The patient travel schemes run by state governments to provide financial rebates for travel to essential medical appointments by remote area residents, are a bad joke.  Last time I looked, the patient transit scheme reimbursement rate for an overnight stay was $35!  Remote area residents are out of pocket thousands of dollars on travel & accommodation-related expenses by the time their baby attends the standard 6 week checkup with a paediatrician, unless they’re lucky enough to be able to travel by road to a town where there’s relatives they can stay with.  Because these children and mothers are in a remote area the standard pregnancy and follow up appointments after the birth, are far more vital than is the case for mothers and children who live within an hour or less drive of a hospital (i.e. within a fairly short ambulance ride in the event of an emergency).  In fact it is usual for anyone living a long distance from a hospital to go and live in the town where it is intended for the baby to be born, at least 2 weeks beforehand, if not 4 (the latter being a common choice for first time mothers [who've never had a test run to make sure the landing gear more or less works as it should], if there are any potential issues that surface (eg low placenta, high blood pressure or blood sugar etc) or if the mother lives in an area where roads are likely to be impassable at the time of year that the baby is due.

In total there were 15 x 30 minute episodes in the Keeping up with the Joneses tv series, plus the one hour introductory episode.  Tonight’s episode 16 was the final episode.  It revolved around Christmas, the arrival of the wet season and the birth of the latest member of the Jones clan, Jack.

Judging by the amount of comments I’ve received regarding how much people are enjoying watching Keeping up with the Joneses, it would be nice to see more episodes or a follow up programme in future years (will the tribe of Cristina’s boys expand beyond two, to four?).   The last segment in the final episode was especially well done and will inspire many people of all ages to head bush to work on a cattle station, or aspire to raising their children in the bush.  Throughout series 1 and 2 of  ’Keeping up with the Joneses’ we’ve seen little Milton and Coolibah employees riding steers and  poddies (calves), campdrafting and mustering on horseback, catching crocodiles and raiding nests for croc eggs, helicopter mustering, motorbike riding, fishing for barra, jetski riding, toad racing, bullcatching and driving roadtrains and graders.   The stuff of dreams for active boys and girls, trapped in classrooms.

In the meantime, everyone who has enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ can do some armchair travel to many of Australia’s largest and most remote cattle stations, via the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  These unique books contain more than 500 colour photos taken on cattle stations in the Northern Territory (including the Victoria River District, the region where Coolibah Station is located), Western Australia’s beautiful Kimberley Region and Queensland’s remote Cape York Peninsula and Gulf, and arid Channel Country.   These cattle stations are businesses and are not open to the general public – the only way to see what they are like is to work on them, or via photographs or film.  The books are ideal Christmas gifts for anyone who is interested in Australian outback life.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, and books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.  Many book purchasers have taken the plunge and started living and working on one of the cattle stations included in the books, after being inspired by the photos.

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.

People who have enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ love the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  So these unique books, with more than 500 photos taken on Australia’s largest cattle stations, are ideal Christmas gifts.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.

It’s much harder to locate well-explained rural blogs written by people running fulltime agribusinesses, long-term - with information on the nitty-gritty facts of large scale farming and livestock raising, environmental and agribusiness issue discussions.  (Full time) farmers work long hours most or all days of the week and are generally exhausted when they knock off.  So naturally it’s hard to find any hands-on fulltime farmers dedicated enough to voluntarily spend some of their scant spare time, writing about what they do, for no other reason than to help people unfamiliar with the industry, understand how their food and fibre is grown and encourage thought on topical issues.

However there are a few.  Here’s a few excellent rural blogs that I’ve found via some concerted digging around the internet:

• Dairyfarming – Milk Maid Marian (Marian Macdonald, Gippsland, Victoria) Excellent info on dairyfarming and explanations of issues.
• Free Range Pig farming & heritage poultry and other rare livestock breeds – Mt Gnomon Farm (Guy Robertson & Eliza Wood, NW Tasmania) Loving descriptions of their livestock combined with the practical realities of raising livestock to be eaten – different to the average ‘organic, free range’ type farmers who are specialising in odd breeds because they’re ‘cute’ - this couple are the real deal.
• Cotton growing – Tales of a Cotton Wife (Bess, Mungindi, northern NSW) Excellent info on cotton growing.
• Chook farming – Our Free Range Farm  (Andy Peverill, Cookamidgera NSW) Good explanations of the trials of chook farming.  And no it’s not like having half a dozen chooks in the backyard, only bigger.
• Grain Cropping – Nerd Farmer (Jonathan Dyer, Wimmera district, Victoria)  Wondering what your supermarket pasta is made from?  Jonathan grows it, and he explains it.

