Rural Stuff

We went on Sunday to the small town of Yass, about 45 minutes north of Canberra, for the annual Yass Show. Think small-time county fair in rural America. It was pretty cool. First, we watched the cattle being judged. It wasn't a big show, so like in 2nd grade, every cow got a ribbon. There was more competition in the sheep category, this part of Australia having more sheep than cattle.

We watched a sheep-herding competition. Like the movie Babe, they release sheep into a pen and the dog has to round them up, run them thru a pen where the dog's owner can squirt some stuff into the sheeps' mouths, then into another pen where the sheep would (in real life) be loaded into a truck. It was a blast to watch. The best dog to my untrained eyes was a German shepherd mix. He was coolly efficient. He only barked once, and I never saw him nip at the sheep - he had the on-the-field presence of Dan Marino.

In another part of the showgrounds were dozens of ancient tractors and other mechanical devices, part of the vintage tractor pull and engine rally. Some of those machines dated to the 1920s. Unlike much of the show, this was purely a hobby for the guys entering. We saw one contraption that was steam-powered with a boiler like a 1920s train. While checking out a mechanical thresher and another device chugging away we caught a whiff of the smoke from coal and wood - a small reminder of what western cities were like as recently as the 1950s when London still had killer fogs.

Like American county fairs, there were competitions for flowers, plants, food - and funnily, a competition for vegetable art! The winner was a turtle made out of melons and other veggie bits. Never seen THAT before - an idea for the Arlington County fair organizers...

After the show, we went to a pub in Yass for lunch. The other times we'd been there, they tried to steer us to the "fancy" bistro in the back, not believing a bunch of fancy foreigners would want to eat pub food. This time, maybe they recognized us because we bellied up to the bar to order our Resch's beer and fish and chips without being directed to the posh room...