SUNDAY 8 JUNE ADELS GROVE
I was on shop/kitchen hand. John on amenities/rubbish.
Still having problems with the phone and EFTPOS. B had been reporting it daily to Telstra. Having the EFTPOS out was a real pain, because we then had to use the old manual swipe machine, with the multiple carbon copies.
We acquired a rather surly German backpacker today, to be kitchen hand. She was in the WOOFER scheme, where people work a few hours each day, theoretically in organic/green establishments, in return for keep.
She had been working up at Pungalina – a very remote, fairly new, safari camp tourist venture, in the NT Gulf country. The manager there flew her in here this morning, in his ultra light plane. I wasn’t sure how long she would last. She was not exactly brimming with enthusiasm for anything.
John was growing vegies for the kitchen – zucchinis, tomatoes, spinach. He was incorporating work in the garden with his other jobs about the place. There were already pumpkins that had grown from the kitchen compost dumping, and bananas and pawpaws from plantings left from the days of the Frenchman.

The vegie garden not long after John started working on it
The men had been seeing a number of baby brown snakes around – maybe 18 inches long. Boss thought there might be a nest near the workshop or vegie garden. Comforting thought! I gave some thought to whether mother snakes stuck around, after laying their eggs, or left their offspring to their fate?