PRE- ORDER Fleur's newest novel 'Voices in the Dark'
Wouldn’t it be lovely just to laze in the sun? Well that’s Rex’s life. Completely retired, except for the odd ride in the back of the ute, his life now consists of chasing the sun. One moment he’ll be stretched out in front of the door and I trip over him every time I set…
It used to be that if you wanted to buy stock, you jumped in the ute and drove to the sale yards. Not any more! A couple of weeks ago, I sat in front of my computer and kept hitting the enter button. Why? I was bidding on a stud ram auction that was being held in…
I guess everyone thinks that Red Dust was the first book I ever wrote… but it wasn’t! One of my oldest friends came to stay with me, around the time Red Dust was launched and brought with her, my first book. Not quite novel length and titled very plainly, ‘The Letter’ you can see the illustrations…
This is Wally. Actually his real name is Law, but he’s a bit of a Wally, and he’s been called it that many time, he comes to that name too. You would have to wonder what was going through his head, when he decided to go to sleep like this! He stayed like this for about twenty minutes…
I’ve been really busy since I received the Blue Skies edit last week. Ali has done a really intensive edit that then needs me to read through and either say yes to the changes, or no. The changes can range from something as tiny as a suggestion to change a word, to wiping out whole scenes. Thankfully there’s…
This doesn’t really look like the standard library does it? Not with all the utes parked and strange looking things, including a cement mixer, at the front. Where are the books? Well, this is my new library! I have a friend who I swap books with fairly regularly, but we don’t ever seem to be…
It doesn’t seem like twelve months ago that we hitched up the mower to the tractor and started roaring through our oats crop! Today, that’s exactly what happened. Anthony’s towing a mower conditioner, which is like a huge lawn mower, but inside of it, there’s special rollers that crimp the stems of oats, ‘just right’…
What’s a boy to do when the sheep won’t run? Have a rest of course! These full-wool girls were not at all interested in running into the sheep crate today! We were loading them up into the truck so we could cart them back to the other farm for shearing, but they were being a…
The kids and I climbed Mount Howick recently and were left in awe of the view! Every time we go up there, we know it’s going to be good, but I think we forget how great it is until we get there again. It’s also quite deceiving how high the hill is. Our cattle look like…
I think it’s fair to say that we’ve had our fair share of dust storms over the last week! This photo could have been the start of the storms that hit Sydney. Taken in the north of SA (thanks Helen Williams) it shows not only the destructiveness of high winds and dry land, but how…
[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleurmcdonald/4035228275/[/flickrvideo] I shot a couple small videos at our ram sale last week. I talk about a ram sale in Blue Skies and I thought, if you haven’t been to one before, it would help you visualise the atmosphere and excitement that runs around a shed as the auction starts. You may have to watch it a couple of…
The build up to any sale is huge, especially big if you’re putting your efforts before your peers and they are judging your work. Our ram sale was a great day! After an early start, the rams were settled in their pens and Rochelle and I headed off to the supermarket to grab all the…
We do live in a wonderful country and every so often, nature throws something at us, that I hope I can capture well enough in a photo, to help remind me how I felt when you saw it. It was a warm day, the bees were buzzing and the atmosphere was still. I’d been madly…
Our annual sale – Tomorrow! For many years now, we’ve held an annual ram sale in Esperance. We gather up the best of our rams, truck them to town, wrestle them into pens and let farmers pass judgement on them! Tomorrow is the big day (18th Sept 09). At the moment, I’m snatching five minutes…
This is why, when you live on a farm, you need a four wheel drive! Often you become a transport company! Ours is called FNA transport – officially Fleur and Anthony Transport, unofficially, a rather rude word starting with F Average Transport! I took some of the extra wool into Esperance, to make the journey to…
This is a really important little note book. It’s small enough to fit in my hand bag or just sit along side me on the passengers seat of the car – and it goes where ever I am at the moment. This is the start of Purple Roads. In here I document every single thought I…
A little while ago, Anthony and I made a journey across the Nullarbor to Adelaide. We were going to look for good stud rams, to help advance our White Suffolk Stud. After a day in the airports we went straight from there to the show! It was wonderful to walk in and be greeted by…
Sometimes when the crop gets a bit too high and there’s a disease or fungus in it, we need to call in the plane. If we run over it with the boom spray and tractor, we’ll do more damage to the plant, than good. Cropsdusters are daredevils, I’m sure! They fly so close to the…
Check out our beautiful looking oats crop. In another five or six weeks it will probably be as tall as my chest! It’s about then we head into it with the mover and cut it all down in rows. Then we leave it to cure (dry out), rake it and start baling. Haymaking is a…
This is what our first day of shearing looked like at 6:00am! Sheep all ready and waiting in the yards, clear skies and a wonderful sunrise, sending a message that it was going to be a special day! We tested our new shearing shed well and truly, with 450 ewes being shorn. It worked really…