I’m still looking for a well written, informative blog similar to the style of the above farming blogs, but written by someone making a living out of Merino sheep (as distinct from non-fine wool breeds).  Given the historical significance of Australia’s production of fine wool, and the continuing uniqueness of our fine wool industry, the lack of blogs written by people living on Merino sheep properties is surprising. 

Writing good quality blog posts, regularly and long-term, with no prospect of financial or other tangible gain, is truly an act of dedication.  The rural blogging landscape is constantly changing as new farm bloggers begin, full of enthusiasm, and longer term farm bloggers find their supply of time and/or energy has depleted past the point where continued blogging is possible.

I look forward to seeing additional farming blogs written by people involved in all aspects of Australian agriculture, from horticulture and fruit growing, to fishing and forestry, crop growing and livestock raising, in different parts of the continent.  And a good blog written by someone running Merinos.  The more variety there is, the faster 2-dimensional farming stereotypes will be broken down.

Attendance at these social media workshops is is highly recommended for any livestock producers who are interested in learning more about how to get first-hand stories of everyday rural life and issues, direct to anyone who is unfamiliar with Australian agriculture, via the internet or mobile phones.  I’m not sure that there would have been much rural interest in attending social media workshops prior to the live export ban fiasco.  But the outpouring of live export misinformation actually did the bush a favour in one way, because it highlighted the increasingly urgent necessity for as many rural Australians as possible to take maximum advantage of the huge range of direct storytelling and networking avenues now available, to counterbalance the mass of opinion very efficiently broadcast by animal rights extremists and uninformed conservationists (eg the ones who keep telling us that ‘Meat Free Mondays’ will stop the sea engulfing coral atolls in the Pacific). 

MLA workshop information includes websites (static or rarely changing background information – but it can take days or even weeks to be found by search engines, especially if the website is new and/or small), Blogs and online forums (up-to-the minute opinion pieces, found by search engines within minutes), Twitter (instant 140 character messages, around the world in seconds), Facebook (more personal and casual family stories, but also how to set up a Facebook ‘Page’ for business networking/storytelling), LinkedIn (more formal business networking – direct with decision makers running companies and organisations to grassroots primary producers; all around the world), YouTube (videos) and Flickr (online galleries of still images).

Workshop participants bring their own laptop if possible.  And if you need help with anything, it’s there in spades.  Our group had a huge age range, from Hillgrove’s venerable can-do Tom Mann at 76 (embarrassingly capable with a fancy mobile phone activities) to people many decades younger.  The range of experience was very varied also, however most had personal experience with one area (eg Facebook) but knowledge gaps in other areas. 

Participants end the one and a half days with a Tumblr blog page set up and a Facebook ‘Page’ (for non-family/close friends) set up, with images and links attached.  Plus a new network and a specific ‘to do’ list.

Any livestock producers who are interested in attending the MLA ’Social Media Conversations’ workshops should contact Deborah Leake at Meat & Livestock Australia as soon as possible, because only the dates and locations for the first 3 ‘test run’ workshops (Charters Towers, Qld; Katherine, NT & Katanning, WA) have been set.  More workshops will be held in other areas in 2012.   Speaking up now will help ensure an MLA workshop is held within travelling distance of where the largest number or most interested participants live.  Information Technology-related workshops tailored for rural residents are as scarce as hen’s teeth – so best to sieze the opportunity.

Over the last six months it has been great to see so many rural residents realise they have first-hand stories of what it’s like to live in the bush that are of interest to other people, and that you don’t need to have some sort of special qualification to be able to write something of interest to others.  The more primary producers who invest a bit of online time in explaining to the public what their life is like, all over Australia and in all aspects of food and fibre production, the better off we’ll all be now, and future generations.

‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ debuted on TV One in New Zealand today, in prime time – 7pm on a Saturday night (filling the gap made by Country Calendars break for the summer).  And if website traffic is anything to go on, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is a hit in NZ.

While my NZ customers, both north and south islanders, tell me the city/rural divide is growing in New Zealand just as it is in Australia, it’s still a country in which the most popular rural programme can continue to screen on TV in prime viewing time, 7pm on Saturday nights - TV NZ’s ‘Country Calendar’.  (Unlike in Australia – where ABC TV’s ‘Landline’ programme has been relegated by ABC urban residing TV programme schedulers to noon Sunday for quite some time, despite consistently attracting more than 500,000 viewers each episode though on air at such an inconvenient time.)

And I’m wondering why Australia doesn’t have a rural television station the equivalent of New Zealand’s ‘Country 99′ TV; whose aim is ‘providing interesting and relevant information and entertainment to farmers and the rural community’.  I’m absolutely green with envy when I check out what ‘Country 99′ has listed for just this week.  Lots of great rural-related programmes on horses (eg ‘FEI Equestrian World’, ‘Along for the Ride’, ‘Backstage pass with Monty Roberts’ and ‘Under the Spell of Horses’), discussions of farming issues and agricultural current affairs, rural financial information and comprehensive weather reports, etc.   Plus rural lifestyle-social event related programmes – eg Tractor pulling championships and ‘Classic Tractor Fever’, Bull riding championships, sheepdog trials and the Golden Shears competition; plus music programmes that are less likely to get aired on other TV channels.   Country 99 also screens Australia’s ABC ‘Landline’ and ‘Gardening Australia’ programmes, as well as some rural-related programmes from other countries.

As previously mentioned, America also has their own rural television channel, RFD-TV.  Australia doesn’t have the 300 million+ population of the U.S.A., but at 22 million+ we are way ahead of New Zealand’s population of 4 million, and our Kiwi neighbours manage to run a full-time rural television channel yet the lack here remains glaring.  We’re all dependent on food production and primary producers, food production is the most vital issue on the planet – and an Australian rural television channel dedicated to rural and remote Australia would easily fill up with a mixture of good quality Australian-produced programmes and the best of what is produced in NZ, U.S.A, Canada and Britain; plus rural trading partners and sometimes competitor nations such as Argentina, Brazil and South Africa.   Agribusiness, worldwide, is a multi, multi, billion dollar business – there’d be plenty of advertising revenue to be had, for an Australian rural television channel.

With coastal Australians now able to access all 16 digital TV channels - surely one could be a channel dedicated to rural television – food and fibre production, livestock, rural news, current affairs and lifestyle etc.  Especially given that a number of the new Australian television channels are just running repeats or simultaneous broadcasts.

For many years New Zealanders have visited Australia to take up some of the hard rural work that (ahem) many idle Aussies have trouble working up enthusiasm for, from fruit picking to shearing.  In fact Kiwi shearers have kept the Australian wool industry alive in many rural areas where Australian shearers became an almost extinct species.  More recently, young New Zealanders taking a ‘gap year’ between completion of year 12 and tertiary education, have been heading to northern Australia in increasing numbers.  They’ve been taking up jobs on cattle stations, from station cooking to jillaroo and stockman work.   Many girls head to Australian cattle stations to work, because they love horses – and on stations, they get to spend all day most days, riding horses while mustering.

No doubt ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ of Coolibah Station will encourage more New Zealanders to head over to Australian cattle stations for a couple of years of gap-year work, which is a good thing for everyone concerned.

New Zealanders are also the highest per capita purchasers of books in the world – and many have bought the coffee-table style books “A Million Acre Masterpiece’ & ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’, in order to either reminisce about Australian cattle stations they’ve worked on, do some ‘armchair’ travel, or research before travelling to Australia.  These books are memorable gifts for anyone interested in rural life.  The books contain nearly 500 photos taken on a variety of cattle stations (similar to Coolibah) located across the top of northern Australia.  Many of these stations are amongst the largest in Australia –  measuring 10,000 square kilometres or more and running 10,000 – 60,000 or more head of cattle, and running large numbers of working stockhorses.  Books can be personally signed and mailed anywhere in the world.  Delivery to New Zealand usually takes 10-14 days.  These best-selling Australian books are unique, and an ideal introduction into the fascinating but little known life on Australian cattle stations.

