TUESDAY 17 MAY     PUNGALINA

After the usual morning chores in the garden, I worked on research for camp needs. It was slow work – the computer speed was snail like! I would have to get some items through the big catering supply firm, but was also trying to find out what I could source from K Mart in Mt Isa – would be cheaper.

John continued work on the framework for the vegie garden roof. He had the uprights all pretty well in place by now. It needed to be a strong structure – able to stand up to cyclones, hopefully.

Vegie garden roof framework – in progress

John “bought” a slab of beer from the Company camp stocks. He would repay it later. We definitely needed to keep tabs on what we might need for our personal supplies, and ensure orders came in on the supply truck.

O killed a scrubber for ding meat. He decided to experiment with air drying some into beef jerky – with a view to saving freezer space. He hung strips of meat up and down the fence of the house area. Great idea – in theory – but in practice, every bird of prey in the Gulf country suddenly appeared, swooped on the unexpected bounty, and had a party. The dings made a valiant effort to drive the birds away but were significantly outnumbered. Experiment a failure!

Air drying strips of beef – in theory

Brown blur was bird coming in to raid the pantry

We did watch Lachy make off with a hefty piece of the carcass, that O put outside the fenced area, for the old boy. Seeing that, one realized that the Ayers Rock dingo would have had no problem making off with a small baby!

MONDAY 16 MAY     PUNGALINA

Our day off. After the last couple of days, we were not inclined for great expeditions, so just relaxed around our camp – after going up to the house to water the gardens, of course.

Noticed a couple of wild dingoes hanging about in the bush, not far from the house, but “ours” were all at the house, just sleeping around in shady spots in the yard. Maybe this was the aftermath of the girls’ escapade?

O treats his dings pretty well, we think, striking a good balance between them being pets but still able to live in the wild way, doing normal ding things. He killed a cow – a rough scrubber – every so often, to get meat for them. An old freezer in his house contained  great chunks of ding meat! He left them free, most of the time, to roam and do those normal ding things. Apparently, they ranged many kms on some nights. Certainly, some days, they came and went several times between the house and camp – about 5kms each way. Now that we were fixtures, we got regular visits at our camp.

If O had to tie them up – like when there were guests at the safari camp – he would make up for the inactivity by later driving them out a fair way and leaving them to run home.

When he was away and there was no one else there, he would leave out a big bag of dried dog food and they could help themselves to that, if their hunting was unsuccessful, or they just felt lazy.

Sometimes, we would be working around the safari camp, then see the really tall grass across the other side of our creek, waving about and would hear rustling noises. It was the dings hunting over there. Occasionally, one would jump up high and look around. It was quite comical to watch.

Dingoes are fearsome chewers. There was no upholstery left intact in any of the “farm” vehicles. They had been known to chew up the phone/fax lines in the office, so had been banned from there. I had been warned to make sure they could never get at the pillows in the safari camp tents! One did not leave footwear outside, either.

Ding work – just keeping an eye on things

O believed that allowing a feral dingo population on Pungalina kept down the numbers of feral pigs and cats. We did not see a cat at all, in our time there. It was rare to see any feral pigs, and there were certainly no signs of same within at least 15 kms of the house. This was a great contrast with the Adels Grove/Lawn Hill area where pigs were a significant problem and where we had never seen a dingo.

THURSDAY 12 MAY     PUNGALINA

John worked on the vegie garden shelter, but also helped me prepare the orders for the next truck. He had set up a computer format for the orders, so they could be printed off and faxed.

I worked on lists of things needed to get the safari camp functioning properly. This was very time consuming. By the time I checked  out what was available, from where, and likely costs, I did not think that either O or A were going to be very impressed with my lists and the resulting costs.  But – if the place was to operate with the panache that S wanted, it really did need to be able to serve wine out of wine glasses, not mismatching water tumblers! And so on.

The track between the Safari Camp and our camp was already looking well trodden

I put in the orders for the next truck, to Woolworths Country Orders. The grocery order was not huge. Much of it was stuff that had been on my original list for the last truck, and which hadn’t been stocked by the wholesale firm, or just hadn’t come. So it was a catch up order. I put in an order to the green grocer too.

The grocery order included cup of soup packets – I was still living mostly on these, but feeling somewhat better. So I included Salada biscuits and Rice Thins. Ordered some bacon and a couple of packs of herb and garlic sausages. I was looking farward to getting the chops and chicken to replace the ones that went bad on the last truck.

The female dingoes managed to break out of their enclosure overnight. They may have had some outside digging help – Lachie? Wild male dingo? Could be some pups in a couple of months. O was not happy about it, but somewhat philosophical too. He said he would rebuild the bitch cage for next year – and put it up on stilts this time!