Notes from ‘Rivendale’ #39: On the Fragility of Existence.

I have been researching a family ancestor, Charles Frank Field- 1850-1950, for a book about him and his times. He was a first generation South Australian, his father and mother having arrived in the new colony in 1839. My grandfather was his only child from a second marriage born right up on the Queensland border of NSW in Yalpunga, a town I believe no longer exists. Born without any hospital and probably no medical assistance. On the day the First World War broke out, my grandfather broke his elbow and so was medically unfit to enlist. His wife, my grandmother, lost her fiancé in the Dardanelles, better known as Gallipoli and married my grandfather instead in 1922. I just recently found out through a relative’s results on Ancestory.com that he may have had an illegitimate child prior to his marriage, a child he never found out about. He was a decent man according to the people who knew him- he died when I was 6 months old- and I believe he would have married this woman, if indeed, she was having his child.

My father was in the Royal Navy which he joined as a signalman at the age of 17 because he was a Portsmouth boy and wanted to do his bit for Britain in World War Two. He left Scarpa Flow in Scotland on the destroyer ‘Pennywort’ but during his tour he fell from one deck to another and injured his knee and was sent to convalesce in Ireland where he caught Scarlet Fever. He didn’t linger long enough in the bitter North Atlantic to be torpedoed by a German U-boat or bombed by the Luftwaffe. Reading Alistair McLean’s book ‘HMS Ulysses’ – see my last post- had the hairs raised on my neck thinking Dad had been in this harrowing conflict where survivors of ships who’d been attacked died in minutes in the Atlantic’s freezing waters. He survived the Scarlet Fever and joined the destroyer ‘HMS Ursa’ instead and sailed for Australia.

He met my mother who was a corporal in the WAAAF-‘Women’s Auxiliary Australian Airforce’ at a picnic in Melbourne and they were due to meet again the next day. They almost missed each other because they were standing under different clocks at Flinders St Station but Mum’s friend Joy, saw Dad and told her where he was. He went on with his ship to join the British Pacific Fleet and help liberate Hong Kong from the Japanese.

After the war and they were married, they spent 13 months apart while he was being demobbed- demobilized- in the UK because my grandfather feared he would never see his daughter again if she went with him. He returned to Australia in 1946 and they rarely spent a night away from each other in the next almost 60 years- one month shy- of their marriage. My father died in 2005 and his wife, my Mum, is still alive.

So I am here due to the confluence of a series of bad luck, good luck, stoicism, endurance and love: If my great grandfather’s first wife hadn’t died at the age of 32 after having had eight children, he wouldn’t have married my great grandmother. If my grandfather had not broken his elbow, he might have died in WW1. If he was the father of that little girl and knew it, he wouldn’t have married my grandmother. If my grandmother’s fiancé had lived, she wouldn’t have married my grandfather and my mother wouldn’t have been born. If my father hadn’t injured his knee, he might have drowned in the North Atlantic or he may never have been sent to Australia. If Mum’s friend hadn’t recognized Dad, a man she’d only met once, waiting forlornly at the station in Melbourne my parents would not have got married.

And I thank my lucky stars that the Doctor attending Mum while she was having me didn’t prescribe her Thalidomide for her morning sickness.

Looking at your family history makes you realize we are all here by a tremendous series of events, any one of which might have denied us existence if they had turned out differently.

Cherish your life, my friends, cherish your existence.

au revoir, mes amies!

Notes from ‘Rivendale’ #38: Wrong Duck, Right President

Yeah and you thought this blog was just about ducks. So let’s get the ducks out of the way first. I started duckfarmpress.com.au to publish books last year. It has brought a lot of my skill set together; writing, history, poetry, design and art. As you can see ‘ducks’ are a prominent part of it. Ducks are ungenerous creatures; they are out for themselves. They have conned at least three hens into sitting on and hatching their eggs this year. They get fed in one pen and then escape, due to a poor attachment of wire, into the turkey pen and eat their food too. The turkeys aren’t too happy about this either. I rarely see my turkey males resting. They are nearly always eating. Why are so many of my animals ‘bottomless pits’? The only time I saw my ducks really full was when one of the boys, now men, had a birthday party and there was a lot of left-over food. I swear they sat and didn’t move for at least two hours they were all so satiated. But there’s more to the duck personality.

So it went like this: A hen half hatched out a duckling which I found peeping furiously and abandoned in her cage. (Hens can make mistakes) It went into the incubator and hatched successfully- let us call this duckling #1. A certain duck- let us call it Duck #1- had sat on eggs for much longer than the 5 weeks they take to hatch, so I removed her eggs and locked her in a different pen. I candled the rest and low and behold there were about half alive so they too went into the incubator. Every duck in creation was wanting to go broody and sit on eggs and with already 14 hatched ducklings, I thought, no more. When I saw a duck (Duck # 2) sitting on eggs in – of course, you guessed it, the turkey pen- I put her in a cage with no solid sides to get over it. Felt sorry for her and put duckling #1 in with her. She completely ignored it and it was removed and put back under heat. Then I thought to myself, this duck was not doing that peepy thing they do when they are broody. Maybe it was the wrong duck? My Muscovies are white and all look the same, an honest mistake. Maybe it had been a self-respecting duck that had just gone into the turkey pen to lay its egg?

I had the let the original expectant mother duck out of the exclusion pen (Duck #1), felt sorry for her, put her in the cage and gave her in the evening two ducklings to mother. But this stage she was over being broody and she ignored them too. So scrub both duck mothers #1 and #2. A broody hen was in the garage having been removed with a few dud eggs from the turkey house. I snuck duckling #1 under her and she accepted him. Over the next day I snuck duckling #2 and the rest of the hatched ones from the incubator under her, in broad daylight, one at a time and she accepted them all. She is now successfully raising eight young ducklings!

