Four Seasons With a Grumpy Goat: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Life on the Farm by Carol Altmann

Author:Carol Altmann [Altmann, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, BIO026000, BIO000000
ISBN: 9781742693675
Google: zcNYnmmAntIC
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2011-11-15T23:33:01.151971+00:00

Deb was so inspired by Sandy’s visit, or maybe it was the chance to wear a firefighter’s uniform, that she signed up for the Sandfly volunteer fire brigade. The brigade met on Sandfly Road in a shed next to the Sandfly Hall, which was next to the Sandfly store and across the road from the Sandfly oval which, together, made up the entire infrastructure of Sandfly.

The brigade consisted mostly of men, which didn’t trouble Deb: before becoming an office manager in Hobart, she had spent most of her working life in construction, surrounded by men in fluorescent-coloured shirts who didn’t talk much. She was also familiar with stifled laughter from blokes who saw her slight build and skinny legs and thought she must have wandered onto their construction site by accident, until she climbed behind the wheel of a Caterpillar grader and levelled the top of the roadbed as if she were icing a cake, silky and smooth. Setting up a small hobby farm was physical enough for me, but I think Deb missed climbing in and out of industrial vehicles with large wheels, so whizzing about in a fire engine would be well within her comfort zone.

Besides Sandy and Deb there was one other woman in the brigade, who joined on the same night as Deb and who wore riding jodhpurs and eyeshadow, and had a neat auburn ponytail.

‘I’ve always wanted to fight fires,’ she said with a giggle when asked by the instructor why she had become a volunteer.

The instructor told the new recruits that their first test would be the smoke tunnel, where each person would crawl through a tight, smoke-filled tube while wearing the equivalent of deep-sea-diving gear. The test was designed to flush out those who couldn’t cope in small, suffocating spaces with a fire potentially burning at their backsides.

Ponytail turned pale and didn’t say much after that. It was to be her first and last time with the brigade.

At Deb’s second meeting of the brigade, and having passed the smoke tunnel test, she was presented with a buttercup-yellow uniform that had fire-engine-red braces to slip over her shoulders, and a robust pair of steel-capped boots. A tag on the back of the uniform said it was previously owned by a fellow called Marcus; even though the sleeves were too long and needed to be rolled up, it was the smallest uniform they had.

After the presentation of uniforms, the Sandfly crew welcomed its graduands by filling a bus with smoke. The brigade swarmed onto a derelict school bus and began tearing it apart while smoke billowed through the chassis in great choking clouds. Deb and Sandy took to the task with gusto and reduced the bus to a husk in minutes, proving that women firefighters do not need to be tall to be effective. By the end of the evening, Deb had her own hook on which to hang her uniform and was a fully fledged member of Sandfly’s finest. (Unfortunately for Deb, she was

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