William Hayes of the Meat Trade News Daily is well placed to comment on livestock breeds in the south of England where he grew up.  ‘You see these magnificent period dramas, with beautiful costumes and every detail just right – but then you see friesian cattle.  When I was a boy growing up you would only ever see Devon, South Devon and Shorthorn cattle.  No black and white cattle.  What a lot of people don’t realise is that there were only dual purpose cattle around then.  Beautiful big Devon cattle that could eat all day and all night.  There were no friesians in Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset until the 1960s.’  William went on to say that friesian cattle would have been brought into the UK after the war (WWII) from the Netherlands, and friesians would have arrived in the south of England from Wales, during the 1960s.

Producers of historical dramas would not contemplate trotting out the wrong model car, clothing fashions or technology – so it’d be nice if they’d put more effort into getting the livestock breeds accurate as well.  If the precise breeds can’t be found, at least film another breed of a similar colour and shape – at least stock less conspicuous than the world’s most unmistakably patterned dairy cow.

And, please, no more ‘voice overs’ of mooing temperate-climate cattle such as Herefords, when it is a tropical breed such as Brahmans that we’re seeing on screen.  This gaffe is akin to dubbing Abba singing over the top of KISS concert images, or squealing rubber car tyres on a sandy track.  Sound is an integral part of the atmosphere.   And how hard can it be to whip the microphone out in front of a mob of brahmans, it’s not as if they’re especially quiet.

In another piece of typical film production – when we watch the injured duck swim off, we hear a Khaki Campbell duck type of quacking (Khaki Campbells are a domestic breed of duck, first bred in England – the sort you’d find turning the water green in Sydney or Melbourne Botanic Gardens) – when in fact it would have been a native breed, probably a very common ‘whistling’ duck.  Having lived in lots of different parts of Australia, I find it difficult not to notice when film editors stuff up bird and animal noises (the most common error, with regard to cattle stations, is adding the sound of bos taurus cattle (eg Herefords) mooing though it’s a mob of bos indicus cattle (eg Brahmans) we’re seeing – when in fact these two types of cattle sound distinctly different.)

In episode 9 we see what is now a typical sight in the bush – backpackers at work.  However these two girls (from England  and Scotland – where the hardest working backpackers come from, according to many rural employers) are more cheerful than most.  However I hope the Joneses doubled their potato order, given the amount that was carved off during the peeling process (start with one large potato with the skin on, finish with one very small, peeled potato).  One confessed to having never cooked a meal before.  One backpacker I met years ago was employed as the station cook although she was a strict vegetarian.  As beef was on the menu morning, noon and night; doing a good job of cooking something you never ate, and in a varied fashion, was a near impossibility.  The manager even refused to eat any of the first pot of rice she cooked, and tipped it into the pig’s bucket.

But I am left wondering about the big circular area of cultivated land, not far from the Coolibah homestead.  It looked like a crop has been planted (presumably some sort of cattle feed – eg sorghum) and that it will be watered by a centre pivot irrigator.  Hopefully this gets a mention in another episode.

People who have enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ love the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  These unique books contain more than 500 photos taken on Australia’s largest cattle stations and every photo has a short but interesting caption, to help those unfamiliar with these cattle stations understand more about outback life.  These books are ideal Christmas gifts.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.

Summary of entry details:

Entry in the ‘Champions of the Land’ photo competition is open from 26 October and closes on 29 November 2011.  So there is no time to waste.

Up to 3 photos will be accepted in the competition, but these photos must be substantially different from one another.  Entered images are not eligible for selection if they have been published anywhere else, already.  Each entry must be accompanied by a statement of 25 words or less, describing the story behind the photograph.  Entries must of course be the original work of entrants.

