TheBanyanTree: You can't bury a cow here

[Peter Macinnis]

We have just been in Tasmania, once called Van Diemen's Land.  The name 
changed because VDL was inextricably linked to the island's convict 
past: the worst convicts from here tended to be sent there, and the 
Vandemonians were the terror of the Australian goldfields. The "Sydney 
Ducks" who caused Californians to develop the "kangaroo court" were 
probably mainly Vandemonians, I suspect.

It is the triangular island, south of Australia, and we made a flying 
10-day visit, hitting the MONA art gallery, a drive to the west and a 
trip up the Gordon River, a visit to a former convict shipyard, a 
travail through flying snow, which we dodged, and we walked up a few 
mountains of a smallish kind.

But the break is over.  Now I must dig into the mystery of Mr. Walker, 
who in 1830, converted his steam flour mill in Launceston (northern 
Tasmania) to a water mill.  I suspect it was a matter of being able to 
order free convict labour to dangle from ropes and drill holes and fit 
brackets for a flume on the sides of a rocky gorge, along with abundant 
water and high prices for fuel.

I had made notes about Mr. Walker's steam mill before I went south to 
Tasmania, but did not connect what is now called "Ritchie's mill" with 
Walker's — it turns out Ritchie only bought the mill in 1876.  I had 
been working on old records and had not caught up with Ritchie, so 
failed to ask a few key questions while I was there.  No matter, I can 
dig from here.

This discovery of the Walker link, made yesterday, is turning the steam 
book (a work of technological history for Year 5, part of a series) 
interestingly on its head, because in the period from about 1820, most 
people were modernising and getting out of bullock-driven or 
water-driven mills into steam, but it was never a foregone conclusion. 
In Tasmania, where most of the electricity is hydro-electric, the swap 
is less than surprising.

Most of Australia is light-on for water at times, but Tasmania is 
usually rainy.  We found it odd that so many paddocks (fields) had huge 
irrigation rigs in them, giant rolling hose systems looming over lush 
high grass, but it seems that until a year or so back, the state was 
trapped in a ten-year drought.  We listened to a bit of 'The Country 
Hour' while trying to catch a news broadcast and weather forecast the 
other day.  So it was that we heard a farmer from the north-west 
discussing the effects of excess rain in the island's top left corner.

The cows, he said, are all getting mastitis and/or fungal hoof diseases, 
but when a cow dies, he complained, you can't bury it: as soon as you 
dig a hole in the water-logged ground, the hole fills with water.

This has become a family saying (we travelled with three cousins): "This 
is dry country: you could bury three cows here, no worries", or "You 
couldn't bury a cow here, but you might just be able to dispose of a 
budgie, if you worked fast..."

Small things amuse small minds: one has to work hard to be amused by the 
burial of cows.



-- 
Peter Macinnis, word herder & science gossip,
William McGonagall Fellow in scansion adjustment, University
of Anson Bay, anapest exterminator, MCSE in iambic mechanics,
http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/