Village Vets

by Anthony Bennett

  ‘What the hell is Corby doing Dad?’ I asked in amazement.

  Dad didn’t answer with words. He looked at me like I was a freak, as if to say, ‘Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘No, what’s he doing?’ I persisted.

  ‘You know, he’s making babies with the cow.’

  ‘How?’

  Dad kept looking at me strangely. I see now what a perfect opportunity this was for the big chat: father and son out there, just him and me, leaning on the gate, sun setting.

  ‘Hasn’t your mother explained to you what happens?’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘Rightio.’ And he turned around and walked straight back to the house.

  Where’s Dad gone and what on earth is Corby doing to that cow?

  Back home in Sydney a few days later I found a picture book on my bed called Where Did I Come From? I read it with great interest but still couldn’t figure out why Dad hadn’t just explained it to me out in the paddock. He didn’t need the pictures. We had it occurring right there before our eyes.

  Even though Dad was a doctor and we did a lot of the cattle work ourselves, sometimes he’d still need to get the vet out from Gerringong. As I said, the main one we saw was Andrejs, who seemed like a really nice man to me. Andrejs was tall with long blond hair. He was a surfie who’d grown up on the point at Werri Beach. He’d come out to the farm and the women would swoon. He had no shortage of assistants – often heavily made-up women in short skirts.

  Andrejs’s dad was also a vet. He’d started the practice in the 1950s. Back then, the NSW South Coast was such an unloved little backwater that they couldn’t get vets to work there. Apparently there wasn’t a single practitioner south of Wollongong. So the dairy co-operatives offered to rehome vets from Eastern Europe. The farmers got their vets and the vets escaped the poverty and injustice of post-war Europe.

  Andrejs’ dad, Arties ‘Arty’ Medenis, was one of the relocated vets. He started the Gerringong clinic and another vet, George Bouris, started the Berry practice.

  Arty was still around then, but Andrejs did most of the work. I thought it looked like a very cool job. It was like the medical stuff I knew my parents did, but it was also outside and physical. For a kid, that was very appealing. So the seed of my career was planted then by Andrejs; and now here he was offering me a job almost twenty years later.

  As difficult as the decision was, it made more sense to go to Berry. Arty still owned the Gerringong practice, and even though Andrejs was going to take it over it was always going to remain Arty’s practice with Arty’s rules while ever he was around. Arty had never taken a partner in more than fifty years of practice, despite much cajoling. So it seemed that there was less opportunity for advancement there.

  The Geoffs at Berry, on the other hand, were well into their careers, perhaps nearing the end of their working lives. The words of Jenny, the vet nurse, kept coming to mind too. It seemed there would be a good opportunity for me to set down roots in Berry.

  George Bouris had sold the Berry clinic to Geoff Manning about thirty years earlier, but people were still talking about him. I heard stories about how he was very proud of his physique, yet he’d always have a cigarette in his mouth, no matter how disgusting the job at hand was. He might be pulling out a rotten placenta, but the cigarette would be there dangling and smouldering. And during calvings, he’d strip down to his undies – leopard-skin briefs – and strut around, dominating the cow with his sheer presence.

  Old dairy man Bruce McIntosh told me how one day he’d said to George he should go easy on the smokes, that they’d kill him eventually.

  ‘Look at me. I am a bull. Nothing can kill me,’ he’d proclaimed.

  A few years later he was in hospital with throat cancer. In his mind it was just a minor ailment and he’d be back at work in weeks, so instead of selling the practice he signed an agreement to go into partnership with Geoff Manning. A few days later he was dead.

  So Geoff came down facing a career of hard yakka working for dairy farmers. He built the practice up, brought Geoff Scarlett in a couple of years later, and then they expanded the small-animal side of things in partnership over close to thirty years. In that time the area changed massively. Even when I was a kid, nobody wanted to go to Berry. The Southern Highlands was where all the money went; and the masses, if they went south at all, went to the beaches.

  But it started changing with a French restaurant in the 1970s, then an antique shop, and off it went, so that by the time I moved down full time to work, the main street was awash with homewares, nick-nacks, cafés and restaurants. And there were far fewer dairy cows; instead there were horses, alpacas and Chihuahuas called Robert.

  I remember driving down to start work. Coming out of Sydney it’s all freeway and eucalypts and semi-urban sprawl. But then you skirt the folds of a small mountain on which lush green cow paddocks slope down to the breakers – the glorious Kiama bends. Coming out of the last bend, you see the greeness dotted with cabbage-tree palms stretching out in front, and you get a waft of cow manure and grass and ocean breeze. You try to catch a sneaky look at the surf to see what the waves are like but you’re doing eighty down a tricky slope so you can’t look long enough to tell. But it’s those barnyard smells along with the ocean and the scent of the different flowers blooming then – be they dandelion or fireweed – that all go into the great big perfume mixer and hit you like a climate-controlled door. I would come to see this place as my gateway to home.

  I moved into Dad’s new farm near Nowra. Since I wasn’t taking the Gerringong job, I rang my university mate, Matt Izzo, one of the NROC veterans, to let him know about it.

  ‘Do you want a job and a place to live rent free?’

