Life in the bush can be very demanding on body and spirit and I have seen hardened men become virtual saints, as they become one with it and if the "bushies" as they are called, work hard, and also play hard as well.
To celebrate the New Year, we had a party at the owner's house of the station we were working on. Seeing the New Year in, we were all in full swing when the local cowman gardener, covered in scratches and nicks, walked in and just said to his employer, "You will never guess where I have hidden my car this time," and walked out.
When we asked him what that was all about he just said, "Oh hell, he does this every time he goes to town to get his supplies. He gets a few beers in him and off he comes home and invariably puts his car in the ditch, or culvert, or over a bank and we always have to go and find his car and pull it out."
We suggested to him why don't you just sack the silly bugger if he causes you that much of a problem. But apparently for all his faults, he was a very honest and very reliable person to have on the station.
So our host thought, seeing as there many willing hands to help him, it was decided to try and find the old guy's car. So we all piled onto the Land Rover with a few wire ropes and chains and set off towards town to find the car, but to no avail. We came to the tar-sealed main road and retraced our tracks towards home again.
But as the homestead lights appeared before us, our host told us, well, the old guy had done a very good job of losing his car this time, as it was not obvious as to where he had gone off the road at all. So we had a pit stop and while I was standing there, I started to laugh and the hilarity of it just made my condition worse. The other blokes asked what was so bloody funny. I told them to come where I was standing.
Doing so, they too saw what I was looking at and we all just roared with laughter, because at the same level as us was the guy's car in a tree, nestled in the branches still in an upright position with the driver's door open. It was very obvious to us what had happened. The old guy had come tearing around the corner, hit a mound of gravel left by the grader and had become airborne, then landed in the tree. Then stepped out of his car fell the six meters to the ground, climbed the bank onto the road towards home.
Well, there was no way that we were going to get the car down from there, so it was unanimously decided, he put it up there, then he could also get the damn thing down also and set off to continue our celebrations.
