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Hay: recollection 2
When we got bigger we worked on the hay too. We'd trail behind dad through the long grass in the paddocks that had been shut up to grow hay, rubbing the heads of barley and rye between our fingers, and looking for the clover flowers deep below. When the grasses were ready, we’d take our turn on the machines that transformed the waving green stuff into prickly yellow hay. First the slasher or the mower would creep around the paddock, from the outside in, until it was all cut. The slasher was my first hay machine. It might have been because little red massey ferguson pulled it: I’d driven the bigger Ford into the rolladoor on the dairy cooling room because I couldn’t jump on the brake and clutch hard and quick enough to stop in time. The door was concave for years afterwards.
Cutting hay is a straightforward job: drive with the inside of the front wheel against the long grass, in long straight lines, don’t daydream too much, slow down to take the 90 degree corners. Quail would scuttle out of the long grass in front of the tractor and I’d fret about their nests and their babies and the ones that I didn’t see because they went under the heavy tractor wheel or got sliced up in the swinging blades of the slasher. There wasn’t much other action, crawling the tractor round a very slowly diminishing square, except to watch the clouds banking on the horizon and hope they'd bring rain and respite, or someone in the distance getting their cows in for milking, or the couples who thought they’d found a secluded back lane to park in.
After a few days, dad would kick at the rows of cut grass to test for the next stage of readiness, and then we’d drive the rake around the path first navigated by the slasher. Sometimes I’d drive it, but mostly it was Sue's machine - the light rake is another small tractor job. Pete and Chas didn't drive the rake often: they'd go too fast, the hay spinning off the top of the tynes and flying across the paddock, a redistribution job rather than an orderly raking into rows. Raking was a better job than cutting; we’d rake three slasher rows into one raked row, so a third of the time, a third of the boredom. The rakes were made up of a series of wheel frames with tynes bolted to them; they’d spin as you drove, moving the cut grass along so that it stacked up at the end of the last wheel. When the grass was thin we’d have a second rake attached to the first, reducing the number of slow squared circles required to finish a paddock.
After the rake came the baler. I don’t recall having our own square baler, the low lying machine that would take hay in at the front and shit out a monotony of tied square bales at the back. A contractor would come and do that bit. By the time we were big enough to drive the machines, the first big round balers were coming in. The early ones were belt-driven; they produced a messy erratically rolled bale, or at least Pete and Charlie did when they were driving it. Sue and I didn't drive the early round balers: it might have been a question of strength and ability to make the thing stop; it might have been the hierarchy of machines whereby males operate the most sophisticated and interesting and females get stuck with the simpler and more boring.
We eventually became baling contractors ourselves. By then Pete was old enough to drive; we were dispatched to visit farmers house to house around the district, hustling for work. We’d pitch the labour and therefore cost-saving virtues of the big round bale: no more loading and stacking and unstacking and carting; they’re round - the rain runs right off, leave them in a corner of the paddock for quick and easy feeding out; feed out one bale instead of fifteen! We’d bale their hay with the speed of light and make their haystacks a thing of the past. No more worrying about your kids smoking cigarettes in the haystack or who put the blankets there and why, we didn’t say.
We had two balers, each with its own tractor. Mine had the lime green Deutsch which I loved. It was like a classy European car, responsive, compact, sleek. Pete mostly drove the other one: it was like a holden sedan complete with bench seat and cabin top, loose gear change and sloppy steering. The best big round bales were heavy and lumbering beasts that took care to create. You’d weave slowly back and forth along the thick raked rows, sitting half twisted so you could watch the edge of the row and the baler behind, diesel smoke blowing hot and dry on your face, the baler devouring the dried grass with its insatiable feeder, the baler spinning the hay tight in the drum of its guts, seeds and dust spiralling like smoke above it. When the gauge showed full, you stop the machine and put the tractor in neutral, stand and lean back to engage the string and let the baler cycle while you play out the string evenly across the bale to keep it tight. Then you activate the hydraulics to open the hatched back of the machine wide so it could expel the bale. On an incline it would roll gently; on a hill it could break down fences, kill small animals if they were too slow to see it bouncing down towards them, or roll right into dams. We weren't supposed to let that happen, but sometimes you need entertainment to break up long days of diminishing squared circles.
There were few enough excuses for stopping that sometimes you didn't mind when the feeder jammed up with clumps of hay, and you had to switch off the tractor and climb down and unjam it. Lying on your back under the feeder, or under the baler itself, and pulling away sheafs of grass until the blockage was cleared you’d end up with scratches up your arms and pollen in your nose and dust in your eyes and dirt in everywhere else. But then you’d earned a break from the rattle and roar of the tractor, and it was ok to sit in the shade of the big tractor wheel, drink from the bottle of sweet black tea that was hot when you left home and had become tepid, eat a sandwich, have a smoke, dream of Paris.
If you finished the job, you’d have to drive the tractor and baler down the highway to home or the next job, hugging the shoulder to let cars and trucks whiz past. If you got lucky there’d be a pub on the way, and you could stop for a beer. When you pulled up out front on machinery that big, no one asked how old you were. The barman would just grin, pull a beer and pass it over.
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Hay: recollection 3
© Sandra Meredith, written late March 2007, typed early Feb 09, for Charlie’s 50th birthday. |
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