Recent episodes of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ have touched on a number of issues associated with remote area living.\u00a0 These lifestyle\/business management differences range from unique education arrangements\u00a0(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),\u00a0the need to plan ahead\/shopping differences,\u00a0and safety (eg the need to always\u00a0take care around rivers and swamps, in crocodile country).\u00a0 Often these issues have just been mentioned in passing – and thoughtful viewers would have been left with a raft of questions.\u00a0 However decent answers are too involved to\u00a0be realistically do-able on\u00a0a 30 minute ‘reality’ style programme.<\/p>\n
But there’s also been a few glaring gaffes.\u00a0 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’.\u00a0 Feral, unbranded bulls are caught and\u00a0sold, not kept.\u00a0 In fact later in the programme Milton mentioned that they aimed to catch 30 bulls\u00a0a day late in the year, because it was ‘handy fuel money’.\u00a0 Once cleanskin bulls are caught, they don’t come within a coo-ee of any cows, instead it’s straight to good\u00a0yards with a fence higher than 6ft (if possible), then onto a ‘town’ truck and to the meatworks to be turned into hamburger mince.\u00a0 Cattle station owners\/managers don’t want the undesirable temperament and physical attributes of feral cattle passed on to any offspring.\u00a0\u00a0Also, cleanskin bulls will tend to lurk in difficult-to-muster scrub and come out at night to compete with the good quality\u00a0and expensive herd bulls, hunting them away from the breeders with the aim of passing on their genes instead.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Because the cleanskins would vanish from open country overnight.\u00a0\u00a0 It’d be like dropping off a bus load of crims at a tea party.\u00a0 Yeah they might scoff a few cakes down\u00a0as 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.<\/p>\n
Early in the 14th episode the commentary remark was also made: ‘the wet season starts in a few weeks’.\u00a0 We all wish it was that cut & dried!\u00a0 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’.\u00a0 However there’s no official start day marked on any calendar and no-one agrees on precise times.\u00a0 Every wet season and every dry season is different and every season starts at a different time and in a different way.\u00a0 And it varies between locations.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But frequently northern Australian residents are disappointed, and bake in unrelenting heat and rising humidity\u00a0instead.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Annual rainfall averages show that the highest rainfall month in the northern end of Australia is February; followed by January then March.\u00a0 December and April average rainfall figures, follow on.\u00a0 Usually wet season rain has gone by some time in April, and months of cloudless, completely rainfall free days, usually follow.\u00a0 In some years these predictable days may\u00a0be 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)\u00a0doesn’t usually commence until December at the earliest.\u00a0 So ‘the wet season starts in 3 weeks’ – if only it was that predictable!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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’.\u00a0 So these unique books, with more than 500 photos taken on Australia’s largest cattle stations,\u00a0are ideal Christmas gifts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The books\u00a0also come with a money-back guarantee of satisfaction.\u00a0 For more information on these outback\u00a0books, visit the Book Contents<\/a> page, or visit the Testimonials<\/a> page to read comments from other book purchasers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recent episodes of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ have touched on a number of issues associated with remote area living.\u00a0 These lifestyle\/business management differences range from unique education arrangements\u00a0(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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,11,217],"tags":[82,179,214,215],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2121,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions\/2121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}