  ‘Sounds too good to pass up.’ So he took the Gerringong job and moved in with me at Depot Farm, a magical place nestled into the sheer cliffs that drop to the Shoalhaven River west of Nowra.

  Dad had forty-five head of Angus cattle on the place and it was calving season. Early on in my stay, I heard a cow bellowing a really long, loud honk before I went to sleep. She woke me before dawn, still going loud and strong. It was different to a normal bellow, and she was obviously distressed – that noise transcends language. I thought I’d better go and investigate, so I pulled on a thick jacket, beanie and boots and followed the honking across the uneven paddocks until I saw the cow’s black shape down at the far end of the block. She was standing at the top of an embankment that dropped to the river 20 metres below. As the first grey streaks of light started to crack the sky, I looked down the steep bank over the mud and wombat holes and tree roots and, sure enough, there was her calf at the water’s edge. Shivers! The calf was pacing backwards and forwards on a narrow muddy part of the riverbed, bellowing for its mother. I knew that the water would come in a long way at high tide, so the calf was going to be in serious trouble.

  When I’d got up, I’d dressed for work at the clinic figuring that since I was up I might as well pop in early. I knew if I went down to get that calf I was going to end up a mess. So I took off my clothes, hanging my jacket, shirt and trousers from a nearby tree. When I stepped out of my boots, my toes were in instant agony from the freezing ground. In just my undies, which, disappointingly, were not leopard skin, I climbed down the bank towards this little black calf that looked about three weeks old. At that age, calves are no longer teetering cute little balls of helplessness. Their muscles are already filling out and they run like greyhounds. I tried to corner him, but he was not in a frame of mind to be cooperative, so I had to tackle him. The little guy just went berserk. He thrashed and bellowed, while Mum, up above, increased her decibels to the point where I started expecting a noise complaint from the neighbours. Somehow I managed to lift the forty-odd kilo calf up the first part of the bank. I then had to hold it down while trying to climb up myself, before lifting the writhing body again and trying to get it up to the next level of the bank. I repeated this process a few times, but eventually I was absolut
ely exhausted. And so was the calf.

  I just lay on top of it and looked at it. It looked at me. I’m surprised it didn’t laugh. I was covered in red clay that barely concealed my goose bumps and blue feet.

  ‘I can’t get you up any further, mate. I need help.’

  I let the calf go, climbed up the bank and ran back to get Izzo. Still in my undies and, covered in mud, I couldn’t go in the house, so I knocked hard. Izzo came to the door: ‘Anthony, I know you’re into your fitness, but this is ridiculous.’

  ‘Mate, you’re about to look the same,’ I said.

  I told him the story and he didn’t need any convincing. Gotta love Izzo, he’s mad. Before I knew it he’d stripped down to his undies and one white body in blue undies and one red Claymation figure were streaking across the paddock, back to the scene of the action. It was NROC reassembled.

  With the two of us and a length of rope, it was pretty easy getting the calf up and we came back to shower and get ready for work. Even though I’d turned the hot tap right down, it scalded my frosted skin. I had clay everywhere, but I couldn’t stay in the shower long because I had to get ready for work again. And I was on call, so I might be required at any minute.

  As I was about to head out the door I heard the home phone ringing. This was odd because the only people with the number were Dad and Pa and neither of them would call so early. I doubled back and grabbed the receiver off the old yellow dial-up phone, curious to hear who it was.

  A wolf whistle came down the line loud enough to rupture an eardrum. ‘Looking good boys!’ It was one of our two female neighbours. They were just cacking themselves.

  They hung up and almost immediately my mobile rang. ‘It’s Peter Walsh from Kangaroo Valley here.’ He spoke in the steady tones of those who live by the rhythms of the land. I’ve since heard it said that the Walshes had been in Kangaroo Valley so long Noah dropped them off the Ark on the way past. ‘I’ve got a calving here and I think it’s bad,’ Peter said.

  I have since come to learn that because the Walshes are such experienced cattle people, if you are called to their dairy for a calving, it’s going to be a bad one, because if it was easy they would have got it out themselves. But I knew none of this then. I was only new to the job. I grasped enough, however, to sense that the Walshes were big clients whom I would have to attend to diligently. With red clay still under my fingernails, I jumped in the car to drive over the mountain to Kangaroo Valley.

  I pulled up at the house in my old Magna. Peter, tall, greying and wiry, came over to greet me wearing the standard dairy farmer’s uniform of black gumboots and a faded blue flannelette shirt. ‘She’s just over here,’ he said, pointing with his great ham-like hands to a ramshackle old yard and a crush that looked like it too had been dropped overboard from the Ark. The cow was in there, but the part that would normally close onto her neck to hold her firm was wide open because it didn’t work. Nor did the gate that usually closes behind the cow to stop her kicking you. So the only way we could keep this cow in the crush was to wedge a bit of wood in behind her, pushing the animal so far forwards that her head was pressed into the front of the crush. It was less than ideal.

  Peter saw my look of concern. ‘We’ve got our main yards over at the dairy down the road, but we keep the cows that are about to calve up here at the house so we can keep an eye on them.’

