Self sufficiency down on the farm. Whoops, I mean Station!!
January 1, 2014
Our eldest doing the mincing, no electrics here!
During a recent “cool spell “we went and got a killer. By this I mean the freezer was nearly empty and so we drove out into the paddock, selected a fat little Hereford heifer who wasn’t a particularly good sort, shot her and cut the meat off her. The Hereford’s eat so much better than anything with Bos Indicus in it. In our opinion!!!! Probably got a lot to do with what they are eating themselves. We then loaded the meat onto old shearers stretchers on the back of the Toyota and brought it home and hung it all up in the coldroom. Very satisfying to see the shoulders and the back legs, the rumps, sirloins, rib fillets, neck, briskets and the rib bones all hanging up waiting to age a little, then to be cut up a little more and bagged and then into the freezer. It also occurs to one that one is going to be doing a lot of butchering in the next week or so. With those blunt knives. The magpie family is happy as there are lots of scraps for them and the 2 little dogs are beside themselves with the smell of all that divine beef. They are heartily sick of Chum and My Dog! The big dogs can also expect some delicious bones and scraps. It really hurts the hip pocket when we have to buy meat and sometimes we do for various reasons.
We make up a big tub of brine to corn the meat in ( silverside, sometimes some rib bones, brisket etc) this lives in the coldroom for about 10 days, long enough to cure the meat. We mince certain cuts (with an electric mincer) and also make sausages and rolled roasts. The shin is diced for stewing meat, some cuts are used for crumbed steak and so we are right for meat for about the next 6 months.
It’s a far cry from when Greg was a boy and all they had was a meathouse to store the meat in while it cooled down and a couple of Kerosene fridges. Then if they killed a beast it was only ever in the winter and after about a week of having fresh meat they had to salt the rest as the only method of preservation. The meat was cut into chunks of about 1 or 2 kilos rolled in salt and kept in corn bags in the coolest place they could find. Sometimes hung up in trees. It also had to be inspected every day to make sure that the flies or ants hadn’t found it, sometimes they would wash the meat and resalt it. I reckon you would get fairly sick of eating corned meat all the time! Occasionally they would buy a sheep off a neighbour and kill it for a change in their diet – nice leg of roast mutton would have been a real treat!
Back then meat was the staple in the diet; veg consisted of potatoes, pumpkin and cabbage and maybe some carrots. Salads were a bit suspect – the ingredients for them were very hard to obtain anyway. With the exception of tomatoes and onions the rest of the “Salad” usually came out of a tin: beetroot, peas, corn, bread and butter cucumbers, and for special occasions – asparagus. Oh, potato salad was also very popular! Sometimes there were fresh vegies if they had a vegetable garden going, but back in the 50’s and 60’s Australians were a very conservative bunch – there was no multi cultural stuff happening in the food department out here and not much in the cities either unless you happened to have a Greek, Italian or Lebanese for a friend. So what did they grow in the garden? Tomatoes were prized as was lettuce and cucumber and then there were the old staples – pumpkin, carrots, silverbeet, beans, peas and beetroot.
It was still very much like this when I came out here in the late 70’s, but we did have a large gas freezer that we checked twice a day to make sure it was still a goer and there were no bits of fluff around the naked flame underneath it. At least we were now able to freeze the beef instead of salting it. And we did have a great vegetable garden too when we lived in the Shearers Quarters and also when we first built our house and now I have another one. Back at that the Shearers Quarters!
We probably still eat more meat than the urban population but it is about 35 % of our diet now not the 70% that was once common. That’s in my household anyway! Not the same everywhere I’m sure.
Our little old meathouse at the Shearers Quarters.
Spring in the Outback – Wildflowers at Kilcowera Station
October 28, 2012
We’ve had a great spring for the perennial wildflowers. However there are very few annual wildflowers, as we didn’t get any follow up rain after the 55 ml we received in July. And so far this spring all we have had is dry storms which have started bushfires. About 30,000 acres of Zenonie has been burnt out.
The top picture shows Silver turkey bush which flowers profusely in late winter, it’s colours range from dark purple through to a nice lilac colour. It’s very good at staking motorbike tyres!
The Cassias are next and they flower for months, this one we call broom bush or punty bush.
Then the Eremophilas start, the prettiest and showiest of them all is sturtii, common name in our neck of the woods is False Sandalwood. Also Eremophyla maculata is pretty nice too.
The colours range from a pale pink through to dark lilac. When they get to the end of their flowering period the ground around is covered in blossom and the bush still has white bracts all over and looks like it has been frosted This bush is considered to be a woody weed but redeems itself for a month or so each year by the display it puts on.
Eremophyla maculata is poisonous to stock, but the birds love it!
Then the acacias start flowering and they are always spectacular.
This one is Acacia victoriae.
And this one we call dead finish, it’s super prickly and Zebra Finches really love building their nests in them for protection from predators.
Other trees and shrubs flowering are the Leopard Trees, Whitewood, Needlewoods and the Bloodwoods should start soon. All this means lots of food for the bees, insects and birds. We also have an abundance of Bearded Dragons, Goannas and Emus around.
- Lucy in the wildflowers, Kilcowera Station, Outback Australia.
Kilcowera Station - Life on an outback Queensland Cattle Station 
