A SEASON ENDS

Each year as the month of November comes to an end I am always amazed to discover some significant aspect has been added to our peaceful observance of the costs of war borne not only by those who leave their homeland, but their dependants who remain and wait.  As you saw in my previous post we were visited by Amanda McLeay of TVTen and that night our floral tribute to the fallen was shown wide and far across Queensland and northern New South Wales. The immediate result was that holiday makers travelling north, who had overnighted in towns like Uralla in NSW called in to photograph our Remembrance Field and to ask for a packet of Flanders poppy seed. Then I received a request from a soldier’s wife, who had seen the TV presentation, asking if her husband could be photgraphed with her and their children in the Remembrance Field prior to his departure for Afghanistan.  I was told that when our men and women of the Australian Defence Forces are about to be deployed overseas the Department arranges for them to receive a selection of family photographs taken in the venue of their choice. This young soldier has already served in East Timor and Iraq. Of course I agreed to this request.

These photographs were taken on the 19th November by which time time we had experienced three weeks of hot weather and the poppies were running to seed. Read the rest of this entry »

JANUARY FLOODS

Firstly I wish to extend my sympathy to all those families who have lost loved ones in the recent floods. I feel empathy too for those who have lost their homes and possessions.

If you are not a regular reader of my posts I suggest you read my last post for 2010 which I ended with the words:

• I expect more rain and more floods at least until Easter. It is during Autumn that the Pacific Ocean current which determines if eastern Australia will experience an El Nino or La Nina season fall into place. At the moment the Oscillation Index which measures this current is still high indicating a continuation of the La Nina weather pattern until Easter.

I had been watching the Oscillation Index rise during last winter and actively saying since July 2010 that we could experience a really wet summer this year. I knew that wet year cycles come around regularly every 25 – 30 years. I am also issuing a further warning. I believe we could continue to have cyclones, heavy rain and floods right through to Easter. So the Queensland disaster could get much worse yet. Like all other warnings, my warnings will only be heeded by a few people.

We prepared for this wet season that I knew was due. Twelve months ago, in preparation for such a wet year, we paid to have our entrance road built up to drain the water away that would run down the slope of the hill and I’m very glad we did so. This has allowed us to drive to and from Mt. Stirling Road without churning and sliding through mud since the rains began here in July. The last thing I want to do is sound righteous, but many of the decisions we make in life are choices. We could afford to get the road constructed, but equally we could have spent the money on holidays or a luxury item. Read the rest of this entry »

CLIMATIC DIFFERENCE

My garden is different to most Queensland gardens due to the altitude of the Granite Belt. Most Queensland gardens are located in tropical or subtropical climates, but the Granite Belt of Queensland is the only region of this State with a temperate climate. The majority of the gardens in Queensland only know two seasons, the ‘WET’ and the ‘DRY’ whereas here on the Granite Belt we have four distinct seasons as in the Northern Hemisphere.

Usually our winters are dry so we seldom get snow and for the same reason we frequently experience more winter frosts than Victoria. Brisbane and Melbourne are the capital cities of Queensland and Victoria. Coastal Brisbane has a subtropical climate but the altitude of Das Helwig Haus (about 850metres above sea level) and our position on the western side of the Great Dividing Range create our much cooler climate.

Read the rest of this entry »

PICKING FRUIT WITH THE BRUDERHOF

After camping overnight in their swags on the bank of our Severn River the ten youngsters and their two teachers were awakened by a chorus of kookaburras – sometimes called the laughing jackass. The adventurous boys gathered fresh water mussels and boiled them in a billy over the coals of a fire, determined to try real bush tucker.

“What did they taste like?” I asked.

“River water,” was the consensus.

Meanwhile, Tabatha and the girls were busy preparing a stack of breakfast pancakes in our kitchen. Nancy on accordion and Joe on guitar led a round of singing to keep us entertained and everyone occupied.

After breakfast as Nancy stripped her bed and cleaned house for me, while Tabatha packed Bruderhof belongings into the back of their bus, two girls reminded me that I had promised they could pick our elderberries. In past years I’ve made elderberry jelly but these girls said they wanted to dip the whole spray of berries into batter and fry as a sweet pancake. I’ve also heard that the white flowers can be used this way, or placed in custard to give a vanilla flavour.

These berries then had to be found a space in the bus, beside the grapes that other youngsters were busily picking from our Isabella grape vines covering the terrace over the guest parking.

