Sole Mates

K Is For Kernot

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

In January 1991 we spent a week in a little Victorian country town called Kernot. It's a blink-and-you-miss-it hamlet in Gippsland, about a ninety minute drive from Melbourne.

Set in lush dairy farming country, it is characterised by green rolling hills and rugged Outback farmers who work the properties established by their ancestors. With friends of ours, we decided that the prospect of hiring a farmhouse for the week was a great prospect - and indeed it was.

Our gracious hosts, Robert and Susan McQueston, made us comfortable and showed us around the rambling property. We unloaded the cars and our respective toddlers and an infant  and settled into our bush retreat.

Before Robert and Susan left, they told me I might like to walk down to the main farmhouse after dinner to pick up a jug of cold fresh milk for the children. Sounded like a good idea to me.
It was midsummer, even though the nights were still chilly and the days so long that darkness only enveloped the quiet countryside after nine o'clock.

It was pitch black when I decided it was time to wander across and collect the milk. Robert had told me it would be easiest to use the path that ran down the hill to the right of our farmhouse. I didn't ask him why.

But now I figured the simplest way would be to cut through the paddock towards their cottage further down the hill.

Of course, I didn't need any navigational aids. The cottage was maybe 100 metres away, on a north-north-west bearing. I could see it clearly because it was the only light source in the entire sweep of the silent Australian night.

No worries at all. Knocked on the door. Said G'day. Took the full jog of freezing cold milk. Then I realised, as soon as I stepped out into the dark again, that finding my way uphill towards a small glow from one window of our farmhouse would be a lot harder than finding my way downhill.

And of course I had to carry the jug in both hands to ensure nothing spilled over. I navigated my way back in a manner that would have brought a smile to the face of the world's most rugged explorers.

The next morning my wife came to me and asked me to inspect my new white Nike runners (trainers if you live in the US). They were spotless. Then she asked to see the soles of the shoes. They too were spotless.

This was a bit like the Spanish Inquisition. So I asked my wife what was happening. With a smile, she led me to the paddock.

It was littered generously with horse dung. Like a fully-solved crossword puzzle, there were deposits in every ``square''. Not just one patch, not just twenty patches. There would have been maybe three hundred patches, of varying degrees of freshness.

But walking across the paddock in the dark, first downhill and then uphill, I had not stepped in one of them. Not one.

For He's A Brolly Good Fellow

Maybe He's Been Flooded With Stock

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

This city shop has the perfect window display, especially at a time when most umbrellas have been destroyed after being blown inside out. We’e gone from drought to severe flooding in less than 48 hours, with the Victorian region of Gippsland hit by the worst floods in almost forty years. The entire town of Newry has been evacuated and across the state, more than 700 volunteers are working round the clock in flood zones.

Melbourne’s water catchments, at their lowest level in recent memory, received 19 billion (yes, billion) litres in a day. But here in the city, unlike the bush, we have been spared the capricious savagery of Mother Nature. There is still no indication of when the water will peak in Gippsland, with flood levels in some areas already surpassing the levels of 1998.

A few hours ago, I watched TV footage of a house being swept down the Mitchell River near Bairnsdale. But this is Australia, and we’re a hardy mob. When television crews found the home’s owner, he was laconic. A home could be rebuilt, he said. And with a touch of the wry humour that characterises the bush, he said his house had been turned into a houseboat.

The segment ended with a reporter asking the homeowner where he thought the floating home would end up. ``Tasmania, maybe,’’ he quipped.