When I was working at an outback school in South Australia, circumstances conspired to transform me into an Agriculture teacher. This was odd because i had no experience or qualifications in agriculture and my students had lived and worked on farms for their entire lives.
My classes taught me how to clear land, put up fences, prepare soil, plant, harvest, bale and sell crops. I’m not sure what the students got out of it but I learned massive amounts.
The Curriculum Committee pronounced itself satisfied with this but they wanted an animal product as well. The simplest of these turned out to be meat chickens. The first thing to do was house them. The Agricultural Research Centre 20 km away had a garage that they didn’t want. One of the parents offered to lend me a 3-ton Bedford truck, a solid beast from the early 1960s. Off we went one school day with a with me driving a truck for the first time, with a load of students, all of whom had been driving trucks since about the time they learned to walk.
The shed was a standard, galvanised iron single-car garage – the ideal size for a crop of 50 meat birds. Now came the time to take it apart and stack it onto the truck. The students, the research station’s staff and I stood around and looked at the job.
“It’d fit like that,” someone said eventually. I didn’t think it would but I was outvoted. Our combined muscle power hoisted the shed onto the bed of the truck. I remember the picture that appeared in the school newsletter. It looked like this:
It looked to me as if it would tip over backwards before we even started moving. Everyone said, “she’ll be right,” then looked at me. I got into the cab and started the engine.
For the whole way back to school on dirt roads, I had a tingly feeling of anticipation. At any moment, I expected the whole assemblage to sit back on the shed and launch the cab into the air.
We got there. The entire school gathered to watch me reverse the truck into position in front of the concrete base we had laid a fortnight previously. It fit perfectly.
The post about transporting 50 monster chickens in a compact car follows on from this one.
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April 10th, 2014 at 11:40 am
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