Too busy with sheep!

I’ve been so busy that I have hardly opened my computer for days! For ages we’ve been trying to buy some dorper sheep. I’m too old to do much but as the government won’t give me a pension I have to do something to justify the small acreage that I own – that is, to make insurance etc payments tax deductible!

After several months of asking around, last week we had a call saying that someone, living a bit more than 500 km away was prepared to sell us some.

Our son who lives with us, and acts as both a carer (non-government) for us and the place got around to build crates to fit the back of a borrowed vehicle and a hired trailer.

Then there was a family discussion as to whether or not they would allow this old man to make the trip. I won out in that I went; they won out insisting that we made it a two day trip. As I slept most of yesterday, the day after we got back, they were probably correct. But I enjoyed it.

The destination was Aramac. Torrens creek is about halfway.

From Torrens Creek it is flat, almost treeless and somewhat boring! We saw four varieties of kangaroos – Greys and big reds; dead and alive. At the pub where we ate supper we were chatting to a kangaroo shooter who kills them, then refrigerated takes them for the meat market. He was telling me that the government has stopped them shooting greys as there are so few. That was not our impression. We saw about 60 or 70 live animals waiting to jump in front of the vehicle and about half were greys. We also saw several groups of emus.

Aramac has in the area only about 300 people. There are according to the write up on Internet many nearby associated interesting things to do. We went one day arriving after dark and left the next morning as soon as the sheep were loaded. Maybe we’ll have to make a longer trip some time but the sheep were our prime concern.

After a seven hour trip we arrived home to a setting sun.

Next morning they remained a tight knit group, but seemed happy enough.

Dominic Cartier