Organise Us? In Dreams! by Christine Larsen

Organise Us? In Dreams!

by Christine Larsen

Everyone has to start somewhere, whether it's early education to begin the learning curve that never ends; apprenticeships to learn careers; dating and falling in and out of love — OR even milking cows! We thought we'd learned farming in the wheat/ sheep belt of Western Australia. But then we came home to South Australia and became Dairy Farmers. This was just part of the first 'hands-on' day!

“Organisation’s the secret,” I said firmly. “Preparation, organisation, imagination… and any other ‘tion’ you can think of!” And I laughed; as though my heart weren’t thudding so hard I thought it would outdo the solid pulsation of the milking machine. It was on a test run before we went down the paddock to get our girls in for our ‘maiden milking’.

True to my deepest philosophy, I had imagined the worst that could happen, worked out how we’d handle it and then tucked it away to the back of my mind. Problem solved (or at least faced and worked through). Kanute once believed this to be a type of pessimism, but soon learned I’m actually a born optimist who prefers to prevent disasters by having a pre-planned course of action. An over-thinker maybe, but an optimist nonetheless. Our ancient dairy had been the first herring-bone style in our area, a breakthrough in its day. At this point in time, however, it had ‘whiskers on it’… as we would discover. The herring-bone style dairy meant cows stood alongside each other in a staggered, zigzag fashion - six girls each side of a waistdeep concrete pit where Kanute and I would milk them with swing-across sets of milking cups. A flat steel bar behind their bottoms and a thick concrete ledge behind their back feet was designed to keep them from joining us. A long feed trough with a walk-space in front enabled hand-bucketing of the cows’ crushed grain rations. In the interest of speed and ease of handling, I carefully lined up the spot where I imagined each cow’s head would be, and evenly spaced out six bucketfuls of their beloved dairy pellets into each trough on both sides. “Perfect”, I announced confidently. “I’m ready.”

Perfect indeed! Except the first cow entering the dairy stopped at the first pile of feed in the trough and started eating. Immediately, everyone else started piling up behind her, pushing and shoving like a mob scene at the opening of a department store sale.

Soon there were cows in the engine room and the milk room around the huge (expensive) stainless steel refrigerated milk vat. A couple went down the steps into our pit; two were wedged tight between the tail rail and the trough; and another tried to jump over the feed trough, succeeding in straddling it instead, totally unable to make her way forward or back.

Bravado - along with pride - comes before a fall. We had no option but to let them all back out again into the dirt yard as we cleaned down the now putrid dairy AND removed the offending feed from the troughs.

A new learning curve! You feed them after they have walked in and shuffled and arranged themselves… and ‘pooped’ again. It took us almost four hours from go to whoa to milk 26 cows. We proudly cut that back to 2-1/2 hours at the p.m. milking. Unimaginable that our ‘regular’ speed some years later would be 80 in two hours. Practice makes perfect, they say… and in this case THEY were right.

Christine is an Australian in the middle of her seventh decade - a writer, farmer, wife, mother, grandmother - now on their retirement farm, and returning from an absence to reignite her works. Christine’s three main genres are - Memoirs - of growing up in the 1950's in Australia, of farming, and of treasured collections. Children's Stories - mostly for middle-school age readers, but also excellent read aloud stories by parents, siblings, grandparents, babysitters, teachers.Short stories + Flash-fiction (and non-fiction) Collections - a range of almost every genre, encompassing every emotion from humour to deepest sadness.