Our first week on the Rackemann farm

Following on from our stay in the town of 1770 we got on a 2am bus to Gympie. We arrived there at 9am the following morning where we had a delightful breakfast in a small café whilst we waited for Carl to come and collect us to take us back to his farm 2 hours inland.

The Rackemann farm has been in Carl’s family for many generations and today it consists of cattle, barley and peanuts. Despite farming being the family profession Carl spent his professional career playing cricket for the Queensland Bulls and for Australia. After retiring Carl became a coach before buying the farm from his father, although his parents remained living and working on the property for the rest of their lives. Carl moved back to the Rackemann farm, situated about 30km from Kingaroy, with his wife Louise whom he had met whilst playing cricket in England.

Carl and Louise have since built their own property on the farm, yet Alex and I have been staying in the original farmhouse where Carl’s parents lived and where Carl grew up. It is clear that the property has definitely been well loved through many generations; it is completely jammed full of things, mainly crazy ornaments covering the sides, the walls and hanging from the ceiling, in particular slightly strange frog ornaments seem to have been collected. There are also hundreds of family photos and the odd few dried snake and lizard skins scattered around, kindly in unexpected places.

Carl and Louise have 2 children, Maddie who is 12 and already acting like a teenager through and through, and Tommy who is 8 and adorable. Tommy sets Alex Star Wars homework each evening.

Since we have been here our tasks have included taking and picking up the children from school, they both attend school in Kingaroy, which as I have stated is 30km away. We are allowed to drive their 4wd vehicles (some very old and tricky to drive and some very new) both on the farm and into Kingaroy, which is pretty exciting and thankfully we are beginning to get our bearings. We have also been dismantling old fences and building new ones, herding cattle to be weighed and preg tested by the vet. Alex had the pleasant job of cleaning out the cow poo in the cattle truck and he also did multiple moisture tests on the barley with Carl (apparently the moisture levels of barley have to be below 12.5% before it can be harvested and consequently sold).

We also took part in Kingaroy’s annual charity event, Relay for Life. This event has over 40 teams and each team must keep their individual baton moving around the track from 3pm on Saturday afternoon until 9am on Sunday morning. We joined a local youth orchestra team, as they were short on numbers, and Alex played saxophone along side them at different times throughout the evening. A photo of Alex playing alongside 2 young girls in fancy dress made it into the South Bernett Times the following day. Our main walking slot was from 3am-5am as I think the children’s enthusiasm had tired by this point. Overall the event raised over 100K for a cancer charity.

Totally exhausted we returned to the farmhouse the following day to find a foot long lizard living in our room. Alex squealed loudly whilst I named it Lucy. As neither of us were brave enough to remove Lucy from our bedroom we having been sleeping beside her ever since, although secretly I suspect that Alex sleeps with one eye open.

[Photos to follow in the next post due to further camera issues, shock!] 

Whitsundays & 1770

 After Magnetic Island we headed south to our next destination, Airlie Beach. Here we stayed in a very lively hostel called Magnums; we went for dinner with some girls that we had met on the bus and then met up with a couple that we had spent some time with a few weeks ago in Cairns. As always, drinks flowed and we had another great evening.

After a few chilled days in Airlie Beach we set off for our 3-day boat trip around the Whitsundays islands. Our boat had 18 people on, the majority of which were young couples from various parts of England and China so we met some really interesting people, which we hope to keep in contact with. During our trip we went snorkelling, tried paddle boarding and Alex went diving again.

As part of our trip we went to Whitehaven Beach, which was simply paradise. It had the clearest, tropical water we’ve ever seen and the softest, whitest sand. The sand is known to be one of the purest forms of sand in the world and for this reason is heavily protected, we even had to wash the sand of our feet before we were allowed to leave. We also climbed up to the lookout for Whitehaven Beach; this is apparently the third most photographed spot in the whole of Australia.

After the trip had ended around half the group met up that evening at a bar in Airlie Beach. The Bar turned out to have a pub quiz on that evening so we all entered. We came second winning $150, which we wisely spent on 15 ‘aqua bombs’ at the bar. Oops?

Our next stop was the town of 1770. To reach this destination we, along side many of the people that we had met in the past week or so, boarded an eventful overnight bus. The bus diver managed to bang his head on the bus door and badly cut his head open, and the bus had some kind of engine fault resulting in us having to stop at the side of the road and wait for a mechanic.

The town of 1770 marks Captain Cook’s first landing in Queensland. That said, the tiny town seems to have progressed very little from Captain Cook’s first landing all those years ago as we’ve found ourselves to be pretty isolated and with very little to do. 

Nevertheless we went on a scooter tour. We were given leather jackets (mine was bright pink, of course) and fake tattoos to help us capture the biker look. Although we were both fairly unexcited about this trip, we embraced the experience and it turned out to be a lot of fun. After a frightening small amount of practice on the scooters we were let loose on the roads and our 3 hour tour began. Despite obviously seeing the ‘town’, or lack of it, we saw at least 50 kangaroos and got to watch a stunning sunset.