A Magical Evening

If you have the time I'd like to help you imagine something wonderful I experienced on Monday the 16th of December.

Imagine, if you will, clambering up into the harvester on a balmy evening with your father.

Sitting next to him and being able to chat over all the different things that have happened in the past week. How the weaners are going, where the ewes will end up after their summer drench. Assessing whether they need a summer drench, or if they are low enough on worms to hold off until the end of summer. The farming talk continues as we relax together, the front slowly picking up dollars upon dollars of canola seed. Munching into it like a big grasshopper and filling up the tank behind us. We watch a fox lingering out to the north of us, the swaths have obviously been providing easy dinner for him in the form of the ground dwelling quail. Speaking of which, we watch one fly flat out from just in front of the header, wings going a million miles an hour as he tries to get to safety 10 metres ahead. Only to find that we're coming for him again half a minute later. That's not all though, there are mice hopping ahead of us as well. The canola seed must be pretty tasty as we regularly watch them hopping away, until we see a shadow hovering over it. You don't even have to look up, you know that at the perfect moment the hawk will plummet and snatch the mouse up. The ecosystem is well and truly alive out in the paddock! 

Zoom in to see the hawk biding his time!

So, we reach the chaser bin and I head off in the beast to empty it so Dad can finish out the night on the header.

The sun is glowing through the clouds, fingers of warm light splaying up and out, a warm orange burning into the horizon.

The iPhone camera gets a work out as the black seed empties into the field bin.

I take the chaser bin back out at the pace of a pregnant elephant. My eyes are glued to the sunset, the beauty of it is truly awe inspiring. 

There's a few hours here where dinner and some awesome photo opportunities occur for me, but of course, the header driver needs sustenance so at 8:30 it's back out to the paddock I go.

The chaser needs emptying again, but this time it's the moonlight that floods across the creamy stubble. The day is cooling into night and there's the smell of moisture in the air. The sweet smell of storms building, and the soft breeze whispering against your arm as you hang it out the window of the ute. Half an hour later, the chaser is empty, the driver is fed, the header is refuelled and it's on we go again. It's at this point that I think of the song 'Harvest Time' by Luke Bryan. I put the song on and cruise back to the home farm in the dappled moonlight. The clouds glide across the silvery orb, the headlights piercing through the intermittent darkness. It's the most beautiful night I've had the privilege of witnessing in quite some time. So beautiful in fact that as I pull in the driveway I stop and revel in it. Sitting on the bonnet with the engines warmth seeping through me, the cool but not cold breeze filtering through the pasture, the warm moist smell emanating from everywhere around me and the moon taking it all in above me. As if that wasn't enough to make the night perfect... 

The mob of ewes in the front paddock decide that they'd like to know what I'm doing on this balmy evening, and so I'm resting on the bonnet looking up at the moon with 1,200 pairs of eyes reflecting around me. They circle the ute continuously, snuffling around literally 2 metres from my boots. They're obviously happy in their paddock and content to let their curiousity instead of their flight response come to the fore. This fact makes me impossibly happy, it's the most satisfying evidence of our stock management skills. If magic exists then this night would epitomise it, it was a truly surreal and amazing experience. I hope that my words have done it justice and the most beautiful part is that living on the land means I will experience it again. That, my friends, is why I love farming, the agricultural industry and tending to this beautiful land.