9 September, 2008 12:22PM AEDT

Postcards from Harry-gone fencin'

Harry's outback adventure has turned to mind games to stave off the madness of fencing.

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We've finally gone out on camp again for the first time since June, and this time was a little different. There were no horses, no cattle and most importantly no cook! We were told that we'd be going fencing for the next few days and I just assumed that we'd be staying each night at the station and doing day trips but it turned out that we were on a serious fencing project.

Five of us went out on camp to build new fences around some new turkey's nests that have been built recently and we took the bare minimum. Instead of our usual camp van we took a smaller one person van just so we could have a shower and fridge.

Instead of taking a cook we were simply given a heap of stuff to do what we wanted with. At first I was very skeptical about cooking for ourselves knowing my own cooking abilities, but it turns out we can put together a bloody good feed.

We ate like kings having steak, sausages, bacon, eggs and chips drowned in some interesting ideas for gravy for the first few days. But soon we ran out of ingredients for our signature dish and had to start getting fancy and cook things like mince and veggies.

We started work each day at daylight as usual and fence all day until we finished a nest which on our best day was by 3pm. As there were enough of us we'd all have our job to do and that's all we'd do for the whole day. By some bad luck I ended up on the post rammer, so I spent seven days straight simply bashing posts into the ground and by the end of it I was going mad.

The most exiting thing I could do to keep myself occupied was counting the number of hits it took to get the posts in, about 120 was the normal, under 100 was good. All I can say is I'm glad that's over.

At the end of the day we'd sit around the fire at camp drinking beer as the sun set solving the problems of the world, I couldn't help but think how cliché this was for a jackaroo, but as it turns out it actually does happen.

Since fencing we've been out on camp as usual for a week, mustering and putting cattle through the yards, same old, same old kind of stuff. We mustered the largest paddock on the place. We took a cut of the paddock one day, and the next day Ted's camp finished it off. There were some big days put in.

On the day the other camp mustered they started at daylight as usual but didn't get to the yards until 8:30 at night. We were at camp just near the yards and as the sun set we could only just see their dust in the distance, so our bikes went off to help them.

As it got later and later the lights of the bikes slowly got closer and as they were just at the yards we could hear the horsemen yelling "where are you?"

Then, "I'm over here!" would come the reply, followed by a frustrated, "Where's here?"

We were feeling pretty useless knowing there was nothing we could do to help so we went to greet them and help unsaddle their horses. That night both groups stayed at the same camp. There were 15 of us in total and although it had been a big day everyone was up for a big night as well, it seemed that camp no. 27 was the place to be.