Decommissioned the camp again. Sent the left over food up to the house for A and W to eat.
There was no communication from anyone about our missing guest. We hoped that he had simply changed plans, not that he found the access track so bad that he abandoned the attempt. At this stage of the season, the boss needed all the guests he could get!
Sent an email to the boss informing him of the no show.
The dings were very used to our Truck being parked up at the house.
The mail plane was a day early this week, due to a NT public holiday on Friday. I collected the mail and groceries from the house, and brought down the foodstuffs I needed.
John mowed the camp lawns and neatened the place up.
Good place to see everything going on
He refuelled our Truck – it had done 424kms since the last time.
I worked on the dinner for tonight’s guest: nibbles of nuts, olives, kabana. Made a batch of chilled cucumber soup. Made a beef stroganoff, using a recipe from my Aust Ag Co cookbook. This book was meant to be a resource for the cooks on the Company’s various stations – compiled of tried and true recipes used by previous cooks – geared quite heavily to the use of beef and the appetites of station workers. I had picked up a copy at Adels and found it really valuable, not the least because it used ingredients readily available on stations, not city type exotica.
I thought the stroganoff would be a wise choice, as I did not want to defrost the volume of meat that a chunk of roast would entail. And I couldn’t be sure of the quality of the smaller portions of “steak” if I was to try to pan fry or BBQ same. I had pasta noodles that could be cooked at the last minute, to go with the stroganoff.
Made up a platter of melon and paw paw for dessert. Set the table in the dining tent – for two. I thought John could eat with the guest and keep him company.
Our expected guest did not arrive! We waited…….and waited. Sunset came. It got very dark.
The arrangement had been a little vague, from the outset, it seemed. Went up to the house to check if W had heard anything – no. Discussed with him whether he or John should go out and check the track in, but decided that having one of the men thus occupied, for much of the night would be an over-reaction, if the man had simply changed his plans. Figured we would probably hear soon enough, if some one was missing!
Waiting around and debating about what to do, meant it was quite a late night by the time the meal makings were packed away and the place cleaned up.
John went to the little generator shed, near our van, to check the oil. He was none too happy to find a shed snake skin in there! It was clearly a nice, warm place for a reptile to go hide for a while – though it was not too long since the generator was in daily use! It was a fairly small skin, which was one consolation. It was a reminder to John to be cautious in approaching the shed.
He fired up the generator to chill the fridges. A guest was expected tomorrow afternoon. He was checking out the access track in advance of a mining helicopter survey party that was booked to come in later in the month, and stay at the safari camp for a while. They would need avgas and so needed to see if a truck with same could get in.
I got a tent checked out and finalized for the guest. Made a date loaf.
Did the usual morning watering. That took up quite a chunk of the morning.
I worked on finalizing the next truck order, and faxed that off to Woolworths and the greengrocer. That truck would load on 11/12 July. The Woolworths order only ran to a page and a bit, this time, much of it for the house. We ordered chicken fillets, whole chickens, pork ribs, lamb chops – again! Hopefully, they would not be missed from the order, this time. Forty rolls of toilet paper was not a quantity that featured in my normal shopping at home!
The greengrocery order was a substantial one. It included seven dozen eggs, 5 kg tomatoes, 4 lettuces, 3kg carrots, 24 oranges, 28 apples, 14 grapefruit, 16 bananas, and smaller quantities of lots of fruits and vegies.
After all that was done, we kept to ourselves down at the camp, pottering about.
Our van in Cane Toad Clearing. The dead treethat John chopped down on arrival. Styrene containers in which I was trying to grow herbs.
With O away, W and A were holding the fort at the house, answering the phone and the like. We still had to do the daily watering up there, though.
Kitchen and living area at the house. Mail bag on hook.
There was still plenty of mechanical repair work to keep W busy.
I went to the office and faxed the weekly order to Tennant Creek, for the mail plane – which was due to come a day earlier this week. Most of the items were for A at the house – sliced bread, long life milk, cheese, saveloys, cornflakes, envelopes. I ordered some celery and bananas.
Late in the morning there was an email from A – some guests would be coming in early next week. So I had to fax a supplementary order for the plane: cream, tinned chick peas, fruit and salad makings.
I did some more tidying up work in the kitchen and general cleaning.
Just for interest, I checked the sunrise and sunset times: sunrise was 7.19am. Sunset was 6.28pm. So we were getting 11 hours and 9 minutes of daylight.
Some type of palm, growing in really stony ground
Our day off.
We slept in. Pottered about our camp for a while.
Took a packed lunch and drove out towards the wetlands – Lake Crocodylus.
On the way, stopped and had an explore at an area beside the track that looked like a sinkhole – quite a large depression in the land. Later, O said it was not really a sinkhole.
Sinkhole-like depression by the track
It was pleasant enough, wandering around in the bush.
Turkey bush
At Crocodylus, the mud around the edges had dried up enough that we were able to take out one of the two man canoes, kept out there. We attempted a bird survey, results to go off to Birds Australia. It was hard to even begin to count all the ducks and other waterbirds, though. There were so many. We could not get very close before they took off in groups, flying. But there was one hell of a lot of them perched in the dead trees, particularly across the far side.
The paddling on the lake was easy and really enjoyable. The only down side was getting in and out of the canoe and getting muddy feet doing so – like well up the ankles!
We decided to try to drive back the long way – via the Jabiru wetlands track, but a little way along it, realized it was still too wet to be passable, so turned around – before we got bogged! Backtracked the way we had come.
