The End Of An Era

It was sometime in the early 1980's. We sat uncomfortably in the conference room of a Darwin hotel, scratching our bushy beards, dressed in button-up shirts we'd bought that morning, listening to the Yankee guest lay down the law. "You guys have to eradicate your wild herds by 1984".

It was the end. Australia's meat exports to the US were under threat. Meat infected with brucellosis and TB had been found in a shipment and we simply had to get rid of those diseases. The end. They'd aerial shoot the wild herds and turn us into farmers.

The kind of men who go shooting buffalo don't make good farmers. Some tried. a couple shot themselves. The end.

At the end of the day it was our fault. You see, when buffalo are shot and butchered out in the wild, they are not tested for disease and the meat can only be sold for animal consumption. Boxes of meat from the abattoir, properly tested have official stamps on them, so they can't be mixed up with the cheaper untested 'pet meat'.

Anyway, when some of the more enterprising and ruthless pet meat buyers started making counterfeit stamps we took our hats off to them. Clever. It was highly amusing to think of super-sized Yanks chewing on our pet meat in their super-size burgers, in fact it was just plain hilarious - especially when the beer flowed.

And we got paid more for the meat.

It didn't occur to us that they'd get caught and it would all end.

It was the end of an era and the end of a lifestyle. Hooning around in cut-down four-wheel drives, our guns sitting on the rack, going to the local pub fresh from the slaughter, covered in blood and staying till stumps. Out again at dawn. Come to think of it, none of us were terribly sane at that time. Barely a day went by that we didn't get nearly hurt or killed. Rolled the Toyota on a bend - "coulda sworn I took it at the right speed" or the dead buffalo jumped up when you went to bleed it - "my shooting's a bit off today".

The fact that we lived through it is testimony to a higher power wanting us to stay alive. The reason still escapes me.