Country Living – Quad bike blues

My husband and I made the emotional decision to lease out our farm in order to concentrate on our other business interests, employees and to free-up some life quality time, which is often absent with a heavy workload. The highly respected Northern Rodney farming family of Daniel and Nicola Berger have taken on the lease, and we wish them well.

Our family home is still here, so thankfully I still get to enjoy this amazing view. I must admit the first truckload of breeding ewes that left the farm almost made me burst into tears, but that quickly turned to joy thinking about some of the maintenance I am now going to demand gets done.

So, I have decided to write a short series of columns describing the highlights and low lights of the calamity that was my non-existent farming career. I will also leave my email address under my pic and invite my community to contact me if they would like me to write about anything interesting they are doing. I can write about almost anything, even finding perfect beauty and inspiration in ordinary people leading ordinary lives – feel free to contact me. So, please allow me to flex my fingers over my keyboard and come with me on a journey of farming self-discovery.

I remember when we bought this farm it felt like I was walking through the doors of a newly opened employment agency, and although I was a willing job applicant, I knew in my heart that my resume was woefully inadequate. It all started with the quad bikes.

“Would you like to learn?” Now I realise that most people would be tripping over themselves to roam as free as a bird on a quad over this beautiful place, but for me this proposal needed some major thought processing. Gazing around at the paddocks, hills and those thousands of animals roaming around, a sudden cold sweat and horrifying thought came over me. Hmm, hang on a minute. If I learn to drive one of them, then that may lead to driving over those hills and chasing after them! Ummm. No thanks, get real! Apparently, I am rather fond of my sanity.

I informed my husband that I was more of a “sling ya legs over the back and hold on tight” type of chick, and that sort of quad bike vocation was best left up to the experts with a far greater level of tolerance and skill than me. Of course, my refusal to learn to ride a quad proved problematic over the years. Like the time some clown left one parked behind my car and my stubbornness saw me miss an appointment that I had waited two months for. Or the time I had a flat tyre in a howling storm and my kids were left to walk the 1.3km driveway in the smashing rain – popular mother I was not. To this day, and after all these years, I have never driven a quad: quad bike riding scorecard: 0/10 (epic fail). Sure, I missed out on a lot of fun, but with my sanity intact I was able to open myself up to trying other farming aspects. Next issue I will be discussing “drafting out”. Trust me, Stephen King horror novels have got nothing on that experience. To be continued …

Julie Cotton
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