I WELL remember the old man telling me about the good old days, when a bale of wool bought him a new car.
Well, those days, I can assure you, are long gone. Nowadays the boffins at AWI suggest you would need at least 30 bales of wool – and with that I doubt we are talking Mercedes.
Fortunately.
Because back in the 1950s when the exchange rate was one bale for one car, it was on the back of the war in Korea and the insatiable demand for woollen uniforms and greatcoats for the United Nations’ forces in that very cold campaign.
But it seems we are back in another state of war – with our erstwhile allies the good old US of A.
They may not be firing real bullets, but they are still pulling the trigger on all sorts of chaos – from demanding our government spend more on defence (another story we might leave for another day) to whacking tariffs on everything that moves to allegedly protect truth, justice and the American way (yep, I used to watch Superman on the telly when I was a tacker).
Trouble is, it is politicians doing all the talking, so there goes truth and justice straight out the window.
Which is, after all, the American way.
In the old Whacker’s experience, and he’s had plenty of that, the odd individual American can be a good bloke.
But lump them together and they are nuttier than grandma’s best fruitcake.
Many of them hardly realise there is a world outside the continental US (lots of them don’t even recognise Hawaii).
And that helps explain how someone such as Donald Trump gets elected president.
Twice.
However, the thing which is increasingly alarming yours truly is the scary similarities I am seeing between the Yanks and us.
For example, they are busy rounding up every non white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant they can and shipping them out of the country. They are, literally, snatching people off the streets.
Here we are busy rounding up every non white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant we can find and shipping them into Australia so we can have someone who will do the work shunned by every white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
I was in town the other day and the missus had taken the car and gone to see her friends up the road a bit. I wanted to get to the other end of town, it was raining, the old hips ached, and I thought, ‘Bugger it, I’ll splash out (raining, get it?) and take a taxi’.
When one finally turned up, the polite Punjabi at the wheel apologised for the delay and said it would have been quicker if they could find a driver or two to help out.
“You just can’t get an Australian to do the job anymore,” he moaned. “Not for love nor money – they just reckon it’s too hard for not enough.”
Well there’s a confusing pot-versus-kettle conundrum.
But strangely, I have been hearing the same story from the crew who move our livestock. They can’t get drivers for love nor money.
So, off the back of that I made my own discreet inquiries with another local freight firm – who are pretty big operators.
And who told me at any time as many as a third of their trucks are sitting idle – no drivers.
“No joke, Whacker,” the boss told me. “We did have an applicant for one of the jobs, but he asked if he could do it from home.”
Stone the bloody crows.
I was passing through Swan Hill last week on the way to another job and thought I’d catch up with one of my orchard mates, who has a seriously large stone fruit enterprise.
He was out on one block with about 15 of his workers when I landed, and seemed to be somewhat agitated, waving his phone around as if making a serious point.
Being the police individual I am, I hung back until they dispersed.
“Crikey mate,” I observed. “Were you giving them a gob full?”
“Whaddya mean?” he said.
“All that hand waving and stuff,” I replied.
He started to laugh and then explained what was going on.
“Whacker, I can’t talk to any of them, they don’t speak English. So I use the translator thingummy on my phone. That mob that just left, I only had to use three languages,” he said.
“If you think that’s bad, I hear the meatworks over at Tongala involves more than 30 languages.”
Well if that’s the face – and voice – of Australian farming circa 2025 I’ve only got two words to say: Ay caramba.
