Family life on the farm.

We live on a small farm. My doctor claims that I should move to a suitable place in a city or town and spend my time socializing. Neither my wife nor i like the idea much. Remaining here does depend on having help and we are very thankful that two of our sons still live with us. One, sadly divorced, is our main stay as a carer and runs the farm; one adopted, young, unmarried is a mechanic’s apprentice.

They live downstairs, having enough to be independent but we still have a close relationship as a foursome. My wife and I live upstairs with a sliding elevator for me. My wife still loves gardening (more than house work!) and does the shopping and visits other folk.

I thought that I would show you some of things which make life here interesting!

Our youngest son repairing the diesel injection fuel pump on the old larger tractor. He did a good job!

Our older son is also extremely capable. The bucket on our smaller tractor with years of use was tearing in several places. So with several pieces of steel welded in it is ‘new’ again – at a fraction of the cost of a new one. The plates with holes in them welded onto the bottom are to allow us to attach two forks and use it as a forklift! That works well and is very useful!

We had nine lambs from twelve ewes and as you can see here they are getting almost ready for the butcher. I must confess I am a carnivore but hate killing most things. My hate doesn’t extend to mosquitoes, cockroaches or mice but to kill a lamb is beyond me. Sadly one of our lambs developed paralysis of its back legs, so we now only have eight. We will add the females to the flock (which with recently added numbers from some collected in Aramac is now 27 ewes; the wethers will be butchered and go into the fridge. We should get enough meat for some months at less than half the price if we had to buy it in a supermarket or butcher.

I had a phone call from America last night. This book is already published as an e-book. They want to bring it out as a printed edition. That will mean a lot more work converting it from an e-book production to a word document. They will then edit it and spread the news. Much of the work this end will fall on our son who besides everything else is extremely good with IT. I guess the cover gives away my pseudonym but if you want to buy the e-book look up

http://www.smashwords.com have scalpel will travel or Barry Hicks AM FRACS on your service engine and it will tell you how to get it! Another medical diagnostic book and some other blogs are also mentioned under my name.

So life goes on, not with for me the pace of yesteryear, but still fascinating. I thank God for the measure of health He has given us.

Dominic Cartier

My 101st Heated Stew attempt.

Our small church has two congregations. At 9AM we have a service for mainly older white people, you might label us a ‘dying’ church. But we do have an outreach into India, South Africa and Ethiopia where people from an overseas church which was disrupted have scattered to other places. The outreach is by the internet. Then we have a much younger Indian congregation which meets at about 10.30 for a service and then an all age Sunday School. Once a month we have commenced a combined service with communion. Today was the first such combined service.

You might wonder what a dog staring at a Television set has to do with church services. I’ve written about my dogs before. Sadly they are both dead, euthanized, because they got into my sheep and started killing them. Here is Liesel staring very intently up at a very colourful, very active packed scene. What is she thinking? How is she reacting? I talk to animals, I may be even more stupid as I sometimes talk to myself. They recognize expressions, they respond to moods but I don’t know what they are thinking. I guess when I talk to myself I can tell myself what I’m thinking!

So what has that got to do with church this morning? The Indian adults, although from a different background have been in Australia for long enough to understand our ways of thinking. But I wondered what the kids thought. Their church services are in their own tongue, Malayalam, and this morning was the first time some children have been in an adult English speaking service. The kids’ English is good, but there are real differences in styles of worship.

In the morning tea afterwards I called one of the little kids to talk to me. He was a bit shy and his older brother came to guard him. He’s in grade 1. So I asked him if he could add up. ‘Yes’, he said. I asked him to add up 1+1, then 2+2, then 6+3 and he got them all correct. I saw him counting on his fingers. I knew that kids in grade one don’t deal in thousands so I asked him to add up 6 thousand and 3 thousand. He looked at me with his head on an angle to the side, thought for a moment and said nine thousand. So I asked him if he knew subtraction. The bigger brother said that his little brother hadn’t learnt that yet. So I told him, the older brother, to let his brother try to answer. So I asked 2-1, then 4-2, then 9-6 and he got them all correct. I then asked what if he took 4,000 from 10,000. And sharp as a tack he told me 6,000. For you and me very easy, but I thought for a grade one boy, that was excellent.

