of the life of a ‘typical cocky's family’. Of course, there is an element of romance in this, but at least it gives a sound basis for the events that make up the Cup events, and the cocky's life is an old Australian tradition, celebrated in literature and song.

Etymological digression: a small farmer in Australia is known as a ‘cocky’ because many small farmers would plant a crop, only to see the cockatoos, (‘cockies’), move in to dig up and eat the seed, leaving the farmers to complain that their only crop was cockies. So we got ‘cocky-farmers’, until the second part was dropped, and now by transfer, we have cow cockies and various other sorts of cocky, all of them farmers.

On a small farm, everybody must to be able to turn their hand to everything, so the Cup is open to teams of four who follow the 1981 scenario that I describe below. The characters' names are less than original to anybody who knows their Australian folklore and cinema, but if anybody wants to get offended by the implied gender specificity, fear not: any sex can (and does) play any of the roles.

In last year's story-line, ‘Dad’ is about to shear a sheep, but a goanna has run off with the shears. ‘Dave’, his son, has to chase the goanna till it runs up a tree. Then Dad comes with an axe, chops the tree down, ‘tags’ the goanna, and so collects a set of hand shears from the judges.

Meanwhile, ‘Mabel’, his daughter, has sent a dog out to select a sheep from a neighbouring paddock. The dog has to bring it back so ‘Dave’ can shear it with the hand shears, so ‘Mum’ can spin the wool into yarn, so it can be used to darn a worn sock.

That, at least, was the original story-line. Over the years, a number of extra and rather unlikely components have been added to pad out the slightly boring period while the wool is being spun, and the sock is being darned. By 1984, we had a horse-ride down a 60 degree slope and abseiling down a cliff, all within Ernie Rutherford's larger potato paddock, next to and behind the pub.

To achieve this, a few liberties have been taken, and the ‘trees’ are actually 30 cm (1 foot) diameter seasoned hardwood poles stuck in the ground, inside a temporary fence of corrugated iron to keep the goannas from escaping. The cliff and the slope have been located in the remains of an old open-cut mine just down the road, and in view of the temporary stands.

In the present-day version, we can also see the ‘Mabel’ character running down (on foot!) a kangaroo to take a ribbon from around its neck, the conversion of the ‘tree’ into firewood billets which can pass through a hoop 10 cm in diameter, and the digging of a hole which is able to contain all of the firewood. With the present relay rules, there are always three members of each team engaged in completing tasks from the list.

The main excitement still comes during the goanna chase, for chasing a kangaroo is more of a gruelling endurance event. Goannas are impressive reptiles, 1.5 to 2 metres in length, and very fast runners over a short distance. When they are chased, the sharp-clawed reptiles run up the nearest tree: on a treeless plain (or a potato paddock!), they have been known to run up people, to the climbees' considerable discomfort!

The colour-coded goannas are released when the audience is seated in the stands (with the guests of honour on the roof of the pub), and the ‘Dave’ contestants must ‘down’ two full pints of beer before leaping into the ‘goanna pit’ (I note without comment that this rule was brought in the year after Ernie bought the licence for the pub, and handed the running of the farm over to his daughters.) At this point, an element of chance is introduced, for if your goanna runs up an already occupied ‘tree’, you must wait until that ‘tree’ is brought down, then chase your goanna up another tree.

At least, that is how it used to be. The rules this year allowed for the first time that, if this happens, the waiting axeman or axemen may help fell the multi-goanna tree. This year, we watched in trepidation as three champion axemen were all working the same pole at once. Happily, there were no injuries, or if there were, the injured were too happy to notice.

I am told that a limited television coverage is being negotiated with the cable TV people, so the event is probably about to become world-famous. Sadly, this success may spoil the whole joy of ‘the Cup’, as more ‘outside’ teams enter. This year, a team called ‘The Dapto Dogs’ came up from the coast and easily took out the event. Teams from Brisbane and Tasmania are expected next year, and a New Zealand entry cannot be too far away.

Perhaps the ‘Yandackworroby Pentathlon’ will one day be an event at the Olympics. Indeed, some of the locals are already talking about setting up a demonstration for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. I hope they succeed, for it is very much an Australian sport, and it has the competitive aspect that most ‘demonstration sports’ entirely lack. Now if only they could fit fighting a small bushfire into the story, for now the bushfire season is in full swing, and we desperately need to be able to laugh at the old enemy.

