The reliable farm hand

When you have a lot of enthusiasm and drive and you want to get ahead in life you tend to take a few more risks especially when you’re young and single.   I didn’t care too much for ego when it came to making my way in life hence have worked in some pretty interesting jobs and situations over the years.

A classic from my early years was a summer farming job I took on to help pay for university.  The farm was close to 5000 acres, which translates into 20 square kilometer’s in size…so, yes a rather large property and although I had worked on his farm (Max was the manager).  I had worked for Max in the past but mostly just for harvest.   However, this particular year was different cos’ although my job started as a hired hand for the harvest it became quite apparent that I was his most reliable worker.   You see living in a small farming community the men who generally worked on farms were itinerate and to a fair degree unreliable in that as soon as pay day came they pretty much went straight to the pub and drank their wages away.   Sometimes showing up for work, sometimes not….this particular year was particularly unreliable in terms of attendance which pissed him off and drove him to ask me to take on more responsibility.

Scary and hard to believe that a skinny 19 year old was your most reliable worker, but in any event there I was being asked to do a little more each week around the farm, not just related to the harvest.  The farm itself was dedicated to cereal crops (wheat, barley and some oats), as well the owner had a number of race horses for breeding purposes and a rather large herd of prize Hereford bulls plus a reasonable herd of assorted cattle and livestock.   This farm was one of the larger ones in the district and one of the most successful.  

Max had 2 full time farm hands and himself all tending to the large variety of jobs required to run a farm of this size and scale.   The owner was a wealthy Melbourne businessman whom I actually never saw in all my years working on the farm.

The first job that year prior to the real harvest was the carting of the hay, in those days we still cut, raked and baled the small rectangular bales of hay, then waited for them to dry in the paddock before loading them onto trucks from an elevator attached to the side of the truck, then stacked carefully into one of the many covered hay-sheds dotted across the broad expanse of his property.  From the homestead it would sometimes take us an hour or more over dirt roads and farm tracks to get to the paddock where we were working that day.

I became his foreman on the hay harvest, leading two guys in their late 30’s and 40’s.   One of us drove the truck, one up top loading the bales as they came up the elevator and the other either slashing additional paddocks, raking the drying grass or baling anew.   In those days we each received the princely sum of 1 cent per bale of hay stacked in the hay-shed, we had to account for every bale carted and stacked each day.   On average we would cart and stack between 1000 and 1200 bales per day depending on the drive from the paddock to the nearest hay-shed - you do the math on how much I made per workday.

GM Holden utes - modern day vs. 1950's classic

One day Max left me in charge as he had to drive into the closest town (30 miles away) to take possession of his new ute (“pick up truck” in North American vernacular). He was away most of the day but checked in on us mid afternoon.    All was going swimmingly, until he arrived back and pulled in behind the large hay truck we were unloading.   I was up inside the haystack, some 15m high above the ground sorting and tying in the bales as they came up the elevator to me. It wasn't long before we had reached the end of one section of the stack and had to move to the next area to finish unloading.   

Max had been quietly observing the operation from next to the truck and saw me motion my offsider to move the truck back into its new place so we could continue unloading.   However, before I could get his attention he had quickly jumped down off the back of the truck and climbed into the cab, starting it and slamming it in reverse and with a rev he reversed straight back into Max’s new ute.   The look on Max’s face said it all as he screamed, “Bloody murder and raced to the trucks cabin pounding on the door.  Alas, it was too late…the corner of the bed of the truck had literally “can opened” his new ute from the front headlight, through the front panel, taken the door off as it continued its vicious path along the side of the vehicle until he was able to finally stop the driver from any more damage.  Of course I was to blame as I was the foreman.  A virtual write-off thank you very much - nice work Mr. Wallis!  And less than 100 km on the clock….

I’m not sure I’ve seen someone more upset than Max that afternoon – the air thick with a litany of profanities that would have made a sailor blush!    In any event he blamed me for the tragedy that befell his new ute, clearly I was the idiot who parked behind a large hay truck :) Although I was never to live it down that didn’t stop him from continuing to employ me.   Did I hear you say “glutton for punishment?” – that’s your outer voice!

Wheat harvest - Victoria, Australia 

His second mistake was to occur later that summer after yet another bumper crop and the main harvest complete.   Max was going to take his family back to Tasmania to visit his parents and so asked me to be caretaker of the farm for a couple of weeks.   Fortunately for me I knew the inner workings of the farm pretty well by this time and so agreed - along with a little bump in pay if I was able to manage it okay.    He was a little anal so he left me a huge laundry list of activities to do at certain times and days, very specific instructions …no worries, what on earth could go wrong?

To be honest it was a great two weeks, just me and the farm as his other farm hands were also taking a well-earned break.   I had taken amazing care of the farm, until disaster struck late on the Saturday afternoon the day before he was due back.   He had warned me that when I went to feed his prize cattle that I had to take a very specific track and to not deviate from his directions pure and simple.  

Well, that was all well and good until I was running late that Saturday afternoon – yes, a young ladies charms beckoned and I had agreed to pick her up but given the last task I was going to be late.   So rather than follow his specific directions, I had decided to take a shortcut…. I wondered why, albeit briefly why I hadn't thought of taking this route before.  I hitched the new John Deere (air-conditioned no less – very fancy) tractor to the trailer, loaded it up and roared off across the paddock toward the gate, ignoring the perfectly good track about ½ mile away that he had insisted I take.   I guess I was about 150 meters across the paddock and I heard an almighty “bang”.   The front window of the tractor cabin was immediately covered in some sort of fluid….

I stopped the tractor and jumped down from the cab to witness the enormity of what I had just done.

Hereford Bull - Royal Sydney Show

I had hit the electric fence wires that ran overhead from the wool-shed to the fences surrounding his prize bulls.   In fact it had actually hit the chimney of the tractor, snapping it off clean; which then flew straight into the air conditioning unit which sat on top of the cab – spearing it cleanly.  The coolant was now pouring over the cab and on the ground around me.  Holy shit!!!

So not only had I taken down the overhead wires and electric fence – the bulls were now free to run amok amongst the herd of cattle in an adjacent paddock (nice work eh?).  I had caused irreparable damage to the AC unit on the tractor (clearly this wasn’t going to go down well and I could see the bonus fly away at that point – shit I might even have to pay him for the privilege of working these two weeks.   It wasn’t long before the bulls found their way into the adjacent paddock…now I was in big trouble. 

Eventually I was able to fix the electric fence and get it powered back up later that night.  It was just a little too little too late.   This saw me not only miss the date that night (no mobile phones in those days – so yes, in theory I did stand her up, not that she ever agreed to go out again) but also spend much of the next day with the cattle dogs rounding up and separating his bulls back into their rightful place only hours before he was due to return….

I wonder why Max still hired me the following year, I think deep down he still liked me but just couldn’t believe the “stupidity of what I had done” (his words – not mine!)   His version of the story became bigger every year, as he loved to regale the new farm hands in the ineptitude of this guy names Wallis!    I guess that’s why I work in an office and about as far away as you can get from a farm.