I keep the books. I have always kept the books, and the books have a line in them that no other cattle station in Queensland has, which is FOIL, and that line, as of the end of the last financial year, stands at four thousand one hundred and six dollars and forty cents since March 1994.
Heavy duty. Not the cheap stuff from the servo. Warren is very firm on this and so, apparently, is Dr Faraday, who says the thin stuff “lets the frequencies through” and who has never once bought a roll.
Where it goes
People imagine the hats. The hats are a small part of it. A hat is a quarter of a roll and Warren goes through perhaps three a year, mostly because the dogs get them.
The real expenditure is structural.
- The second bedroom (1996). Walls, ceiling, the back of the door, and the window, which means the room where the website is run has not had daylight in twenty-four years. Shane says this is “actually ideal”. Shane is nineteen and looks it.
- The camera (ongoing). The Panasonic lives in a foil sleeve on top of the fridge. The sleeve is replaced whenever Warren thinks it has been “read”.
- Beryl’s feed bin (1994–present). Lined. Empty. Lined again every autumn in case she comes back and they try to take her again from the same spot, which Warren says is “how they’d do it”.
- The Tupperware container. The Bureau letters are wrapped individually.
- The Faraday Paddock.
The Faraday Paddock
In 2004, after the wheat formation, Lyle Faraday proposed that a small holding paddock near the house be made “abduction-resistant” by running foil along the top wire of the fence, the theory being that a continuous conductive loop would “confuse the beam”. He named it after himself, which I would have had more to say about if he hadn’t also named the unit after himself first and got that out of his system.
The Faraday Paddock is 80 by 60 metres. The perimeter is 280 metres. Heavy duty foil is 30 centimetres wide and comes in 150-metre rolls at roughly nineteen dollars. Lyle’s design called for the foil to be folded lengthwise over the wire, so two rolls per circuit, and he specified three circuits “for redundancy”, and then the wind came through in October and took the lot into the Hennessys’ place and Pat rang to say the cattle were eating it.
We did it four times between 2004 and 2009. That is $456 of foil in a paddock, not counting the wire ties, before I stopped signing for it. Lyle says the project is “paused pending funding”. The funding is me.
Results
No cow has ever been taken from the Faraday Paddock. No cow had ever been taken from the Faraday Paddock before it was the Faraday Paddock either, and no cow has been taken from any paddock on this place in the twenty-six years I have been writing FOIL in a ledger, including the Top Paddock, which has nothing on it but a laminated sign.
Warren says that proves the foil works, because they can see it from up there and know we’re serious. I say it proves the thing it proves.
The one time
I have been asked by Warren, as a condition of publishing this, to “mention 2011”, and because I believe in balance, and because he let me do the receipt, I will.
In February 2011 the second bedroom took a direct lightning strike through the TV aerial. The aerial was destroyed. The TV was destroyed. The microwave, on a different circuit, was destroyed. The computer, in the foil room, on the same circuit as the TV, sitting on a desk against a foil wall, was fine. Not a flicker. The website stayed up.
The electrician, who is a sensible man, said the foil had “possibly, maybe, I’m not saying it did” carried the charge around the room to the earth and saved the machine. Warren has his business card in the Tupperware.
So. One lightning strike, one computer, twenty-six years, four thousand one hundred and six dollars and forty cents. I will let you do the sums on what that computer cost per year to protect. I have done them. I have shown them to Warren. He says lightning was “clearly a test”.
Policy going forward
The foil budget is capped at $120 a year, which is enough for the hats, the fridge sleeve and Beryl’s bin. Any structural foil requires a written proposal and will be considered by management on its merits, which is a sentence I have said to Lyle Faraday eleven times and which he has not yet heard.
The second bedroom stays as it is. It’s his. And it did save the computer.
— Noreen
Document U8MC-20-0507. Status: DEBUNKED BY THEM. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.