It doesn’t often come up in farming conversations, but my title is officially Dr. I’m not the useful sort of doctor, though — just an academic. In retrospect, I should have studied medicine, as I originally intended. Instead, my academic qualifications extend to explaining climate change, but are totally useless in the project that is about to take all of my time and energy for the next few weeks: lambing 33 ewes.
This is the first time in six years that I’ve had lambs of my own. I had lots of good rationalisations for why it was a good idea to buy in lambs, but the truth is I chickened out. Lambing, like ageing, is not for the faint of heart.
An early season bush fire on my farm earlier this year led me back to studying the knowledge of indigenous Australians about using fire to shape the landscape and enhance biodiversity.
Note to self: you need to change your mindset well before shearing next year. Let this be your reminder to practice staying in the present moment almost all the time, rather than just occasionally. If you don’t, you will, at the very least, leave a critical gate open and lose your sheep into the back country when you really, really don’t want them there, and don’t have the time to gather them back into the fold. There was a lot of swearing, none of it particularly inventive, when I did precisely that two days ago on my fifth straight day, and 7th out of a total of 12 days of shearing.
It was a cross between a flying tackle and a wrestling pin to the mat when I tripped and fell on top of the old ewe I was trying to catch. She’s a 14-year-old with severe cataracts, and she’d gotten lost in Chicory Hill tree reserve a few days ago. It was pure blind luck I found her when I did.
As I held on to all four legs of the squirming, hapless young kangaroo, all I could think was. “WTF am I going to do now?!” With my five working dogs swirling around me, I couldn’t let the little bush kangaroo go—they’d already had him up against the fence once, which is how I finally caught him. Three of the five dogs were intent on finishing the job I’d so rudely interrupted.
The pattern of heat at the ocean surface drives rainfall and evaporation patterns. Where the ocean surface is warmer than the atmosphere above it, evaporation and upward convection create the right conditions for rainfall. Hence, when the Indian Ocean near Australia is relatively warm (called a negative Indian Ocean Dipole), we generally see higher rainfall across Australia as eastward-moving weather patterns bring that moister, warmer air over the continent.
The Indian Ocean Dipole is at a record high value. To quote Dr Suess’s Sleep Book: “This may not seem very important, I know. But it is, so I’m bothering telling you so.” The IOD is an indicator of the distribution of surface temperature in the Indian Ocean. When it’s positive, like now, warm water is pushed up against Africa, and cooler water is found near Australia. This is like a smaller version of El Nino, where warm water is squished up against South America and cooler surface waters are found near Australia.
