Ingham WWOOF # 2

The house took some settling into. There was almost-permanent noise: the bleep and electronic music soundtracks of computer games, on which all 3 boys are fixated, pounding bass-heavy music from the eldest son's impressive stereo, and, of course, yelling. Yelling for communication over all the other sounds, the kids yelling at each other, Narelle yelling at the kids. The youngest child didn't speak yet, and communicated with a grunts and half-words, which added to the cacophony. Still, once I got used to this, I found them friendly and welcoming - Narelle was relaxed about work, and she often joined me on jobs, when she wasn't working hard on her school PTA commitments. They family have had WWOOFers stay for up to 3 months at their house - though I think the ever present feeling that things were teetering on the edge of chaos would drive me away long before then!

The property was in a beautiful setting, too. Along a few km of gravel roads, over a concrete creek crossing, up a dirt track, and then suddenly the area opened up into a curving driveway with fruittrees along one side, the chook and geese pens, and the house. The backdrop was grey-blue mountains, which ran with myriad waterfalls during the wet season (during the wet season, and particularly after a cyclone, the creek would often rise up so high as to strand the family on their property - the longest they stayed trapped was 3 weeks!) The place was peaceful (aside from the family-based noise - and the geese!) and green, and at night the thousands of stars balanced the blinding blue skies of daytime.

During my time at the house I did everything from house-based chores - cleaning the bath, washing windows and screens, and shredding stacks and stacks of paper to line the goosepens, to making and bottling cumquat jam, mucking out the goose pens, helping prune the fruit trees, weeding flower-beds and feeding the chooks and geese each morning. This was slightly nerve-wracking as not only did the geese attempt to mug me whenever I came into their pen to let them out, but there was the ever-present worry of snakes in the hanging branches above the chook pen. Oh, and the poisonous and giant golden orb-weaver spider which lived in the food shed! The farm was my first encounter with two scary/amazing/horrible types of Aussie wildlife - giant spiders and green ants.

I saw 3 massive spiders during my time on the farm - with a legspan that could cover your face and freakishly big, black or orange-patterned bodies - the one in the shed, a golden orb-weaver high up in a tree (picture coming soon - camera zoom is a wonderful thing), sitting in it's golden-stranded web, and another creeping across the grass towards my host's bare feet as we pruned fruit trees. Luckily we all spotted it in time and her son picked it up on a rake and chucked it away, but it was unsettling all the same - they're impressive, fascinating animals when you're staring at them in a web, not so when they're inches from your feet! I lived in fear (and still do, in fact) of walking face-first through one of their webs when I'm working in an orchard or garden!
Green ants, while neither poisonous nor giant, are still unpleasant, particularly when they gang up on you (as they always do). They're tree ants, much larger than our British black ants, with a green body and orangey legs and pincers, and build huge, amazing nests in trees by gluing leaves together to make a sort of giant ball. They even 'farm' aphids around the nest to give themselves something to snack on. So, very interesting and clever little creatures from afar - not so nice when you get up close to them, after miniature-chainsawing (my host, not me, i think she could sense my inherent clumsiness) down a branch holding one of their large nests, or dragging a branch covered in them a few hundred metres to the burn-pile. This is when they'll grip onto you with their rear-pincers, pinch your skin open and spray a stinging, acidic (but, oddly, lemon-flavoured) substance onto you. Any close contact with green ants swiftly leads to the 'green ant dance', a series of flapping, jumping, twisting movements (sometimes with accompanying shrieking-in-pain sound effect), as the performer attempts to rid themselves of the five or ten or fifty ants which have attached themselves to their feet, ankles, arms, or wherever. Even wearing gloves and shoes I often got bitten, but Narelle would have bare legs, hands and feet, even when working closely to their massive nests! Mad. Unfortunately you can't avoid green ants if you're working around trees - if there's trees, they'll be there. Great!
Still, according to the locals, fire ants are a lot, lot more painful and unpleasant. And I found out after the fruit tree pruning that the ants' lemon-flavoured venom can be used to flavour tea, and even chocolate.... yummy?

My second Ingham WWOOFing experience definitely got better as time went on, and added to all the encounters with new and interesting wildlife, Narelle's husband was actually an English guy who'd come over on the 3 week boat from England (the "10 Pound Poms" - when the British government was promoting emigration to Aussie and a ticket for the voyage only cost 10pounds) at the age of six. He was still very interested in England and particularly English cooking, so Narelle made lots of yummy English food like yorkshire pudding and bread and butter pudding, which definitely made a nice change from pasta and stirfries.

From Narelle's I caught the bus to Mission Beach, to discover if Nik had survived his 3 weeks hard labour on the banana plantations...

written by  LizIsHere on June 13, 2010 from Ingham, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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