It was Bruce’s next brother Rob to take up some of this city boy’s slack in the second week of my baptism of dust, blood and dog hair at their family farm in Holbrook, during a summer break from university.
They were still calling me ‘Ted’.
A cottage the family rented out on their 10,000-acre grain and sheep farm required a spot of TLC to its modest garden fence, which naturally was a six-wire cattle boundary with two barbs at the top.
I was introduced to the ‘stay’: the diagonal post on any paddock corner that has one end in the ground and is designed to counter the pull of tight wires in order to keep the corner post upright.
Since the house was boxed in by a garden of modest size, each side of tight wire came nowhere close to the kilometres needed out in the real McCoy and thus it was deemed a suitable training ground for me.
There’s a correct process, technique and measuring involved.
I added art to it with a spot of vaudeville.
It was incredibly hot that day and we had no water.
“Oh there’s water, don’t worry,” said Rob when my voice started sounding like a cactus attempting karaoke. But it seemed we had to wait.
They demonstrated installation of one stay and left the remaining three to me. Under supervision.
I’ll spare details. Actually, I might not: corner post in and hole packed down; connection point measured as exactly one axe handle length from the ground; chainsaw cut in four inches on an angle at that point.
Then the tricky bit: swinging the axe to perfection on an upwards angle a la a decent cover-drive that would make the boundary rope — a type of large-scale whittling.
The stay is then put in snugly on an angle inside the triangular divot with a hardwood backstop at the other end in a two-foot hole.
Then pack it all down.
Bruce and Rob took over the wiring, because by then I was on my back, panting.
It was time for a drink and although the enormous rainwater tank was filled to the very brim, the only access to water was through an overflow spout the width of a hand, two metres off the ground.
“This is what you do, Ted,” Rob said.
He then demonstrated the ‘get-it-right-or-you’re-dead’ syphon trick which was a term I coined for reasons that are a few paragraphs away.
Rob took a curved length of stiff polythene irrigation pipe, reached up — for he was tall — and threaded the pipe through the spout until it almost vanished, whereupon his palm covered the end, and he drew it back quickly with his fingers and voila! A stream of ice-cold water soon splashed the brothers’ faces, throat, back of neck and inside their hats.
My mouth was now so dry that even the flies had lost interest, but Rob pulled the pipe out, breaking the syphon.
“Your turn, Ted.”
I found I could undertake the process much quicker than Rob, chiefly because on leaping up with the pipe I accidentally let it go and watched it vanish into the tank, forever.
Their chuckling had that hint of lacking amusement.
“We’re dead,” I said.
“Not to mind, Ted,” said Bruce, “one more stay to go.”
As always, incompetence breeds incompetence, and my final post (pun may as well ring true) resembled a carved totem of which Chips Rafferty would have been proud in Smiley Gets a Gun.
We strolled homeward, the sun not quite against our backs and the dust around us looking positively juicy.
“Is polythene poisoning a thing?”
Bruce had scored higher than me in organic chemistry.
“Probably.”
Two years later Bruce and his brothers visited my family home in Adelaide for a couple of nights for Bruce’s graduation.
They spent the final morning inside my father’s shed where I heard sawing, drilling and much giggling.
At the final meal they presented their work: a wooden trophy of a patch of land with a corner post, angled stay and four wires sticking out.
“Thanks for letting us stay,” was inscribed with a felt pen.
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.