After last week’s episode of Keeping up with the Joneses, full of end of year bullcatching, cane toad racing, croc egg collecting\u00a0and Christmas preparations, it was great to see baby Jack Jones, the newest arrival in the Jones family.\u00a0 The story of Cristina Joneses pregnancy has reminded me of how different it is to have children when living in a remote area.\u00a0 Trips for standard ultrasounds and obstetrician checkups that would be quickly, easily and relatively cheaply accomplished by city residents are major events for anyone living in a remote area (especially once they already have some children to look after).\u00a0\u00a0Speaking from personal experience, having done it both ways.\u00a0 Hundreds of kilometres have to be travelled so it’s not usual for it to be a one-day single-purpose trip.\u00a0 Invariably other appointments are scheduled\u00a0around the same time, such as\u00a0dentist checkups and car repairs or servicing, plus fun stuff such as haircuts.\u00a0 And shopping necessities are stocked up on – including necessities for the new arrival.\u00a0 Everything from toys to clothing of different sizes, bedding, chemist shop items, car seats etc.\u00a0 In\u00a0effect, what a town resident spreads over many short visits spread over the whole year, a remote area resident jams in to an exceedingly busy 2-3 day period several times a year. \u00a0Tonight’s episode of Keeping\u00a0up with the Joneses\u00a0was a great reminder of how forward thinking rural mothers must be – if you run out of essentials, there’s no popping down to the shop at short notice.\u00a0 I hated running out of anything, so always had spares of everything essential.\u00a0 The helicopter flight with the newborn Jack Jones reminded me of my trip home with our first baby.\u00a0 We returned home in early January after 6 weeks away, and deep water in a wide, sandy creek made the main dirt road home, impassable.\u00a0 After a couple of day’s waiting in the closest town we got a lift home in a Toyota for the 100km+ drive home.\u00a0 For a number of kilometres in one stretch, we crawled along in the 4wd\u00a0following someone walking ahead on the dirt road through the water, checking that there were no hidden washouts.\u00a0 Our week-old baby was sweating in the car capsule sitting on my lap.\u00a0 The road dried out enough to bring our own car home 4 weeks later.<\/p>\n
The patient travel schemes run by state governments to provide financial rebates for travel to essential\u00a0medical\u00a0appointments by remote area residents, are a bad joke.\u00a0 Last time I looked, the\u00a0patient transit scheme reimbursement rate for an overnight stay was $35!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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\u00a0etc) 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.<\/p>\n
In total there were\u00a015 x 30 minute episodes in the Keeping up with the Joneses tv series, plus the one hour introductory episode.\u00a0\u00a0Tonight’s episode 16 was the final episode.\u00a0 It revolved around Christmas, the arrival of the wet season and the birth of the latest member of the Jones clan, Jack.<\/p>\n
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?).\u00a0\u00a0 The last\u00a0segment in the final episode was especially well done and will\u00a0inspire many people of all ages to head bush to work on a cattle station, or aspire to raising their children in the bush.\u00a0 Throughout\u00a0series 1\u00a0and 2 of \u00a0‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ we’ve seen little Milton\u00a0and Coolibah employees\u00a0riding steers and \u00a0poddies (calves), campdrafting and mustering\u00a0on horseback,\u00a0catching crocodiles and raiding\u00a0nests for croc eggs, helicopter mustering, motorbike riding, fishing for barra, jetski riding, toad racing, bullcatching and driving roadtrains and graders.\u00a0\u00a0 The stuff of dreams for active boys and girls, trapped in classrooms.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, everyone who has\u00a0enjoyed 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’.\u00a0\u00a0These unique books contain more than 500 colour photos taken on\u00a0cattle 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\u00a0Gulf,\u00a0and arid Channel Country.\u00a0\u00a0 These cattle stations are businesses and are not open to the general public – the only way to see\u00a0what they are like is to work on them, or via photographs or film. \u00a0The books\u00a0are\u00a0ideal Christmas gifts for anyone who is interested in\u00a0Australian outback life.\u00a0 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.\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.\u00a0 Many book purchasers have taken the plunge and started living and working on one of the\u00a0cattle stations included in the books, after being inspired by the photos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After last week’s episode of Keeping up with the Joneses, full of end of year bullcatching, cane toad racing, croc egg collecting\u00a0and Christmas preparations, it was great to see baby Jack Jones, the newest arrival in the Jones family.\u00a0 The story of Cristina Joneses pregnancy has reminded me of how different it is to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,8,11,217],"tags":[100,179,214,215],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140"}],"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=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2172,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}