  I dipped my hands in iodine and lubricant and went in to have a feel around. Even with my limited experience I knew the cervix had dilated, but the calf had spun 90 degrees in the abdomen so the uterus had twisted. Imagine twisting a partially inflated balloon and you get the picture of how this calf’s exit route had been closed off.

  I also knew that a caesarean was the only hope of saving mother and baby. I was lucky that my second-last rotation as a student had been at Finley in the Riverina, near the Victorian border, where there are a lot of irrigated dairy farms. I had a great rotation there with vets named Petso and Butch, and ended up doing quite a few surgeries – calvings, twisted stomachs and caesareans. I’d done a couple of caesareans alone, observed a few others and assisted with a few more, so I felt pretty comfortable with the whole thing.

  Because I was so new, one of the Geoffs would be nominated as my backup when I was on call, so that if there was something I couldn’t handle, they were there to come and help. But up at Kangaroo Valley, I was out of mobile range. I could have asked the Walshes to call from their house; however, I felt I could handle it and I really wanted to prove that.

  There were two big complicating factors. One was that the Walshes breed big, big animals. Holsteins are already one of the tallest breeds of cow in the world and the Walshes seemed intent on making theirs even larger. My head was in line with this cow’s withers (the bumps at the top of the shoulder blades). The other complication was that to do a caesarean you need access to the cow’s left side. But the left side of this crush didn’t open, only the right. Normally the cow’s head would be contained in the crush and you’d swing the left rail out to perform the operation; however, that option wasn’t available to us. Peter quietly mentioned that Geoff (Manning) would normally reverse the cow into the crush, tie her head to the rail with a halter and then tie her body into the crush with a piece of rope.

  This was going to be a doozy.

  Peter put a halter on the cow and then tied a rope from the head bale back around her body to pin it in there. It looked okay, but I knew that if she became agitated such a big animal could thrash her way free with ease. And at that time we didn’t use many sedatives. The only one we had, xylazine, was dangerous in cattle. They are super sensitive to it, so if you give them too much, they go down. The last thing you want when you are doing a caesarean is for the cow to suddenly want to lie down. All the weight of the abdomen on the ground pushes the guts up and they all come out through the hole you’ve created or, worse, the cow flops onto the hole and you can’t access the calf any more.

  So I put in the local anaesthetic and confidently cut into the cow’s left side. A cow’s rumen, the largest of the four stomachs, sits on the left. If you make your cut on the right, all the guts fall out, but, if you do it on the left, the rumen is large enough to act as a plug. If you cut too deep, however, you will lacerate the rumen and the cow’s abdomen will fill with grass and bacteria and that will be the end of her.

  I could see the light pink, spongy mass of the rumen pushing up against the hole, so I knew that hadn’t happened. I could also see the shape of the calf in the uterus, luckily very close to the cut. I manoeuvred one of the calf’s legs out through my incision. I was then able to cut into the uterus, allowing a shower of contaminated tea-coloured amniotic fluid to pour out onto the ground and all over me. Saturated twice in the one day and it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.

  Things started to improve from there and I was able to reach into the cow’s uterus to locate the calf’s other front leg and head. Peter looped straps over the calf’s feet and with an almighty heave we delivered the calf through the cow’s flank.

  It was alive and female. Godly clouds form over you in these moments, accompanied by swelling violins and shafts of light. The farmer is elated because a female is ultimately worth thousands of dollars while a male calf is almost worthless. The vet is elated because both lives have been saved and the client is happy.

  But there was still work to do. Peter held the uterus for me with his massive gnarled hands while I stitched it up with a watertight suture pattern. After that, it was straightforward to untwist the uterus now that it was empty. Everything went beautifully with this enormous animal, which, at any moment could have had a conniption, snapped those ropes and landed on top of me.

  Peter hadn’t said much during the process, but the mere fact he’d let me have a go was praise enough. When he shook my hand and slapped my back on the way out, I knew he was happy.

  I was very chuffed with myself as I got back into the Magna, covered with placenta and dirt, to drive back to Berry. I wound back up
the hill through the rainforest, past a big wombat and a scurrying lyrebird. This truly was a magic day. They’ll all be suitably impressed when I tell them about my morning. Topping the rise at Woodhill Mountain brought me back into mobile range and no sooner had the Magna started the descent into Berry than the phone rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ It was Geoff Scarlett and he was angry. ‘You were meant to start work an hour ago.’

  ‘I’m on the way back from Kangaroo Valley.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I got a call from the Walshes. I had to do a caesarean. I’m on my way back.’

  ‘Oh, okay. You need to do a caesarean. I’m on my way.’

  ‘No, Geoff, I’ve done it. I’m on my way back.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve done it?’

  ‘I did it myself. I’ll be back in Berry in fifteen.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I was out of range and I didn’t think I needed help. I’m happy to do them on my own.’

  I think the two Geoffs were a bit taken aback. At uni our year was the very first to do an entire year of prac work before being let loose on the world. All the new vets they’d ever seen before had only done six weeks.

  I got back in and they were still a bit shocked and cranky that I hadn’t called. ‘It was a nice black and white heifer,’ I said, ‘and the mother looks like she’ll be fine.’