The previous night I had phoned David Dunn whose family has grown stone fruit near the top of the ridge of hills on the western side of the Glen Aplin valley since the 1920s. He had agreed to welcome this Bruderhof group as a school excursion to the family orchard. The Bruderhof said their goodbyes to Eberhard and I accompanied them on the bus to their destination.

What a welcome they received! Brendon Dunn loaded the youngsters, all sitting down and under the supervision of Mike, into the tray of the farm utility. Tabatha rode up front with Brendon until they reached the plum orchard.

Nancy, Joe and I travelled in comfort in a 4WD car with David and John Dunn. Nancy was delighted as the smell and taste of the ripe plums brought back to her memories of picking fruit in the orchards of Ontario, Canada where she had grown up in a Mennonite community.

The children were overjoyed at the thrill of picking an abundance of fresh fruit straight from the trees.

From the plum orchard we crossed a track and entered a peach orchard.

Nancy kept remarking how different these Australian orchards were in comparison to the ones she had known in her youth. As David Dunn explained, his family had cleared pockets of fertile land amongst the granite boulders to establish their fruit trees. The eucalyptus forest growing in the rocky terrain around these pockets provided protection from winds, but not hail.  Much of this fruit was blemished due to hail damage and would be sold as second grade fruit.

Brendon phoned a neighbour over the hill, who said he was about to throw out fruit he had graded as unsuitable for sale. He drove off with Mike. They returned with Golden Queen peaches (the best type for bottling) and nectarines. After the Bruderhof group returned to Danthonia these could be made into jams or preserves.

Back we drove to the packing shed where Brendon brought out boxes of second grade plums from the cold-room, which he gifted to the Bruderhof.

This is the district, the Granite Belt of southern Queensland where Eberhard and I have lived for more than seventeen years. It is the district I describe in my book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine.

Das Helwig Haus B&B owned by Eberhard and Fay Helwig is situated at Glen Aplin, near Stanthorpe on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland, Australia.

This is a region noted for Australian wildflowers, four wilderness National Parks and sixty wineries. In 1997 Eberhard and Fay established the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies, a European wildflower.

To obtain Fay’s book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine send an email to helwig@halenet.com.au The price is $33.00 posted to destinations within AustraIia.

Internationally it is available on

http://stores.lulu.com/strictlyliterary

http://books.google.co.uk/

GREEN CREDENTIALS

I begin this post about Peter Spencer by saying that my green credentials are obvious. When Eberhard and I bought our property in 1992 there was no garden surrounding the small timber house that was to grow to become Das Helwig Haus B&B. I set out to build the garden of my dreams and have achieved a remarkable result. We recently opened our garden for the Australian Open Garden Scheme. I’ve planted trees and shrubs in this organic garden to attract the birds, bees, butterflies and other living creatures.

Yesterday friends visited just as I assembled a new electric shredder. Although I compost leaf matter from the garden, I realized that most of my shrubs are now so large that when they are pruned back I needed a shredder to mulch their woody branches. Read the rest of this entry »

MORE ABOUT TREES

Some of my readers are wondering what it was that Peter Spencer wanted to do on his property. I’ll quote the words of Kahn Spencer posted on Agmates.
The people on this forum and those all over the world that are supporting Peter in his stand deserve to know what his motives are. At this point money is obviously a major concern, the bottom line is Saarahnlee and many other properties are no longer a viable business due to this legislature. So yes money is part of it but it is not the sole reason or the main reason for his stand.
The irony is that not only does Peter not have plans to do any major clearing on the property, he has spent a great deal of time and money researching and designing a forestry sustainability plan for the property. He had a goal several years ago, I remember because he would talk about it all the time when we were children, that goal was to selectively harvest and replant a variety of, mostly native, trees. By doing this the farm would be able to sustain a very controlled form of forestry without ever causing a significant reduction in the total vegetation. It was in essence a vegetation management plan. This devastating legislature will not even allow him to do that.

For details about the legislation and how Peter Spencer has not been able to get a hearing in the courts of Australia, go to http://loveforlife.com.au

Those of you who have read my November posts related to Peter Andrew’s book Back from the Brink will know that water not only flows over land, but travels downhill beneath the soil to our gullies and rivers, unless it is all taken up by the thirsty Eucalyptus saplings now stealing two percent of Queensland grassland each year. They are nothing more than woody weeds but are protected under the State vegetation laws

Read the rest of this entry »

SMOKE FILLS OUR VALLEY

We are experiencing a period of hot, dry weather. This is what the farmers need to ripen their tomato crops before Christmas. Have you ever noticed how expensive tomatoes are at Christmas time? The crops in the northern districts like Bundaberg and Bowen are finished and the backpackers are moving south looking for work. Here in the cool mountain highlands of the border between Queensland and New South Wales our tomato plants can not be planted until the frosts are finished. This year the farmers on the Granite Belt had heavy rain in May to fill their farm dams and the weirs across the creeks and Severn River. They have water to irrigate their crops and now have been blessed with a heatwave to encourage the quick growth and early ripening of their vegetables.