Yandackworroby Pub

You can get to Yandackworroby the easy way or the hard way. The hard way is down the coast, then grinding along gravel and dust, all arranged in furrows, holes, and corduroy. The easy way is an hour of suburban street crawl to Sydney's south-west corner where the freeway starts. After that, we drive in comfort for another hour.

That takes us to our turn-off at a small ghost hamlet beside the highway. It died when the highway came through, carrying everybody past at an air-conditioned 110 km/hr, and the people who lived there didn't have the good sense of the folk from Cootaburra. Now we are on back-roads, and even though each time we go there another small section has been sealed with tar, there is still enough dusty bumpy road in the next hour and a half to make us glad when we reach Yandackworroby.

The "towns" of this area are minimalist. Kelly's Ford is just a camping area, often deserted, Windyworroby is no more than a community hall, and Sassafras is merely an abandoned barn where two dirt roads cross. In that league, Yandackworroby is a thriving metropolis, with almost a dozen occupied buildings along a 500-metre strip of road, including a small school, a shop, and a pub. There is also a small museum that I will tell you all about, some other time.

An Australian "pub" is cousin to the British pub. It is a public house, a hotel, a place that serves alcoholic drinks to the public. Most people drink beer, but spirits and soft drinks are to be had, and wine is often possible. Some pubs are giant booze emporia, but country pubs in places like Yandackworroby are important social centres, and resting places for the passing traveller and bushwalkers like us, heading into, or out of, the nearby wilderness areas.

Opposite the pub, several large pine trees provide welcome shade, and there are rough timber tables and benches on a verandah which is shaded for most of the day. You enter the bar through dangling squeaking screen doors that slam sullenly behind you, for this is sheep country, and something has to be done to keep the flies out. You order your drinks, say a few words, pin your business card to the wall if you have one, and then push back out onto the wide verandah. Time passes slowly enough for people to be able to talk to each other.

Aside from bushwalkers and travellers, there will always be a few locals who know what the rainfall has been in the last week. This is vital information, for we will rely on past rain to keep us in drinking water over the next few days.

Even if the creeks aren't running, one decent rain shower in the night will feed the drips in the camping caves. With luck, we can gather a litre of water each hour at each drip. But without recent rain, we must carry all our water with us, so we value the information we get from the farmers at the Yandackworroby pub. Even now, in the midst of a drought, there is reasonably good water in the area, wrung out of the clouds as they blow over the surrounding mountains.

Sometimes, though, the farmers are working. On our last visit, I slowed the car down as we approached Yandackworroby from the Kelly's Ford end, because a hand-painted sign on the trampled grass of the verge said "sheep on road". Rounding a corner, we found a mob of sheep muddling along the road, followed by a utility truck. (A utility, or ute, is what Americans call a "pickup". Australia invented this vehicle, so I will stick with our name for it.)

One sheepdog rode on the ute, sitting on the roof for a clearer view. Three more dogs were working the herd along the road, directed by a man who stood to one side, clear of the dust clouds the sheep were raising. I stopped the car: we were only a few hundred metres from the pub, and my son and daughter are keen photographers. I thought I would just wait for the mob to pass by the pub, and then drive peacefully up, but I had not reckoned on country courtesy.

The walking man looked back to us as my two teenagers got out. He waved, and with three loud whistles and two hand signals, the road was clear, the sheep cowering on one side of the road under the baleful glares of the crouching dogs.

I drove past slowly to park in the shade at the pub, leaving my son and daughter to walk up with the sheep, taking photos as they came. There was just enough time for me to set a round of drinks on a verandah table before they and the sheep arrived, they to drink, the sheep to mill in the road outside the pub. For some reason, the screen door of the bar had been propped open, and several of the sheep managed to lurch aimlessly inside. A quick word from the ute's driver, and the three hard- working dogs put the sheep back outside. All the while, the dog on the back of the truck kept its position. We speculated briefly that it was having a birthday.

Right next to the pub, a paddock gate stood open, and without any visible or audible instruction, the dogs drove the sheep through. As the sheep dispersed voraciously into the fresh green grass of their new home, the dogs jumped onto the back of the ute, and the man closed the gate. The woman in the ute parked it in the shade, and they both dropped into the pub to settle the dust.

