Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, and Quasimodo were all talking one day.

Sleeping Beauty said:

"I believe myself to be the most beautiful girl in the world."

Tom Thumb said:

"I must be the smallest person in the world."

Quasimodo said:

"I absolutely have to be the ugliest person in the world."

They decided to go to the Guinness Book of World Records to have their claims verified.

Sleeping Beauty went first and came out looking deliriously happy.

It's official, I AM the most beautiful girl in the world,"

Tom Thumb went next and emerged triumphant,

I am officially the smallest person in the world."

Sometime later, Quasimodo came out looking confused and simply stated,

Who is Camilla Parker Bowles?

The Final Lap

I am now on my sixth and final month of my exchange and I’m in the town of Numurkah near the city of Shepparton central Victoria. My host Mathew Kearney is a farm manager of a small dairy farm with about 300 cows!! The farm is owned by a New Zeland farmer who runs the main dairy farm in NZ. The area around Shepparton is all dairy industry and is also all irrigated with the main channels wider than the river Lagan and probably cleaner to!! They are great for swimming in as there wasn’t any current!! The method used for the irrigation in this area is Flood Irrigation which involves laser graded paddocks to give a gradual flow giving lush grass all year round! Matt took me to Echuca which is where the paddle steam boats are for the mighty Murray River and a fantastic Irish pub called the Shamrock. Later on that day we met up with some other YF members and had a bbq on the rivers edge!
Matt kindly asked me if I would get some chairs from the back of the trailer, as soon as I got into the trailer the door was closed tight and the jeeps engine fired up into gear with me in the back as they hit every bump as fast as they could! It was like a roller coaster with out the safety gear!! But revenge is sweet with the river being so close and an accidental PUSH!! We called it evens after that!! John Mathers A&M yfc once wrote an article on his exchange that was titled “There’s no escaping John McCallister” well I learned this night that it is true as two people asked if he was still on the go these days as they stayed with him on exchange!
Moving onto my next destination of St Arnaud where I stayed with Nigel and Daniel Greenaway. Daniel looked after a 500 sow piggery and Nigel ran the cropping side of the farm. When I arrived they were just about to start the harvest so I was put to good work in the chaser bin and turning over fifty acres of Lucerne hey. Being near some bush land there was a lot of wild life around!
So the lads took me out spotlighting on the back of the Ute armed with a spotlight, two shotguns and two 22 rifles. We stared about 10.30pm on a pitch black night on search of feral animals first I got a rabbit then a few hairs to start us of, then into the paddock to chase and shoot the foxes near the sheep. Though this was only the beginning as we had not seen one kangaroo, so we took a look over the hill and about thirty roo’s where grazing and that’s when all hell broke loose like trench war action with a lame sheep stuck in the middle of it all!! Total count for the night 11 hair/rabbits 9 foxes 13 roo’s and 1 possum and very nearly that darn lame sheep!! All we had left to do was lift the dead roo’s and through them into the neighbours paddock! These Lads were to wild cowboys!!
To get to the bottom of a rainbow is always a challenge just like it was for me to get to the town of Rainbow my final stop! Rainbow is in the west of Victoria in a region called the Mallee which is virtually all cropping country. My host Fred Soul was in the middle of his harvest so once again I was driving the chaser bins! Fred’s farm bordered the scrub/bush which covers hundreds of thousands of acres towards the west. The ground quality was poor as it was basically sand and only grew about one tonne of wheat to the acre!! My time in Rainbow finished my Australian YFCU Exchange.
I am currently staying with my cousins and anti Norma Higginson on their farm in the town of Junee. After spending Christmas here there was a devastating bush fire on the 1st January that overwhelmed Junee in a mater of hours with a strong westerly wind which destroyed over 25,200 hectors with 200 properties affected 10 houses, 4 shearing sheds, large amount of hay and silage, several headers, 20,000 sheep, 100 cattle, 1500 km of fencing destroyed all by a cigarette butt being thrown out a car window!!! This has now been classed as natural disaster area.

“The Irish as a people have a gift that allows gab to roll almost