WWOOFing Murray Falls - it's a long one!

juicing oranges

outdoor shower

Mouser! Gorgeous cat :)

The property was named Yabullum, which means - approximately - in the local Aboriginal language (each tribe has their own seperate language), 'the place that is never dry'. The actual house was next to an oxbow lagoon, that mentioned place, and a creek also ran through the property. Half of the 80 acres was given over to wildlife refuge bush, while the rest held the house, sheds, three fields of lychee, mangosteen and rambutan trees, and the horse paddock. The setting, particularly outside the house next to the lagoon, was gorgeous, peaceful, green, alive with birdsong, the burps of frogs in the water and the hum of cicadas in the bush on the other side. And the barking of hyperactive Layla, an extremely playful Kelpie dog, who never tired of playing with sticks and balls, and would try out her full range of barks to try to persuade you to play too.

The house itself was old and wooden, decorated with buddhist and eastern imagery, paintings left by past WWOOFers, and always scattered with at least two of her five cats. Mouser, a gigantic grey fluffball of a cat (with a fondness for sleeping on the kitchen island) who had turned up on the property after being dumped as a kitten, easily won the most gorgeous cat award, but the others were very cute too. The main kitchen/dining area even had a hinged wall, meaning that the wall could literally be propped open almost all the way to reveal a massive strangler fig tree, thick foliage and the lagoon itself. It felt like you were almost eating dinner in the bush at times! There was an outdoor shower too, under the shed roof but with a cut-away so you could look out onto the lagoon as you washed your hair.
We stayed in a caravan, under the open-sided shed connected to the house, but spent most of our time in the main house, for meals, reading, drinking tea, or watching Dr Who and the Aussie music-comedy gameshows Spicks and Spicks.

It obviously helped that our host, an ex-teacher, was wonderful - she was friendly and relaxed, she knew stacks about the bush and Aboriginal heritage, and she also had a great cd collection of 60s and 70s greats which we played our way through during our stay. Oh, and she blended her own tea, and believed in brewing up at the very least three pots a day - one at smoko (smoking/snack break, which happened around 10am each day),with lunch, and normally after dinner as well - which was heaven. Teabags taste like brewed sawdust after that!

There were three Jersey 'house cows' (not cows who live in the house, incidentally, as we had tentatively assumed from the WWOOF book entry...), and three horses on the property. Two huge Clydesdale geldings, and one extremely nervous Quarter horse mare who had been rescued after being abandoned on a cattle station. We groomed the older, placid Clydesdale, Lauchlan, each morning, while Suzanne trained Fergus, a stunning but headstrong 5 year old. It was great to be around horses again, even if they were much, much bigger than what I'm used to!

We did a wide variety of tasks on the farm, none of them seeming particularly strenuous due to the frequent breaks - we would start at 7.30amish but going to feed and groom the horses, then work on one project till smoko time, which consisted of piling back to the house for tea and crumpets, cake or toast, then either go back to that project or work on a new one till lunchtime at 12.30/1ish, then continue on in the afternoon to, at the latest 3/4pm, before another visit to the horses in the early evening. We covered boggy patches in the cows' field with sand, weeded the orchid nurseries (and fertilised them with a delightful cow-poo based fertliser, there was a yummy froth on the top when we took the bucket lid off...), fertlised an entire orchard of rambutans (with help of a Suzuki mini pickup, which I got to drive), stacked wood into burnpiles (and then cooked potatoes in them, eating them later on with butter and salt and cold XXXX's, which was up there with culinary highlights of this trip!), collected and juiced oranges, and painted irrigation piping. We also spent much of a day clearing a whole shed of various bits of mysterious - and often very heavy - farming gear, discovering a large family of toads and a large, hairy, tarantula-like wolf spider in the process, and wrestled with miles and miles of vine to reclaim the garden after the wet season speed-growth of invasive plants.

Suzanna even took us on a daytrip one day to visit Murray Falls, which was about twenty minutes drive away. We took an interpretative bushwalk up to a viewpoint at the top of the falls - the climb was rewarded with breathtaking views of the waterfall and the tablelands with misty rainclouds rolling down the mountaintops towards us. The walk itself was made even more interesting by Suzanne's own knowlege of how it was possible to live off the bounty of the wet-tropics bush, learned through her friendships with Murray Aboriginals. We discovered how boomerangs were cut from the buttresses of trees, providing the ideal shape and yet leaving the tree itself in tact, and how bush turkeys built huge mounds of plant scraps into nests, using the heat of the material to incubate the eggs.The Murray Falls site is actually the Dreaming place of the brown pigeon, and appropiately enough we spotted a flock of them flying from a tree as we walked along the ridge above the waterfall. On the return journey back down the track we were lucky enough to encouter two inquisitive kookaburras, who's distinctive laughing calls reverberated around the farm but which we'd never managed to see up close.

Leaving Suzanne's farm was quite difficult, we'd had a great time with her, working, talking, getting hints on old 70s cult authors to check out, and hanging out with the awesome cats. But we had to move on Cairns - and luckily, we'd never have to come back to Tully again, since my mysterious disappearing bankcard had finally turned up at the branch there on the day I left (post in Aussie is slow... even slower when the bank forgets to post things for a month...)

So, back to north to Cairns, and then finally we could begin our proper journey south...

written by  LizIsHere on June 23, 2010 from Tully, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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