When they came out onto the verandah, I asked about rain, and gathered some local gossip, carefully saying nothing about what we had just seen. Then as the couple were leaving, my son wondered aloud what the dog on the back of the truck was doing. "Ah," the man said, nodding slowly, "That's me spare, just in case one of me other dogs gets a puncture."

I elected to leave it there. There are some things you just don't ask about in Yandackworroby.

Kick-started by a dung beetle

This is one of a series of tales of Australian rural life as I once lived it I have just realised that these were all banjaxed by a treacherous ISP, but I had kept all the bits, and now I am reviving them.

Cootaburra lies quietly, drowsing beside the Corella River, in western New South Wales. Until recently, little has changed in Cootaburra during a hundred years of slow and gentle decay. Many of the children still go to school barefoot, as their great-great-grandparents did last century, bantam roosters call the town to wakefulness each dawn, and each barking dog in the night is instantly recognised and cursed by name, as is each squalling cat.

It is a small and compact town. The people are all old residents, intermarried for five and six generations, with kith and kin scattered all over "the district", an indefinite geographical entity that seems to cover the whole Corella River catchment, the western marshes, and even beyond.

The district is prosperous, for it is surrounded by wheat fields that yielded good crops, even in the recent drought, and vast sheep paddocks that sprawl over the rolling hills. With the drought a thing of the past, the local farmers are happy, but the town itself has been under threat. It seemed to be a town without a future, for the farmers of today pass Cootaburra by.

When the area was settled last century, people spread out thinly and took over the land of the first inhabitants. All land was considered the property of the Crown, and having chosen your land, you paid the Crown for the right to do so, and that was that. The original inhabitants were largely ignored in the process, although they are now being accorded some recognition, and even some occasional compensation, but that is another story.

The early farmers needed towns, about every sixty miles along each main road (that is, about every hundred kilometres today). This pattern meant that most farming people could ride the fifty kilometres or so to the nearest town by horse or sulky, and get back again in the same longish day, provided they were quick about their business in town. The town provided schools, churches, and stores, the main essentials for all but the most distant farms.

Once the car came, the horse was discarded, and the sulky, a light cart, drawn by a single horse, went with it. A few children still ride horses to school, but they are the children of rich farmers who live close to town, riding fine ponies, not the offspring of the poor, riding four-up on a superannuated plough horse as their grandparents did. Once the horse was an economic necessity, now the car fills that role.

With the car making it easier to travel long distances, rationalisation was bound to happen, a simple word, but a horrid process to those rationalised. People today can drive the 100 km between towns in just over an hour, so now they can choose a larger regional centre, which can grow and offer more services, at the expense of the smaller towns. On the edges of the bypassed towns, houses are deserted, they fall into disrepair, and the town slowly lurches closer to being a ghost town. There is nothing very rational about being a ghost town.

Once the banks start to cut their losses and move out, once the main store in town has its last sale, once the pubs start closing their doors, when the dentist leaves town, the pharmacist merges with the newsagent, and the local doctor cannot sell the practice, it is only a matter of time before the town dies completely. Unless the locals start to fight back, that is.

Cootaburra is a lovely example of recovery. Established during the gold rushes of the 1850s, the town lies on a major highway, and Cootaburra survived on the passing trade: it was a long way, either side, to the next main town. True, the main fast food chains ignored Cootaburra, but that was all to the good, for locally owned businesses filled the gap. Truck drivers knew what the food was like, and stopped there for a feed. Knowledgeable travellers saw the trucks, and stopped there as well.

Now a "government transport initiative" has sealed Cootaburra's fate as victualler to the travelling masses, for a bypass has been installed, and ordinary travellers sweep by on the highway, unaware of the feeding delights that they are missing. The farming riches of the district were still being spent 200 km away, and the town was slowly bleeding to death.

Most Australian country towns have a Big Something. The map is littered with Big Merinos, Big Pavlovas, bananas, huge pineapples, cane toads, trout -- most of God's creation and much of human invention can be found, sculpted rough and large, in an Australian country town. Each naive replica was built to draw hordes of tourists in to gasp with delight at this or that gigantic model, and each is slightly more grotesque than the one that went before. This seems to be inherent in the genesis of Big Somethings in rural towns.

