Pets, Paddocks and Poles (aka My Dad Dropped a Telegraph Pole on Me)

Once upon a time there was a family who lived on a hobby farm for many years.

There was always a dog and a cat around who lived long, happy lives. Except Casper. Casper, the cat, had many lives. He survived being ran over, poisoned with pool chemicals and having the tip of his tail severed by a log falling out of a fire, for which he blamed the dog. Casper was white, making him susceptible to skin cancer, and once the cancer headed towards his brain, his short but dramatic life was brought to a close.

Guinea pigs, budgerigars and mice also became pets at times but were merely fads that caused more grief than joy. The supposed male guinea pig purchased from a pet store had babies; the budgies rarely had babies but when they did, had trouble keeping them alive; and when a mouse was accidentally let loose in the house, the mice were banished, never allowed to return.

To have a hobby farm and not have proper farm animals is a sin.

There was once a horse called Robbie on agistment that nobody in the family were confident enough to ride. He jumped fences for his own entertainment. A single electric wire was erected at the top of the fence line. He sniffed it and experienced the shock of a quick jolt. He turned his back on the fence and in one decisive action, accurately kicked the wire to the ground with his hind hooves. He continued to jump fences until his owners sold him a couple of years later.

Next on the scene was Sally, a goat acquired to be a cheap lawnmower. She was brought home in the back of the Holden station wagon, ripping the vinyl lining on the ceiling of the car with her horns.  She was a beautiful creature and supplied the family with milk, the children and the father unaware that the mother filled regular milk bottles with Sally’s nectar. A few months later Sally gave birth to a couple of kids and they were then all bundled off to a place that could handle such a tribe of goats.

A box of cute cheeping chicks was selected from a farm and carefully carried in the lap of a child for the car drive back home. The chicks were loved, to the extent that one of them was nurtured to death within the little boy’s hands. He was distraught once he realised what he had done. The rest of the chicks quickly grew into chooks and attracted a neighbour’s dog for an occasional midnight feast. An axe brought the demise of the remaining few. The mother of the family cried as she plucked them and cried again as she watched her children eat the result of her labour.

The only real farming success came in the form of poddy calves. The father would buy a handful of poddy calves, hand-feed them until they were ready to exist only on grass, fatten them up and then sell all but one after a couple of years. The last in each lot was kept for butchering. Daisy was the first. A calf that jumped fences was named after Tim Forsyth, the Olympian high jumper. Splash appeared to have a whack of paint dropped on her forehead. Many guests were put off their BBQ lunch when the children talked about Daisy or Timmy or Splash in loving terms, appreciating the beasts as pets they loved as well as for the joyous flavour they produced.

The cow paddock lacked trees. A public servant’s salary didn’t stretch to the construction of farming infrastructure so the Dad had to innovate. He loved a good bargain and at an auction he found a large pile of telegraph poles, cut to three-quarter length. As a draftsman, he fancied himself as a self-taught architect and could picture these poles becoming a grand stable. He snaffled them up.

Building the stable walls was easy enough to do alone, in the beginning, and a pulley system helped to lift the poles up the wall but on a day when one of the pulleys broke, a second pair of hands was needed. His wife was too busy with the youngest child so he enlisted the help of the eldest.

He thought the 11 year old would be able to easily move the chock of wood up a level while he held the telegraph pole up, waiting to rest the pole on the wood in its new position, between the existing wall and the ladder. However, the child had trouble finding a spot where the wood would take hold and be stable. As the Dad lost his strength he yelled “run” at the child but she backed into the stable instead of away from it. The dropped pole bounced on her head (explains everything, her family would say for the rest of her life), knocking her to the ground, where her legs then received the final impact of the pole’s fall. She screamed and was momentarily in awe of her scream echoing around the countryside. Her father lifted the pole off her legs and tried to help her to her feet but she couldn’t stand. He carried her back to the house but before entering she said she would try to walk again. She was able to hobble with help from her father. Still, they took her to Emergency at the local hospital where it was declared she just had major bruising. She walked pigeon-toed for several months after that.

Somehow the stables were completed and was filled with hay and the hay became populated with mice. The children would chase the mice, unaware of how the mice would have attracted snakes, brown snakes which could kill with a bite. A baby brown snake once came into the house and shattered the illusion of home being a safe place. Grass would grow long where there were no animals to keep it down and the children would play games within it, boisterous enough to keep the snakes out of sight.

There were telegraph poles leftover after the stables were built so instead of letting the pile become another snake haven, holes were dug around an area that was a yet-to-be-completed tennis court. Relatives from Sydney, who regularly visited at Easter, helped to insert the poles into place. When there was enough money, chicken wire was going to be wrapped around the poles to form the tennis court enclosure.

Meanwhile, the tennis court only existed in imagination. The ground had a bit of a slope so to make the court as flat as possible a retaining wall had to be built. The material for the wall came in the form of test concrete cylinders, covered in a yellow sulphate on each end. Apparently, concrete had to be tested for road worthiness hundreds of times. Children were paid 5c a cylinder to chip off the sulphate ends. The Easter rural retreat became a tennis court working bee for several years running. One year, with the help of a hired bob-cat, the area was flat enough to erect a net and have a hit and giggle for an hour or so.

The money required for a court surface and the chicken wire fence never materialised and the tennis court became no more. The concrete cylinders were repurposed for converting the carport into an enclosed garage and lining the walls of a nuclear war shelter. Eventually all that remained of the tennis court, were the fourteen telegraph poles.

After the children grew up and were well established as city dwellers, with families and careers of their own, the mother and father sold the hobby farm and moved to a bigger piece of land. They continue to live there with their poddy calves, a cat and a dog, but alas, no telegraph poles or concrete cylinders for building architectural dreams. The calf-port, however, is a story for another day.