A word from management: the receipt

Warren has asked me to write a column “for balance”. He has also asked me not to mention the receipt. He is getting one of those.

I run Boolaroo Downs. I have run it since my father handed it over in 1983, and I ran it before that in every way that mattered except the signature. Warren does the cattle, and he does them well, and I want that said before I say anything else. He knows a sick cow from the far side of a paddock. He can back a float into a gap you’d struggle to walk through. He is a good grazier and a good man and in March 1994 we needed a new bore pump.

The economics

A bore pump, in 1994, was eleven cows. Not metaphorically. I did the sums at this table and it came to eleven cows, and Beryl was one of them because she was nine, and nine is when a cow stops being a good investment and starts being a pet. Warren knows this. Warren has sold hundreds of nine-year-old cows. He has never once filmed any of them being lifted out of a paddock, because they went on a truck, in daylight, to Roma, like Beryl did.

I have redacted the money because it is nobody’s business, and because Warren has a theory that if the figure is published “they” will know what a cow is worth and adjust their operations accordingly. I don’t know who “they” are in that sentence. Neither does he. It changes.

What actually happened on the 14th

It rained. The dogs barked. Warren, who had been filming the dogs for the Show video for a fortnight, went out on the verandah in his socks and filmed the rain for about forty minutes, during which time a vehicle came along the Wandoona road with its spotlight on, looking for a bull of the Hennessys’ that had gone through a fence. I know this because Pat Hennessy rang the next day to apologise for the noise.

The tape shows a light, a lot of rain, and something that may be a cow and may be the windmill. It has since been “enhanced” so many times that it now shows whatever you tell it to. The Burnt Circle is where he burned the tyres in February. The grass doesn’t grow there because tyres.

Why I let him keep the site

People ask me this at the CWA, usually quietly, usually with a hand on my arm. The answer is that it’s his, and it’s harmless, and it got him through a bad patch when the prices fell and the pump broke and he needed something to be angry at that wasn’t the bank.

And I’ll say something else. It has brought people here. Cheryl, who I think is lonely more than she is abducted, has a room full of friends every Tuesday. Lyle Faraday, who is a very silly man, is also a very kind one, and fixed the CWA’s urn for nothing. People write to Warren from all over the world, and some of them are frightened, and he writes back to every one of them and tells them to keep watching the paddock, and I think for some of them that’s the first time anyone has told them to do anything.

So I pay the hosting. It is forty dollars a year. It is cheaper than the foil.

For the record

Beryl was a good cow. She went to Roma on the Tuesday. She would be about twenty-two now, which is not an age a cow reaches, and I’m sorry, love, but she’s gone, and she went the ordinary way.

The pump still works.

— Noreen

Document U8MC-07-0501. Status: DEBUNKED BY THEM. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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