DROUGHT OF 1958

From 1952-1967 I lived with my family on a farm in Samford Valley north of Brisbane.

In 1958, there was a vicious drought probably the result of El Nino that no farmer knew about in those days.

There was no rain for over 2 years. My father would scour the horizon daily but there was never a rain cloud.

Grass died and the creeks ran out of water. We dug a well in a dry creek bed and struck water. A bucket full of water would trickle out every hour.

My father placed a 500 gallon tank beside the well for the cattle to drink.

As a 12 year old boy, it was my job daily to hand pump water to a herd of waiting thirsty cattle.

At the time, my father was very sick. I know now that he came out of the war with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and high blood pressure.

He suffered his first stroke in 1962 and died in 1968 after several strokes and hypertension.

My mother and I shouldered the burden of the farm during the drought. Cattle were weak and produced little milk.

The milk company gave no mercy and calculated our quota in the drought months. Nothing has changed. The farmers are still being ripped off.

Since the creeks were running dry, there was just a trickle of water flowing across the thick mud.

Cattle would wade across to drink the water but be too weak to pull their legs out of the sticky mud.

My mother and I had no tractor but would harness two draught horses Molly and Blossom to pull the cows out with a rope tied around their horns.

Often the cattle were too weak to stand and just gave up. My father was a marksman in the war but never allowed a rifle on the farm. The killing ended in 1945.

I would borrow a .22 rifle from our neighbour. Our cows had names. I shot Maisie, Elsie, Julie, Hazel and Daisy. I killed each one over several months of the drought with a shot behind the head.

I was 12 at the time. My father named the cows after his sisters and mother-in-law. That was his sense of humour.

Then the rains came in 1960 but we were too poor to go on. The milk company refused to accept milk from any farmer who did not have a tanker in the dairy. They were weeding out the small dairy farmers.

I went to high school and graduated as a teacher in 1966 and posted to the bush in 1967.

My father died in 1968. I came back to Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital to sit at his death bed.

He was a tall strong man and a champion boxer in the war. There he lay in a foetal position before he died.

That was the worst drought ever. But the droughts of 2016-2019 are far more catastrophic due to global warming.

As a young man, I still recall the flooding of Lake Eyre and Cooper’s Creek with the overflow spreading to the Murray-Darling basin.

If Egypt can water the desert with the Aswan Dam, Australia can build dams in the north of Australia with water piped to the inland. We could become the garden nation.

If the Purari and Brown Rivers on the south coast of Papua can flow into the sea, surely we could buy water from Papua New Guinea, to be piped down to northern Australia.

We could share the project with water to Port Moresby and a hydro electric scheme shared with Papua New Guinea.

Naaah, she’ll be right mate.