And here lies the problem that faced the citizens of Cootaburra. To be really effective, they could not afford yet another naive "attraction" that would soon be overtaken. They had to take a leap to the really grotesque, while still falling within the apparent range of Big Somethings, Australia-wide. Enter Bob Rutherford.

Bob is the not the only Rutherford to appear in these chronicles, and he is in fact a cousin of Ernie Rutherford of the Yandackworroby pub. Bob was in Yandackworroby a year or so back for the running of the highly successful Yandackworroby Cup that I will mention shortly. I met him while I was down there to have a yarn with Ernie, and I have kept in touch since.

Bob's solution was to have the town build a giant replica of an African dung beetle at Cootaburra. To explain why they did this, I will first have to discuss a few matters that may distress the more sensitive of my readers. Trust me, for this exposition is essential to your understanding.

Australia's native animals produce small dry pellets of dung that are dealt with by native dung beetles, but those are quite unable to deal with the massive productions of cattle and sheep. The result has been a vast increase in the number of "bush flies", right across Australia. About twenty years back, Australian scientists imported African dung beetles, well able to cope with the productions of elephants, rhinos and hippos, and tested them in small areas of Australia.

The results were outstanding. The dung beetles cut up the wet plops into little balls which they push away and bury, laying eggs in them as they do. The buried dung is unavailable to the flies, whose numbers are reduced. In sheep farming areas like Cootaburra, people no longer need to practise the "Great Aussie Salute", sweeping the flies away, all summer. In the Corella River district, dung beetles are widely hailed as saviours by people, now able safely to open their mouths during summer, for the first time in their lives.

So Cootaburra has its dung-beetle, a huge scale model in ferro-cement and fibre-glass, standing almost six storeys high, set up and floodlit by night on a low hill, just as you enter the town, and visible from the bypass highway, as well as being advertised on billboards across the state. Already, a theme park is developing around this coprophilic coleopteran, and the continually rolling "dung ball" has a hatch let into it, so intrepid adventurers can climb into the hollow centre and tumble around. I will not offend my gentle readers by recording here the name given this ride. Cruder readers will no doubt work it out.

My friends the Fancelli sisters have recently moved to Yandackworroby (I will have to tell you all about how that happened, some time soon), and they have developed a smaller model of the beetle, where the dung ball is the barrel of a "stone rumbler", in which stones are rolled with abrasive powder until they are polished smooth as glass. Three of these rumblers are now in operation at Cootaburra, turning gravel from the Corella River into attractive souvenirs. Then there are the dungball ear-rings, key rings, tea spoons and dung beetles in snowstorm domes, but the true winners are the unintended attractions of the town.

Bob Rutherford had a clever idea, but he never recognised the true glories of the town. Now the city people are coming for longer stays, they are beginning to ferret out the real oddities of Cootaburra which are the mainstay of the town's economic recovery. The Acropolis cafe by the railway station offers "capuccino", where the foam is produced by shaking a two-litre plastic milk bottle. Every kind of steak at the Acropolis is served with a fried egg on top, the only sort of bread is politically incorrect and white, and the Acropolis is always packed by smirking cognoscenti, waiting for some innocent passer-by to react.

Equally packed is the traditional bush Chinese restaurant operating at the town's bowling club, where all of the meals taste like slightly curried sweet and sour monosodium glutamate, just as most bush Chinese food has, ever since the Chinese settled here, after the gold rush days. City people, seeking their mythical rural roots, delight in such things, just as their real and urban ancestors delighted in other types of freak show. But freak show or not, at least it keeps the town economically alive.

The Cootaburra annual Arts festival proved so popular that it now runs four times a year, and it may even be pushed into continuous operation -- the locals may be naive, but they aren't thick!. These items are often claimed by Bob's detractors to be the true basis of Cootaburra's recovery, but without the kick-start from that dung beetle, endlessly rolling its ball of dung, day and night, on the hill over the town, Cootaburra would be dead by now, another victim of economic rationalism.

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Friday, 5 September 2025

Clearing the Snowy Mountains for winter

The Fancelli sisters' gym and health bar

The Fancelli sisters' store

Adventures in the tourist trade

New Year's Day in the bush

Yandackworroby Pub

Kick-started by a dung beetle

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