Red, white and blue… and verde (the colours of my day)

Today was Australia Day – a proud public holiday in the best of Aussie traditions. Around us here at Granite Glen, neighbours traveled over red dirt roads to various small towns to attend Australia Day breakfasts and award presentations.

Bad speeches were (no doubt) made, nervous foreigners were probably bestowed with scrappy-looking trees and citizenship papers, and locals who had done something half decent (and had a mate to recommend them a couple of weeks earlier) took home citizenship awards.

To explain to those reading this from other parts of the world, Australia Day is I s’pose the equivalent of Thanksgiving in America, or Bastille Day in France. But the day is revered and celebrated in the most “Aussie” of ways.

First and foremost there is the public holiday. Which means that if you HAVE to work, then you get more moula in the wallet and can justify a visit to the TAB for a bet on the ponies on the way home! Then there is the barbecue (barbie) on which the obligatory prawns and steaks must be charred. This is usually presided over by the men of the gathered party (blokes) who require copious amounts of ice cold beer to achieve the desired level of char to said meat. And MOST importantly of all, there is sport on the television (telly) – the Australian Open Tennis (Women’s Final) and the International Cricket Test coincided this year making it an especially auspicious date. Therefore the barbie and the telly would ideally have been in as close a proximity as possible.

As delightful as this all sounds, it was not how we celebrated at Granite Glen.

A call on the two-way radio the previous night had revealed that steers in the farthest section of the property had busted through a fence and made themselves at home in a neighbours paddock, so the boys had to start early (gone by 6.15am) to shift them out quick smart. In order to make the 40 minute truck drive worthwhile, they also decided to sort (muster and draft up into groups) heifers nearby in preparation for an AI program.

I made up my mind to recover something of the celebratory nature of the day, completed my chores and gathered the ankle-biters with packed sandwiches into the Prado.

We headed out about 11am to rendezvous with the men. The day was glorious – deep red dirt roads, white and silver clouds and intense cyan skies filled each scene as we crested each hill, set off by the freshest verde. The panoramas of our journey north were rich with colour and lush with grass. Recent rain has been amazing for the plant life, creating an abundance of fodder for the cattle. Buffel grass heads waved in the breeze, fluffy little flags over the thick sweet stems below.
The team met us enthusiastically – my hubby SSB (tall, lean, blond blue-eyed spunk), my Dad (a stockier, swarthier figure and legendary horseman) and my brother (also stocky, but fairer than Dad, with a rep as a terrific axeman and general good bloke). We picnicked beside the yards together – our three hard-working men happy to share the visual feast (as well as any spare morsels we had thought to pack). Whilst the horses were loaded onto the truck, the ankle-biters played with much squealing in the horse float.

Before too long we packed up to to head home, cook pikelets and give the Little Woman some much-needed sleep.
(No this is not a sleeping child, as one might expect at this point. Thought I would throw a bit of granite from the drive home in here to enlighten those who have not encountered this amazing rock in its raw form – not just the kitchen bench version! And after I stopped stopping every 5 minutes to take pics, the Little Woman did indeed go to sleep! For which we are all very thankful.).

We arrived home to a welcome invitation to wash the sweat of the humid day away with a swim at our neighbours. After sharing fresh pikelets and then later some leftover lasagna and a cold drink on the patio with them, I wondered: is this not the true celebration of our country (for us)? It occurred to me that I was getting to celebrate the real Australia – soaking in the colours of our flag from the hues of our countryside and sharing a cold drink with mates, under the glow of the Southern Cross.

Happy Australia Day to all… whether you are Down Under or somewhere else in the world.

Bush Babe