Apr 25 2009
THE GYPSY WITH STOLEN CATTLE
Across Australia is a variety of travel routes, bushies can see them un-signposted by the lay of the land, bushies can tell where lost visitors are likely to be because the country draws them, bushies know where lost stock would be because the country draws them. This knowledge and predictability is a gift bureaucrats will never have or see going on as they hunt and gather in the “supermark-ups”, posh eateries on the public funded plastic cards, and the food they buy just appears on shelves from a supermark-up back room.
Will the complacency last? – does a bear Sh** in the woods
Australian farmers are the most productive per individual in the world, hard working innovative efficient highly productive, drought, rain, flood, hail, frost. The “supermark-ups” the posh eateries have salt and fresh water foods, tropical temperate fruits, vegetables, Asian, European, American, Islander in origin, dairy foods and meats of the highest quality from many origins – “then there is the exports”.
Does no one care because they are worried about the environmental impact farmers, foresters, fishermen are having, as the gang green public servants and Government are selling out our primary producers as villains?
The current attack on farmer’s ability to keep producing, or perhaps the ongoing erosion of capacity to keep feeding the two people, taking second fiddle to gang green tourism and bureaucratic rules, restrictions and regulations, is the ability of farmers stockmen to move their animals other than on the back of a truck. Guggling emissions, burping methane and inhaling diesel fumes is all the townies think about as they sit around a beautiful meal and sprouting environmental talk that reeks of fiction, farming families go to the big smoke and see it all the time. The ungracious people of Australia have forgotten farmers feed them and it takes years to produce their meals!.
Just the common hamburger takes 3-6 years for the meat, 2 years for the egg, 2 months for the lettuce, 4 months for the tomato, beetroot and onion, several years for the pineapple, 12-18 months for the bun, 18 months to 4 years for the milk, butter or margarine, 2-3years for the bacon, 2years for the source, 30 years to grow the paper wrapper.
Some farmers are lucky to get $7 that return selling a 50-70 kg sheep value added and turned into $30 per kg small goods in a few weeks plus woolen sheep skin products, particularly true if the sheep cannot be fed in a drought or shifted from a disaster.
What about the people in Victoria that died trying to evacuate in the face of massive fuel loaded inferno fire, thattarted as a bushfire then grew on 7th February 2009, council roads were littered with rotten trees and 3 foot of rank grass along the roadsides not able to be used to FEED drought affected stock because of some state or local Government rules or regulations protecting the environment from some perceived fictional threat or other.
Mostly demand from council or state government to do their job, stockmen have been priced off the road for walking cattle because of massive insurance cover demands. The old story proven to eradicate some activity, bang up the insurance cover and that will kill it dead.
The Pastures Protection Board – the Rural Lands Protection Board, now called “Livestock Health and Pest Authority”, is a 100 year old institution funded by farmers to maintain the Traveling Stock Routes (TSR’s) across NSW. These stock routes likely followed the mega fauna migratory routes then the Aboriginal trade routes then stock routes now dominated by black and gravel roads as the motor vehicles takes over the world as dictator of land travel. These missiles have laws and regulations built around them because Parliamentarians see vehicles as the prime user. If anyone wants to walk they have to get in their joggers and go around the city parks or go bushwalking if you can in the locked up National Parks until they get so over vegetated by lack of maintenance, no one will be able to walk there anymore.
In a recent campfire yarn we were talking droving and the future of the TSR system as the Livestock Health and Pest Authority lost its way on a third of its function.
Grabbed by the gang green as a threatened remnant vegetation,
Will the TSR infrastructure be fractured, fragmented and lost?
If you wanted to go around Australia on a camel could you do it?
The power hungry little people behind government desks dictating terms of how the world should run, facilitating and helping people doing a big job does not come onto their radar.
Take this instance of stupidity, a drover was out beating off the elements and fending for his mob when a Police paddy wagon arrives. “We’ve had a report of a gypsy out this way with a mob of stolen cattle!”
For all the money farmers shell out to walk stock in addition to paying rates to RLPB/LHPA and Shire, this is just outrageous behaviour and ignorance on the part of the Australia public.