I wonder what people think and how much they understand when a church service is going on. The Indian children sat perfectly well behaved – not a noise out of place. But how much did they or any of us hear of the prayers, the songs, the preaching, the communion? I guess it will be told in the way we live our lives this week.

Please note the small skateboard under the table, in the dog picture above. It hasn’t been used for many years. The small boy seen below playing below with two of my grandchildren was run over by a train and lost both legs and an arm. We were allowed to bring him to Australia for medical help but not permitted to adopt him. He used the skateboard and the little ‘do-dad’ in front of him in the picture below to get around. He is now a University student in the USA. We still correspond but I’d love to see him face to face before I die!

He used to love sitting in front of the TV, conducting Andre Rieu as he watched a DVD.

The day I first met him he was about to be discharged to be a beggar on the streets of Ethiopia. I brought him home that evening and it was the beginning of a long friendship. He knew no English, but we had Amharic as a common language. I asked him if he had to get up to pee at night. He said ‘no’. I asked because I knew it would either mean a wet bed or me getting up to carry him to the loo. Then I asked him if he ever woke up screaming at night after the accident. I was surprised and delighted when he replied ‘There is a God in Heaven and I have left it in His hands.’ He was somewhere between 8-10. It was drizzling rain and, on a dirty road, I kept having to use the windscreen wiper and following behind other vehicles when the rain stopped I had to use the water spray jets to clean the window. I tested him when he asked where the water came from. He had never been in a car. I told him that there were two little boys under the hood and I would give them a little electric shock and they would pee for me. I kept a straight face. He looked worried for a moment and then burst out laughing. ‘Now, tell me the truth!’ I knew we would get on well, and we still do.

People can think! It’s what they do with what they’ve learned that counts!

Dominic Cartier.

A Day Out.

My orthopaedic surgeon allows me to take, once every few months, a high dose three day course of prednisolone to allow me to have a pretty pain free couple of days. I use his permission for special events. I used it this week.

In retirement my wife and I live with two of our sons on a small 100 acre (40Hac) property. About 40% of it is taken up with 2 hills steep and covered with my enemy the Chonkee Apple. That leaves us about 60 useful acres. One of my sons is adopted and younger than many of our grandchildren. He is an apprentice mechanic. The other much older has a part time job as pastor of a small church, and makes caring for us and the farm the rest of his job.

So what do we do on the 60 acres? We are developing, I guess you would call it a hobby farm, with Dorper sheep. Initially we bought 12 ewes and a ram. We got 11 lambs, sadly one of which was stillborn and the dogs got at two of them. The dogs have since gone to dogs’ heaven even though we loved them very much. A farmer cannot tolerate that behaviour, and I refused to see them chained up all the time.

So we have 8 lambs nearly ready for market (males) or putting back into the breeding flock (females).

Here the lambs are separated in a small paddock to finish fattening them.

As we separated them from the small flock we counted 8 of them. I think if you try you can count 8 heads. The brown in their ears makes counting a bit difficult. But there were 8. Yesterday there were 9!

Now if you count correctly there are 9!

All our ewes have ear tags. None of these have. The 2 uncastrated ram lambs are easily identified and there are still only 2. So How? I don’t have an answer except maybe our neighbour who has a few now has one less. Something about grass on the other side of the fence being greener! At any rate they are looking in good nic.

But what has that got to do with my use of prednisolone? Nothing! We decided to buy some more ewes. Hopefully by getting a good percentage of ewe lambs we hope to run a breeding stock of about 50. The only place we have been able to get them is a round trip of about 1,200Km. This area around us is a cattle area, so there aren’t many sheep, and not many have dorper sheep. (These don’t need shearing, they shed their wool.) So I, usually limited to small trips and often in a wheelchair these days, wanted to go with my son. Hence the three day course.