Judging:

There are 3 judges.  Helen McCabe, Editor-in-chief of the Women’s Weekly; Deborah Leake, MLA, and myself (a professional photographer specialising in rural Australia). 

The 5 finalist images will be published in the January 2012 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, along with the photographer’s details etc, thus receiving valuable publicity for the photographer and for rural Australia.  The final winner will receive a 64GB Apple ipad – and additional, very valuable publicity – via publication in the February 2012 issue of AWW.

The MLA may also organise an exhibition of a selection of the entered images during 2012, which is the Year of the Farmer.  Entrants whose images are selected for exhibition will have their names appearing with their images, and in any catalogue/s or image lists that are produced for the exhibition/s.  (So anyone interested in purchasing a copy of the exhibited images, would be able to contact the photographer direct.)

Judges will be looking for creativity/originality and how well the photos relate to the theme – food producers working and caring for their land and livestock.  Plus, of course, technical excellence.  Usually, winning images involve the ideal combination of originality (of subject, composition, approach) and technical ability.  But photos also have to be relevant to the theme – otherwise they won’t be in the race.

The finalist photos will be published in the Australian Women’s Weekly.  Because AWW is a full colour glossy magazine, print reproduction qualities will unavoidably be a consideration as well (although this aspect is largely covered by the above-mentioned reference to the necessity of a good technical standard, it is worth emphasising).

The Australian Women’s Weekly has the highest circulation of any Australian magazine – reaching more than 2 million Australians via nearly half a million sold copies per month.

The three smaller ‘insert’  images that appear in the double page ‘Champions of the bush’ article in the November AWW issue (pages 214-5) were taken by myself on Rosewood Station (northern NT/WA border), Tanbar (Channel Country, Qld) and Wrotham Park (upper Gulf Country, Qld).

For specific details on how to enter and where to send entries in ‘Champions of the Land’, plus the terms & conditions ‘fine print’, refer to the November 2011 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.

I am very much looking forward to being part of the judging team for this photography competition.  So get busy and send in your best images, and please pass the information on to anyone else you know who may be interested in entering.

PS:  Please note that as a judge I can’t provide personal advice or answer questions regarding the competition, so any queries are forwarded on to ACP (publishers of the Australian Women’s Weekly).  The photography competition Terms & Conditions are on the ACP Magazines website.

Typically cloudless dry season skies above typically dusty horizons – with the ‘Barkly Breeze’ putting in an appearance making the fancy outfits fly up around the ears and campfires spread into the mitchell grass.

The Brunette Races were described on ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ as the Territory’s biggest sporting event, which is not actually true (for example there are annual races in Darwin and Alice Springs which draw large crowds).  However in 2010 the Brunette Races were the busiest they’d ever been because so many extra people made the effort to travel from all over Australia to attend the special centenary celebrations.  The Brunette races are held over several days and feature horse races, a campdraft, rodeo and childrens events.  The first couple of days are quieter, mostly residents from surrounding cattle stations.  Whereas the last 2 days (weekend days) have a much bigger crowd, which includes more visitors from further afield.  While there is food and drink to be purchased, visitors have to be largely self-sufficient – and it’s many hundreds of kilometres to the nearest supermarket of any kind.

Next week’s episode of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ apparently features the chopper crash, which has appeared in the promos since last year, and the arrival of a couple of backpackers.

People who have enjoyed watching ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ love the best-selling coffee table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.  These unique books contain more than 500 photos taken on Australia’s largest cattle stations and every photo has a short but interesting caption, to help those unfamiliar with these cattle stations understand more about outback life.  These books are ideal Christmas gifts.  Orders for 2 or more books come with a free calico carrybag and a good discount, books can be personally signed and mailed direct to anywhere in the world.  The books also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.  For more information on these outback books, visit the Book Contents page, or visit the Testimonials page to read comments from other book purchasers.

Great news for everyone who has enjoyed this insight into Territory cattle station life, Jones-style, via Milton and Cristina Jones and family and employees.

For more comments on the ’Keeping up with the Joneses’ TV series, including background information on the Jones family and filming information, refer to the ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ tag.

For a fascinating tour of some of the largest cattle stations in the world, which are not open to the general public, refer to ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ & ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’.