Recent episodes of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ have touched on a number of issues associated with remote area living. These lifestyle/business management differences range from unique education arrangements (eg remote area students are enrolled in school of the air/distance education and meet their ‘classmates’ only rarely), medical issues (eg. the need to travel long distances to have pregnancy tests), the need to plan ahead/shopping differences, and safety (eg the need to always take care around rivers and swamps, in crocodile country). Often these issues have just been mentioned in passing – and thoughtful viewers would have been left with a raft of questions. However decent answers are too involved to be realistically do-able on a 30 minute ‘reality’ style programme.
But there’s also been a few glaring gaffes. One is the commentary remark made when one of the cleanskin bulls objected to being loaded on the truck: ‘he should be happy since he’s going off to breed with the females’. Feral, unbranded bulls are caught and sold, not kept. In fact later in the programme Milton mentioned that they aimed to catch 30 bulls a day late in the year, because it was ‘handy fuel money’. Once cleanskin bulls are caught, they don’t come within a coo-ee of any cows, instead it’s straight to good yards with a fence higher than 6ft (if possible), then onto a ‘town’ truck and to the meatworks to be turned into hamburger mince. Cattle station owners/managers don’t want the undesirable temperament and physical attributes of feral cattle passed on to any offspring. Also, cleanskin bulls will tend to lurk in difficult-to-muster scrub and come out at night to compete with the good quality and expensive herd bulls, hunting them away from the breeders with the aim of passing on their genes instead. Suggesting that Milton was catching the cleanskin bulls to drop them off in a 3-barb paddock with the domesticated cows, has drawn attention to the fact that whoever wrote the script has absolutely no genuine understanding of cattle management on northern cattle stations. Because the cleanskins would vanish from open country overnight. It’d be like dropping off a bus load of crims at a tea party. Yeah they might scoff a few cakes down as they passed by but they wouldn’t hang around where they could be seen and easily re-caught, sipping cups of tea with the ladies.
Early in the 14th episode the commentary remark was also made: ‘the wet season starts in a few weeks’. We all wish it was that cut & dried! Unlike southern regions of Australia which have four relatively predictable seasons and an official calendar start and finish to summer, autumn, winter and spring; northern Australia has two commonly recognised seasons ‘the wet season’ and ‘the dry season’. However there’s no official start day marked on any calendar and no-one agrees on precise times. Every wet season and every dry season is different and every season starts at a different time and in a different way. And it varies between locations. Most commonly, October heat will start to bring thunderstorms to the north, and everyone hopes for some falls of at least several inches each time, in November. But frequently northern Australian residents are disappointed, and bake in unrelenting heat and rising humidity instead. Annual rainfall averages show that the highest rainfall month in the northern end of Australia is February; followed by January then March. December and April average rainfall figures, follow on. Usually wet season rain has gone by some time in April, and months of cloudless, completely rainfall free days, usually follow. In some years these predictable days may be interrupted for just a day or two by cloudbands dropping light rain over the cooler months, and hour-long intense thunderstorms in October & November, but solid rain (from low pressure systems or monsoon troughs) doesn’t usually commence until December at the earliest. So ‘the wet season starts in 3 weeks’ – if only it was that predictable!
From memory there were only going to be 15 episodes of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, and next week shows the start of heavy wet season rain, so presumably it is the last episode.
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Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Image of the bush, Coolibah Station, Keeping up with the Joneses