From our Summer hatching, we now have 22 ducklings and one sole chicken-hatched in the incubator- given to a hen who had sat for many weeks on dud eggs and is now over the moon with her one chicken. The 22 ducklings are being mothered by two hen and two duck mothers. I know there’s a metaphor in there somewhere and I think it might go something like this. Trump is the duck mother who went broody but took no responsibility for the ideas someone else hatched and couldn’t care less if they thrived or not even though he had ‘laid’ them in the first place. He abandoned his ducklings- the American people- and let a few responsible GOPs and Democrats clean up the mess he started. President Biden is the experienced hen who will hatch both duck eggs and hen eggs because what he cares about is life thriving and he will be that broody hen until all is as it should be again. He just needs to look out for the quarter of the flock who don’t have enough water and food to thrive. They need to share in the full fat of the harvest too.

Au revoir, mes amies!

Notes from ‘Rivendale’ #37 Thank God, it’s 2021!

I think more of us anticipated the arrival of 2021 than in any other year I can remember. Annus horribilis- a horrible year. Hope this one is an annus mirabilis-‘wonderful year’. Vaccines frantically being rolled out in the wealthier western countries. If they can’t vaccinate someone who already has the disease then they are going to find it hard to get on top of this contagion. It’s was year in which you couldn’t really plan ahead, especially for travel. ‘Hunkered down’ being the preferred mode of existence until case numbers dropped then it was like a weight being lifted from your chest until the next wave when it started all over again. I am extremely grateful we got to celebrate Christmas, despite thinking we needed a mini lockdown. New Year was a quiet affair in this household. Even more grateful my Mum got to see this new year and is responding to cancer treatment.

Weather: A permanent cloud seems to have formed over the Southern Highlands in the last few weeks. Rain nearly every afternoon but definitely overcast and temperatures very low for this time of year. We had the last two days before Christmas Eve with the wood heater going. Hey, not to complain or anything but usually when I have to mow the grass, I’m not also building up the heater. Haven’t been for a swim this season or to the beach- am hoping before the end of the holidays to get there. The vegie garden has really shot ahead. Bush pumpkin plants are a metre high so are the potato plants. Tomato plants are raging upwards and beetroots and silver beet planted a few weeks ago have started to progress. The shallot bed has been crazily successful, but I let it go to seed in the hope of seed spreading as well as having lots of bulbs to plant next season. Am progressing slowly with digging daffodil bulbs- can’t find too many of the little gems because-doh!- I forgot to mark the rows with stakes. The paddock they are in is not massive- about 30 or 40metres square but the grass on it is so thick our goat is working hard to reduce it so I can dig. I have hired a guy to slash the main paddock- which is about 2 acres in size. It looks amazingly huge when its slashed. At the moment thick bracken and high grass is covering it and allowing the ‘Tree of Heaven’ to creep across. If I haven’t mentioned this tree before, it’s a declared weed in the shire and regarded as a bio-hazard and the council is forcing me to poison it. I have done an hour trial on this so far, so let’s see.

Animals: The co-sitters- a white Muscovy duck and a brown hen have 3 and 6 ducklings respectively to raise and are currently in small cages until their babies are big enough to transfer to a larger cage. The grey Muscovy duck hatched out five ducklings after all the fuss and after not knowing if the thunderstorms had killed them. Of the 14 ducklings hatched this year, most are Moscovies but some show characteristics of Pekin/Khaki Campbell cross- one has a blue beak for example and there are a few brown ones. The black hen and white Muscovy duck in the turkey house have hatched nothing. This is more an issue of the eggs not being fertilized, I believe than being killed by thunderstorms. However, hatching rates are down this year. The grey duck has hatched 16 ducklings in a setting in the past.

The grey Araucana hen in the back pen hatched out one tiny black and white chicken and then left her eggs so I put these in the incubator. I hatched out one black chick and this chick went to the brown hen in the turkey side pen who had sat for weeks with nothing to show for her trouble. This can only work if you put the chick under the hen at night when she is still on eggs and she will think she has hatched the chick. Hens don’t accept chicks you just put with them in daylight- they are not completely stupid. However, they can’t count, so you can put more chicks under a hen at night than eggs- presumably dud ones- she is sitting on. This hen is still sitting on the dud eggs in the cage and not attending to her chick’s food and water needs so today I will have to remove them. What’s the point of one chick you might ask? Well, I’m not after numbers. I just want this hen off her broodiness and one chick will do it. When it gets bigger, I will put her and her chick in with other chickens I hatched earlier to make a group.

Groups stick together in later life and perch together at night. When you introduce new hens to a group they will be picked on and the ‘pecking order’ worked out. That’s why you shouldn’t introduce just one new hen to a group if you can help it. Introduce at least two or more if you can. Then they have a minor group to hang out with until the main group tolerates them. I have found singular hens don’t seem to settle in one pen easily, they migrate from pen to pen and seem a bit lost. The same thing has happened to my black duck. She stands out amongst the white crowd of ducks in the pen she is usually in and too seems a bit lost. Hopefully, more black ducks this season will help her blend in more.

‘Birds of a feather stick together’ is generally true. The Pekin and Pekin cross Khaki Campbell group- 6 of them- lone range across the road for succulent snails in the roadside verge and in the vacant house block. If I hear a car horn it’s usually someone beeping them as they cross the road. I chase them back in a lot.

Au revoir, mes amies, bonne annee!