This son, whom I think is extraordinarily capable, has built two crates to fit a ute and a trailer plus a ramp

So setting out at about 10 in the morning, we arrived back and by midnight had unloaded the extra 15 ewes and were in bed by midnight. I thoroughly enjoyed the outing.

Sunset on the way home over the long Western Queensland plains. It has been a good season.
The new sheep waiting in the yard the next morning. They are a pretty colourful group.

Now we’ll have to wait and see how many lambs we get. They’re all supposed to be pregnant.

Dominic Cartier.

What’s in a picture? Memories

I certainly didn’t expect to see this picture when I opened my computer this afternoon. But there it was straight in front of me.

It’s not the best quality picture but it holds lots of memories.

  • Our only daughter was born when we were home on furlough in Australia but then we returned to our work in a mission hospital, where I was a surgeon. For our daughter’s sake I had better not tell which year it was, as ladies are so conscious of their ages. It was however well over 40 years ago. She is as lovely and beautiful a daughter as anyone could wish for.
  • The young man, a late teenager, was employed as a gardener but took on the role of her constant carer and companion. He loved her heaps.
  • One morning he arrived late for work and we asked if he had had his breakfast. He hadn’t, so we asked him to eat with us. We were having fried tomatoes and onions on toast. He ate it all but then said something I will never forget. ‘You foreigners don’t like all our food. Now I understand why. That was terrible.’ Innocent lovable honesty.
  • He had tuberculosis of his neck glands that responded to treatment’
  • We attended his marriage some years later. He has a lovely wife and beautiful children. Sadly one shortly after graduating from University died.
  • He’s still alive but has known tribal persecution and suffered several major health problems, but is still a man I’m delighted to call a friend.

All that flashed through my mind from just seeing a poor quality old photo. I loved the kid, loved the man and his family and still even in his relative old age think very fondly of him.

Dominic Cartier

Making the Cross meaningless…

Sometimes I dream and it is surprising the odd things which pass through our imaginations when dreaming. I had a dream…

As someone who doesn’t like war I dreamed what gimmick I could popularize to make it so that we can still have a holiday on ANZAC day but not have the soldiers all marching around dressed up as if they idolize the concept of fighting, and the old ones reliving those times of past wars with the terrible loss of life and destruction of property. Supposedly the wars won peace and now we have a world with no more fear of further such horrible world events as WWs I & II. In my dream when I sit and think it seems to all be glorifying a falsehood, for there are new wars beginning somewhere around the world every day.

ANZAC DAY 2016 in Addis Ababa – the Ceremony
The watching Crowd.

I think that I might choose a Koala. They are not particularly aggressive, they look so cuddly. I’m sure that we could teach them how to have tasty cupcakes, instead of normal koala babies. Their babies could have all sorts of flavours and toppings. And possible I could get big businesses to get involved and make chocolate koalas and surely with their inventiveness to make profit and to take away the horrible thoughts of war. They maybe could make little ‘ANZAC cakes’ with a machine gun included into the icing.

Then I, in my dream, ponder. Quietly an angelic little beastie sits on my left shoulder and whispers in my ear – for a minute I hear the point of the celebration and its significance for our nation. ‘Don’t be stupid’, the figure says ‘and ruin something not perfect but basically good and very significant.’

And no sooner they speak I feel the hooves of a caricature dressed in red tights and with horns on their head and a pitch fork on my other shoulder. ‘Go on do it, try it! You’ll probably make yourself a fortune! Look at Easter – they have rabbits, delivering painted eggs! The chocolate factories are on the bandwagon and make a fortune in ridiculously priced chocolate shells covered with brightly coloured foil. Remember they have made little cakes and drawn a couple of lines across it and call it a cross. People wouldn’t buy it if they didn’t put the real meaning of Easter into it somewhere! Go to, boy! I think you’re on a winner!’ ‘Think back on past Easter days, you will see the kids hunting the bushes for chocolate eggs and the nearby churches nearly empty! Go on, you can do it.’

The Old Rugged Cross

And I wake up. I have choices to make in the real world. What will I do this Easter season and on Anzac Day in a few weeks? But don’t forget it is your life; you are only responsible for yourself. Happy Easter.

Dominic Cartier