But last night the weather forecast for today included a severe fire warning. And yes, I awoke this morning to the sight of our valley filled with smoke.

With visibility reduced by this pall of smoke I do not yet know where the fire is situated and if it is headed in our direction. What I do know is that thanks to our foresight in clearing trees in close proximity to our house and undertaking a controlled burn of our country at the end of winter, we will not need to evacuate our home. Read the rest of this entry »

A TALE ABOUT DAMS

To write in support of Peter Spencer and why he is on a hunger strike I need to tell my readers how country Australian land owners are being robbed of their rights to utilize their land. I will explain how our Australian Government can act, when it so chooses, to over-rule State Governments. Our farming property Das Helwig Haus B&B is free hold title, but increasingly what we are allowed to do on our land is being eroded by State and Federal laws. I do not have the freedom to now clear land, build dams or light fires – freedoms taken for granted by my Australian forebears.

On the Agmates site Rob Wass explained How our Politicians (at all levels) Appropriated our land (property). Read the rest of this entry »

REMNANT VEGETATION

At last it appears that the main stream media in Australia seems to consider there could be a story in the hunger strike of Peter Spencer. There are to be a number of radio interviews today. See Peter Spencer.

It is my intention to continue writing daily posts and illustrating them with my photographs to discuss some of the State laws which have been imposed on country people in recent years. As an illustration, consider a frog dropped into hot water. It will immediately respond by jumping out. However, if you place a frog in tepid water and slowly increase the heat the poor thing will stay there until it can no longer jump.

Such has been the encroachment on the lives of country Australians by various State governments in the past twenty years. Each issue was hardly worth a fight until now when we suddenly find ourselves powerless in the courts of Australia. This is another issue that I’ll elaborate on at another time, but the courts of Australia do not have the power to over-rule State court decisions. It has been a hypocritical act by our Australian Federal Government to encourage State governments to introduce laws that then allow our Federal Prime Minister to claim the credit for meeting greenhouse gas emission targets, without the affected people having any right to claim restitution via the courts of Australia.

As many of you know we have a beautiful river frontage and that we have a license (another tax) to draw water from this river for irrigation purposes. I have not utilized this license to grow commercial crops. We have only drawn water for the garden and to irrigate the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies each spring.

Read the rest of this entry »

EUCALYPTUS FORESTS = HOT BUSH FIRES.

As always happens when people people join a FORUM to support a person or project they start to discuss other matters. Thus while I’m writing these posts in support of Peter Spencer I can not do much more that let people know why this courageous man has gone on a hunger strike. It must also be noted that every time I write the words Peter Spencer the powerful Google search engines will recognize his name and give it more prominence.

I posted my words yesterday on http://fayhelwig.com supporting the stand of Peter Spencer, who is on a hunger strike to draw attention to the lack of compensation for Australian country people who have had their rights to utilize their land, as they see fit, taken from them by Qld and NSW Government land grabs. I gained inspiration to write another post after reading comments on http://agmates.ning.com/group/peterspencerhungerstrike

Despite the fact that CO2 is a potent plant food, and that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would only result in a rise of 1 degree Celsius, why are we tying up vegetation? Wouldn’t it sequester more CO2 if trees were grown, the timber utilized, and then more trees grown in their place? Instead we have the ridiculous situation where vegetation is grown until senescence, then it falls down, cant be harvested or collected and adds to situation such as the recent ‘Black Friday’ here in Victoria? Comment from Colin J. Ely

Saplings clean much more CO2 out of the air and produce more O2. A plantation of new trees will help, rather than leaving the existing trees. Perhaps a compromise could be reached, a part of the land could be used as a plantation which could be used for logging once it has reached maturity. Just a thought. Comment by Leith Carnie.

This was the view from our farm boundary fence in October 2002 of a bush fire, on the other side of our Glen Aplin valley, which took the life of a local woman. The little clearing on the hill in the centre of this photo above is the Felsberg Winery. Read the rest of this entry »