Some track clearing
I read for what was left of the afternoon. John spent time on his computer.
O flew out this morning to go to Brisbane to visit his lady friend.
More of the usual routines.
I had the tent beds all made up again, so the tents were ready for the next guests, apart from the last minute finishing touches.
Back in April, O had brought back with him, square rubber “jigsaw” mats, that I’d pieced together to use on the floors of the showers. Preferable underfoot, to mesh and corrugated iron. They had been really good to have, but after last week, they really needed a more thorough scrub than there had been time for while we had guests. Today, I did that with a stiff scrubbing brush and Ajax liquid, and they were back in pristine condition.
It was a pleasant break, not having to clean the amenities every day!
Now that we had time again to have our late afternoon happy hour, in our clearing, I was noticing that the sunsets had become absolutely brilliant. Although we talked about it, we did not have the energy to make the sunset trip to the Escarpment, as guests did. John did not fancy the drive back across the river in the dark, either!
With the guest flurry over, we did not see so much of O, for socializing. He had A to cook his meals at the house, so there was no point in asking him down to us for tea. And he had A and W for company, when he wanted same – and probably when he didn’t, too! They spent much of the time in the house with him and only went out to their camper trailer to sleep. A had brought her sewing machine and set it up in the house, so she had patchworking to occupy her in the evenings. I rather envied her that occupation – quilting was something I really wanted to try, but it was not a craft that fitted – literally – into a small caravan.
Mail plane day. I went up and collected the grocery delivery, sorted same and took the things that were my order back to camp. Also received another box of library books – excellent.
Inside the main house. The chest freezer was for ding meat.
O arrived back around lunchtime with the truck order. That was a major job to sort out and check off, and sort into what was for the camp and me, and what was for the house. Some things had not come – presumably unavailable – bananas, mandarins, celery, honeydew melon from the greengrocers. The four 4litre bottles of kerosene I’d ordered for the flares, had turned into four 1 litre bottles. That would not last long! The six cans of chick peas were also missing from the wholesaler order. The massive Woolworths order was filled well – they do a good job. However, it seemed that all the chiller items had been missed – or not offloaded from the truck: lamb chops, butter, chicken breast fillets, sausages, a couple of whole chickens that A had wanted to roast. Those were the things that could provide us with some dietary variation from beef, so this was a disappointment all round. Also missing were the six loaves of sliced toasting bread A had wanted. It was like some perishables had been left for last minute filling into the order – and then forgotten. We did not receive the invoices – they went straight to A – so I could not check if we had been charged for any of these things.
So, at least, my supplies were replenished ready for future guests. Although, it had to be said, bookings were not too abundant, right now.
Wattle in bloom
Dealing with all that took up a goodly part of the day for me, by the time things were transported to camp, and put away.
John had patched up things as best he could, in the vegie patch. And, later in the day, O strengthened the fences.
The two rows of little paw paw trees were growing quite well. Both John and I had put a lot of time into making sure they were well watered, likewise the various patches of pumpkins and melons that were on mounds around the general garden area. I also had a sprinkler on the lime and lemon trees, regularly.
The foot traffic of the last week or so around the kitchen tent and campfire area had worn down the grass in places, and it would need sustained watering to bring it back to sound condition.
John was upset when he went up to water the vegie garden this morning, to find that some feral cows had managed to break down the outer fence around the house block, at a point by the river side, come up to the back of the vegie garden, get their necks over the inner fence far enough to demolish most of the almost-ripe corn crop. He had lovingly nurtured that – had hoped to have it ready for the large group visit, but it wasn’t quite. He was really cross.
The corn has been growing really nicely, back in May
What was left of the corn after the cow attack
The inner fence that the raiding cattle reached over, or through. The gap at the corner is a squeeze gate – a person can squeeze through, but a cow can’t.
After his morning jobs, and trying to redeem the garden wreckage, John was mowing the camp lawns. It was amazing just how much the grass had grown while he was otherwise occupied.
I was working on the clean up in the kitchen tent.
O appeared and kind of hovered about for a while. Then he came and told me that he did not want to interrupt John, but that there had been a phone call from John’s daughter, S, to tell him that she’d given birth to another boy, on Monday. O then disappeared back to the house.
I went and told John, who was thrilled about his second grandson. He was not able to call S though, given that she was in Brussels and it would be too complicated to try that – and work out the costs – from here.
Days later, we heard from his other daughter, that she had phoned on the Tuesday and left a message about the new baby – one we never got. She said she had spoken to a man, but we never did find out if it was W or O who forgot to pass the message on. John was rather peeved about this.
O left in the night, to drive out to Redbank Mine to pick up our orders from the Mt Isa supply truck.
Another day of work.
I shut down the dining tent. Took the tablecloths from there, and from the breakfast tables, for washing and when dry put them away in the plastic container in the kitchen tent, for next time.
Mopped the dining tent floor, stacked the chairs.
Started the kitchen clean – a few day’s work there to do it thoroughly. The stove and oven alone made a big cleaning job.
The corn that John had planted by our van was growing nicely. He did more work in the vegie patch today.
Quite a contrast to when we first arrived here. Vegetation drying out. Access track widened and smoothed by our constant use.
It was noticeable how much the country was now drying out. Green weeds had died down. The grass was browning off. The “deciduous” trees were dropping a lot of leaves – evident from the big one by our van, and in the quantity of leaves appearing on the camp lawns.
This Adventurous Age 